'Y2K Seems Like a Joke Now, But in 1999 People Were Freaking Out' (npr.org) 134
NPR remembers when the world "prepared for the impending global meltdown" that might've been, on December 31, 1999 — and the possible bug known as Y2K:
The Clinton administration said that preparing the U.S. for Y2K was probably "the single largest technology management challenge in history." The bug threatened a cascade of potential disruptions — blackouts, medical equipment failures, banks shutting down, travel screeching to a halt — if the systems and software that helped keep society functioning no longer knew what year it was... Computer specialist and grassroots organizer Paloma O'Riley compared the scale and urgency of Y2K prep to telling somebody to change out a rivet on the Golden Gate Bridge. Changing out just one rivet is simple, but "if you suddenly tell this person he now has to change out all the rivets on the bridge and he has only 24 hours to do it in — that's a problem," O'Riley told reporter Jason Beaubien in 1998....
The date switchover rattled a swath of vital tech, including Wall Street trading systems, power plants and tools used in air traffic control. The Federal Aviation Administration put its systems through stress tests and mock scenarios as 2000 drew closer. "Twenty-three million lines of code in the air traffic control system did seem a little more daunting, I will say, than I had probably anticipated," FAA Administrator Jane Garvey told NPR in 1998. Ultimately there were no systemwide aviation breakdowns, but airlines were put on a Y2K alert....
Some financial analysts remained skeptical Y2K would come and go with minimal disruption. But by November 1999 the Federal Reserve said it was confident the U.S. economy would weather the big switch. "Federal banking agencies have been visited and inspected. Every bank in the United States, which includes probably 9,000 to 10,000 institutions, over 99% received a satisfactory rating," Fed Board Governor Edward Kelley said at the time.
The article also remembers a California programmer who bought a mobile home, a propane generator, and a year's supply of dehydrated food. (They were also considering buying a handgun — and converting his bank savings into gold, silver, and cash.) And "Dozens of communities across the U.S. formed Y2K preparedness groups to stave off unnecessary panic..."
But the article concludes that "the aggressive planning and recalibration paid off. Humanity passed into the year 2000 without pandemonium..."
And "People like Jack Pentes of Charlotte, N.C., were left to figure out what to do with their emergency stockpiles."
The date switchover rattled a swath of vital tech, including Wall Street trading systems, power plants and tools used in air traffic control. The Federal Aviation Administration put its systems through stress tests and mock scenarios as 2000 drew closer. "Twenty-three million lines of code in the air traffic control system did seem a little more daunting, I will say, than I had probably anticipated," FAA Administrator Jane Garvey told NPR in 1998. Ultimately there were no systemwide aviation breakdowns, but airlines were put on a Y2K alert....
Some financial analysts remained skeptical Y2K would come and go with minimal disruption. But by November 1999 the Federal Reserve said it was confident the U.S. economy would weather the big switch. "Federal banking agencies have been visited and inspected. Every bank in the United States, which includes probably 9,000 to 10,000 institutions, over 99% received a satisfactory rating," Fed Board Governor Edward Kelley said at the time.
The article also remembers a California programmer who bought a mobile home, a propane generator, and a year's supply of dehydrated food. (They were also considering buying a handgun — and converting his bank savings into gold, silver, and cash.) And "Dozens of communities across the U.S. formed Y2K preparedness groups to stave off unnecessary panic..."
But the article concludes that "the aggressive planning and recalibration paid off. Humanity passed into the year 2000 without pandemonium..."
And "People like Jack Pentes of Charlotte, N.C., were left to figure out what to do with their emergency stockpiles."
2038 is comeing! (Score:5, Insightful)
2038 is comeing!
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So switch to a computer with 64 bit integers.
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is that really the solution, back in 1999 when people joked about it, there was no code upgrade at the time.
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You mean, switch to a computer with a spell checker.
Re: 2038 is comeing! (Score:2)
Switching to a 64-bit conputer does not magically fix it. And you don't necessarily need a 64-bit computer. (You can keep track of 64-bit numbers in a 32-bit machine.) This is about software. (Like Y2K.)
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Oh no! I'll have to replace my LinkSys router or upgrade the libc on it to something within the last 10 years.
Probably a lot of stupid shit will break. Maybe some aircraft will be grounded because they never bothered to work out how pilots might enter logs and timestamps into the system. We already know that a simple OS update will blow up Delta's ticketing,
So 2038 will be just like any other year. Where software flaws costs a company millions of dollars in lost revenue but nobody addresses the root cause.
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Eh, that's 14 years off.
No one is going to be using these clunky 32-bit *nix systems and associated software that many years away. Better hardware and better programs will have come along by then.
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You realize that's almost exactly what people said in the early 1980's when the Y2K bug first started to become a concern?
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I see you that are already out by one year! It is 13 years to go! (19 January 2038)
Sadly, the fix is not as simple as using a 64-bit operating system. Y2038 can manifest itself in anything that uses time. In particular, communications that allow interoperability between systems that have any time based metadata could be vulnerable. For example, filesystems such as EXT2, EXT3 and EXT4 (32-bit variant) are non-compliant. Or perhaps information that uses timestamps that overflow.
Interoperability will be the ke
Re: 2038 is comeing! (Score:2)
We've got plenty of time!!! /full of sarcasm many of these systems will take more than a decade to swap out since they are protocols.
Re: 2038 is comeing! (Score:2)
This is a person that doesn't understand that timestamps are sometimes already used to keep track of birthdays. And some programmers have decided to use signed ints for people born before 1970.
Data point (Score:5, Interesting)
Many freeze dried canned foods of this age have a nominal 25 year shelf life. I lurk a number of "prepper" groups on Facebook, and 2024 has triggered a number of "using up the Y2K cans" discussions. Fun times.
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We'd have civilization back up and running long before now. The emergency supplies are always just to get you over the hump.
It's difficult to overstate the lengths some folks were willing to go to. e.g. I've seen a Ford 8n tractor that runs off of a wood gasifier and multiple small engines converted to run off steam. Then again, if you grew up with duck-and-cover, maybe that's not so over-the-top after all.
Better to have it and not need it, I suppose.
worked that night (Score:5, Interesting)
I got paid $1000 to sit in the call center that night, our main customers were phone companies, with a few large businesses and universities. I got a single customer call, about nothing unusual. Went home at 2am.
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I was onsite, on the phone to a vendor as the clock struck midnight. Sure enough, the error occurred. Paused the app, give error message, got the email, copied the patch to a floppy, ran it, test ok, resumed operations. Downtime, 4 minutes or so. Customer satisfaction, priceless.
It was my only client that needed a stand by. The rest had all settled weeks in advance. One client fired us because we refused to recommend migrating from NetWare to Windows NT. Their new NATS hardware crashed 1/2/2000 when the bac
Re: worked that night (Score:4, Interesting)
I chose on purpose to work the late shift as a call taker during late night talk radio at KGO radio in San Francisco, because being around newsrooms and talk show hosts with a lot of adrenaline during important events is fun. I assumed it would be crazy that evening.
It was boring as hell. Nothing happened and I also went home early.
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I wasn't worried because I knew that 2000 was an off by one error and the real millennium bug would be 1/1/2001.
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I was working at an electrical utility a few years later and heard about how close the electrical grid had come to imploding. At that time all sales and exchanges of energy were done manually, much of it by emailing around a giant Excel spreadsheet full of macros doing marginally-to-not documented things. That thing would have crashed and burned, as well as their backup system, and left North America without an effective way to trade electricity. The new system was put into production Thanksgiving weeken
I did not work that night (Score:2)
I ran the Y2K program for an large international mining company and ensured everything was done and tested three months before. I got offered a lot of money to work that night and refused. My boss was stunned and I told him that even though it was a generous offer it simply wasn't worth it to miss the biggest party of all time with my friends.
I had an unforgettable night with absolutely zero regrets and a great experience with my friends.
Re: I did not work that night (Score:2)
Just tell him if something really happened, you would gladly drop everything and report in for 10x normal pay. :-)
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Re: worked that night (Score:2)
You're wrong. They would let things crash and burn because that's what they wanted all along. They can finally use their Mad Max apocalypse supplies, emergency rations, guns, etc. It justified their prepping.
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No the problem is people overreacted then and now much its going to be a much harder sell now to solve the next problem, but the level of bullshit was extreme, planes falling out of the sky, hair driers stop working, was utter trash. Much like COVID, yes it was a problem yes something should have been done but in places like New Zealand where the fear mongering went overboard people will not listen the next time. There have always been people that don't believe the government the internet just makes them m
Re: I worked 911 (Score:2)
What was the procedure for New Years 911 callers? Stern talking to about tying up a critical line? Or just shrugging it off and moving on?
Y2K was a joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
i.e NOT
Re:Y2K was a joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. A lot of hard work was done by many thankless programmers during the years leading up to 2000. Thanks to their hard work, y2k was just another new years celebration, instead of a disaster. Funny how people look back now and think there really wasn't any problem.
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I can tell by your user id you were around in 1998 too...
I had stopped coding in 1992-ish and in 1999 I got a call from a buddy saying " hey you got any VAX-cobol skills?" I said "yes, why?" He said " I got 1-3 million lines of code that need your help. pay you a lot for it."
that was the largest check outside of commissions earned at that time. it was larger than my wall street bonus at the time.
I jury rigged a windows 95 computer, a terminal program, MS access and I think wordstar ( not sure ) to do massiv
Re:Y2K was no joke... (Score:3)
Very true. A lot of hard work was done by many thankless programmers during the years leading up to 2000. Thanks to their hard work, y2k was just another new years celebration, instead of a disaster. Funny how people look back now and think there really wasn't any problem.
I challenge them from time to time when they say stupid shit with a simple question "Were you there?" and provide your exact correction. I also provide an example bug that I encountered in drinking water processing systems. Testing showed that the proportion of chemicals changed when the bug was encountered which poisoned the water. It was one of the most salient reminders to me, at the time, how important the work was.
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I worked at an insurance company in the late '90s, they were running their core process on the obsolete and no longer supported Empress database on an ancient VAX. Their Y2K testing came through fine, and Andrew was bored a few days later and decided to test the change from February to March since there was no February 29 that year. To his shock the DB crashed hard when he changed the date to February 28! Working backwards he eventually found that for no known reason Empress puked on February 11, 2000.
Re: Y2K was a joke... (Score:2)
Is it possible a lot of folks did this trick and'll have a Y2K+30? Lol.....
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No it doesn't. You're looking to assign blame to the people who have no ability to be held accountable. So your government funded COVID research and due to a problem it leaked from a lab. What next? What do you do with this information? Does your pandemic response change? Do people come alive again? Can you blame it on someone you can vote out of office? Common, let's follow through with this discussion. What will you achieve other than helping you feel better about blaming some nebulous entity which you c
Re: Y2K was a joke... (Score:2)
Millions have been killed by COVID. So let's blame people who spread harmful information. Trump spread harmful information.
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The problem is you can't force the truth even if it is the truth. The more you proclaim you are telling the truth and insist on everyone opposing your view shut up, the more people who don't believe think you are lying. It is almost impossible to convince someone you are not lying if they believe you are lying.
People were freaking out, but techs weren't (Score:5, Interesting)
We all knew nothing substantial would happen in 2000. Why? Because a lot of smart people had already worked hard to alleviate the problem years prior.
But the media frenzy was relentless: stories of Y2K apocalypse went around all newsrooms, and it was a competition between them to capture as much audience as possible.
Me, I was working for a small company doing embedded MS-DOS. We made a fortune selling a "Y2K cure" floppy disk: all it did was set the clock to 2000, check whether DOS returned 2000 or 1900, and in the latter case, install a completely trivial TSR to add 100 years. We sold that disk $60 a pop and it sold like hotcakes.
And you know who bought it most? Companies who knew perfectly well their computers were fine (because their IT guys had tested them using the exact same trivial method) but needed to be "Y2K-compliant" for insurance purposes.
Y2K was a great scam. A lot of people made off like bandits.
Re: People were freaking out, but techs weren't (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: People were freaking out, but techs weren't (Score:2)
There is no "not AI tragectory". We've opened Pandora's box and there's no stuffing it back inside. It is too interesting on a global scale. People have powerful offline models. All we can do now is hope it doesn't happen in our lifetime and live for the day without regrets.
Re:People were freaking out, but techs weren't (Score:4, Informative)
In the following days, only one incident was reported across 1245 different software (and hardware) systems. It was in a third party product that was only used by two people (out of a workforce of over 8000), and neither of them had read or responded to 4 years worth of emails about Y2K. The issue was fairly insignificant (wrong day of the week on a menu title bar).
Y2K was not a joke. It was a testament to the drive and dedication of IT professionals. The fact that nothing happened means that all the hard work was worth it. As far as I'm concerned, it was one of the most successful projects in IT history - delivered on time and in scope.
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The potential problem wasn't whether DOS, or other operating systems (Solaris, etc) would handle the date, but rather all the legacy applications which potentially might have assumed the century as 1900 and only handled the year as last two digits (year % 100). This was compounded by the fact that some of the really old systems, most likely to have assumed they'd not still be operating in the year 2000, were written in COBOL or ancient versions of FORTRAN, so it was a payday the retired COBOL programmers ta
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Agreed. I was in SF and surrounded by nascent SiliValleyites. I can't remember any of them considering Y2K anything but a nuisance. We all spent a lot of time going over high-level sources hunting down 2-char year fields, and then it was over. A true nothingburger.
The Y2K panic was one of if not the first of the pure taken-out-of-context, cable-media-created apocalypses. They were astounded by the audience shares Y2K stories were getting, and learned quickly how to flog a BS issue til it dies - all for
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For me it was noting on that particular date, but that's because I had altered the code so that the tw digits were expanded to fit in the range 1903 - 2002 (updated yearly with the current year as the center).
A four digit year would have been nicer, but the storage requirements wouldn't fit on our machine. (I forget how many dates were involved, but it wasn't trivial.) This only worked if the assumption that nobody over 97 or under 3 was legitimately using transit was correct, but I didn't find any proble
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Because a lot of smart people had already worked hard to alleviate the problem years prior.
No. Not years prior. The craze of Y2K kept going up until December 1999 precisely because people weren't ready. 1999 was a great year for people on contracts and people with overtime pay working in IT. It was a very real issue up to the end with in some cases major institutions still testing code in the last month.
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One of the reasons the late 90s was so strong economically was the massive amounts of money companies and the government were spending for years to ensure Y2K was nothing. Hiring tons of people who had no prior IT experience and training them in the exact steps necessary to find and patch millions of lines of decades-old COBOL code running on banking systems.
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I started worrying about Y2K in 1995. I made damned sure every single piece of code I wrote from 1995 on could handle Jan. 1st, 2000. I went back and fixed any previously written code that was still in use.
I was not alone.
A friend of mine, fresh out of college in 1996, was having a hard time finding a job-- but he'd taken COBOL as an elective, and spent several years doing Y2K mitigation.
It always frustrates me how people point to Y2K as an example of why IT geeks are "useless", when the reality is, we *D
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I was part of a working group that released an international standard in early 1999 that used two-digit years for dates.
I should add that it was a notoriously dysfunctional working group, and my participation could be characterised as a string of WTF's.
Practical Joke (Score:5, Funny)
A friend of mine went to the bank in December 1999 and bought a stack of $2 bills. She went shopping at various stores just before the New Year and paid with $2s. Clerks asked, "What's up with the $2 bills?" She said, "I went to the bank for some money and these are all they had left."
The look of terror on a few clerk's faces was priceless. Here I am, stuck at work and the bank run has started.
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Only trace of a joke I could find on Slashdot as we wrap up another year... And I don't think it was that funny.
Funny comparison time? Japan issued a 2000 yen note some years ago. I stumbled across one recently. Pretty sure they didn't bother to reissue it when they changed the currency recently. At least I have yet to see any reference to a new version of the unpopular idea.
Re:Practical Joke (Score:4)
There were 279 million people in America at the time. You feel really confident that no one pulled precisely this prank? I mean even if you are right and this person just made it up, it means that at least one person has thought of it already which means that the odds are someone else thought of it too.
I would wager it happened on more than one occasion.
Calling out liars is best done for bullshit claims rather than things that people would absolutely do for fun.
Everyone was sure (Score:2)
The power was going to go out on NYE
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It would have if the operators of the North American power grid hadn't completely revamped their electrical purchasing system, IIRC the new system went into production Thanksgiving weekend of 1999.
Still a lot of legacy tech out there (Score:4, Interesting)
There was little freaking out (Score:5, Interesting)
A few people were nuts, just like today. We spent a lot of time auditing code to avoid disruptions to financial systems. Anybody with half a brain was laughing at the idea your car would stop running or anything of that nature.
A lot of people stayed home on New Year's not because of Y2K fears, but because venues got it in their heads they could up their rates by 1000x for a millennium party and people noped out of the rip off.
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This, exactly. SOME people were freaking out. Most of us were aware enough of all the previous several years' hard work that'd gone into addressing the known problems that we expected, at most, some minor inconveniences.
And that's exactly what we got - relatively minor inconveniences.
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It was a bit nervous, but a LOT of work was done. Some idiots think it was a scam, or a big panic over nothing, but if none of that work had been done it would have been highly disruptive. We were seeing weird issues show up a couple years early at times, credit cards with weird expiration dates and stuff like that.
What's surprising to me is that so many people still can't figure out how to program with time. Most think that problem was just dumb database guys trying to save two bytes, but you see other
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> because they're still naive enough to be using local time for all base time calculations
Yeah, I don't care what you show to the end user, but EVERYTHING should be stored (and processed) in UTC. No daylight saving adjustment, no time zone adjustment. All UTC. Behold, all conversion errors go away and mistakes are never made again - because the only possible mistake is on the final display and you're going to catch that on day one.
Then again, I think the only logical date/time format is YYYY-MM-DD HH:
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FWIW, MSWind95b didn't roll handle the rollover correctly. Files sorted by date started appearing in the wrong order.
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Univision and the rest of the Latino press had scared the crap out of their viewers, our niece was so frightened that she cried when she heard that we were planning on going to the Space Needle for the celebration. We ended up staying home drinking and screwing like bunnies, so still a good time.
Re: There was little freaking out (Score:2)
You screwed your niece?
Re: There was little freaking out (Score:2)
Surely a trollbait.
Some Lessons Learned (Score:2)
I have an APC rackmount UPS that gets ignored if it doesn't alert.
Well the battery got old and alerted so I logged in and noticed that the date was off.
Turns out the year can't be set past 2019. This was bought in 2015.
And I guess Eaton owns it now and maybe if I install windows on a laptop I can piecemeal upgrade the firmware to something without the problem?
Or just turn off NTP and ignore it again.
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Under the heading of 'unnecessary check', maybe it's just that they did not expect the unit to last 5 years.
Me? I know how to swap out batteries in most anything.
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Ah, I have to deal with 20 year support contracts. And sometimes 20 year battery life requirements. That's a long time in the technical world, but they're devices in the field that are expensive to go out and visit in a truck. But like all software or firmware, there's a lot of creeping features. So eventually the new stuff will not fit in the old devices in the field. Then someone starts to panic. Why isn't the customer buying new hardware (because we support it for 20 years); why can't we make the co
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2010 Spamassassin marked e-mails as spam because of a rule that defined 201x as "Date far in the future".
No, the media was (Score:2)
The rest of us knew not to worry or panic. But you can always rely on the media to blow things out of proportion, so that's precisely what they did.
The real Y2K scam... (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who was working in I.T. well before Y2K (note the 4-digit Slashdot ID) and who worked on actual code and system remediation projects for Y2K, I can assure you that it was NOT a technical scam. We had old billing systems (think: AOS/VS II hosted COBOL, other dusty old crap like that), along with untold Oracle back-ended applications, which were both critical for a multi-million dollar company's billing cycle yet also poorly written enough that they absolutely 100% would have produced incorrect output starting in 2000. All of that had to be gone through with a fine tooth comb and fixed, which we did, and as a result my own Y2K on-call was as boring as hell....precisely because we'd done all that work. Other companies had similar Ancient Horrors lurking on their data center floors, and all those had to be fixed or replaced too. Never doubt the need, or underestimate the work required to get it all done.
Now, all that being said, there WAS an actual Y2K scam, but it wasn't a technical one: Rather, "Y2K Remediation" budgets became the dumping ground for all the bad ideas, lost projects, failed acquisitions, questionable purchases, mistress payments, and other C-level executive idiotic decision making. No shareholder would question the need to fix the actual Y2K problems, especially given the overwrought news cycle around that messaging. As such, C-types took the opportunity to bury all their mistakes in that budget, never to be seen again. I saw it happen with my own eyes, but nobody outside really grasped what all they were doing.
THAT was the real scam of Y2K, not the actual technical issues that needed to be fixed.
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If I remember correctly, AOS/VS stored dates as a 16-bit number that represented the number of days since some time in 1967. It should theoretically have been good until at least 2100.
Morons are always "freaking out" (Score:2)
Non-morons look at things and use rational though (theoretically available to any human, but most seem to not use it much or at all) to understand the threat. Then they prepare. And that typically works out just fine.
Godfellas (Score:5, Insightful)
In the Futurama episode Godfellas [imdb.com], Bender encounters what he believes to be God. The most memorable quote from the episode is, When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
That applies to Y2K. Like the story says, people were working on this long before the cutoff date so when things didn't go wrong the public was left to wonder what the big deal was all about, that it was overhyped. That's because those working on it did things right so the transiton was seamless. A few archived stories from back then:
FAA pre-Y2K testing [cbsnews.com] Flights were unaffected [wired.com].
A tidbit about U.S. and Russian military sitting side-by-side [nytimes.com] during Y2K.
Stories from around the nation [scientificamerican.com] from people at that time.
1/4 century later - still the same issue (Score:2)
DEBUNKING BS:
There were no 23 million lines of code (lmfao) to comb through but there were enough to make it a part time job for many consultants -- who would be released after the new year. You can tell this is a made up number because lines of code is not a measurement used by programmers, and differs greatly based on chosen language. So, for example, C-code is more efficient but uses a lot of short lines. ADA or COBOL are more complex, so less LOC for the same function.
THE REAL PROBLEM:
The underlying
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8, 16, and 32 bit computers will still be around in 2038. You think they're sticking a 64-bit processor in your pace maker? These small chips are everywhere. And to replace them all is too expensive. Thus, different time methods - why should that pace maker use Unix time that was invented for file times? Just pick a different epoch that's not 1/1/1970.
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Lenel, the largest security software company on the planet, uses hardware from Mercury with a 20 year expected life that runs on an 8-bit CPU (and there's a LOT of it out there that is even older).
Re: 1/4 century later - still the same issue (Score:2)
What does the computer have to do with it? You can keep track of 64-bit timestamps in a 32-bit system, its just much more resource expensive. (Math emulation is a thing.)
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I can tell that you are a software programmer because you are out by 1.
You said "you have 14 years to get this stuff fixed." but that will be too late.
It is currently 13 years to 19th January 2038.
Re: 1/4 century later - still the same issue (Score:2)
If you're storing 32-bit timestamps in an SQL database, it does not magically use 64-bit timestamps just because they are supported now.
Exactly two failures reported (Score:2)
First was the local snack machine decided to shut down at midnight, due to its countdown for scheduled maintenance suddenly tripping. Shame, since we were relying on that machine to keep us at our desks and able to pick up the phone should the need arise (it didn't).
The second failure was with the badges at one of our facilities in the UK. We ran out of temporary swipe badges, since a larg
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I've seen weird stuff. Unix time for medical machines always seemed weird. It was invented for file times. Not a universal time method for all objects everywhere. So it had difficulty dealing with birthdates and ages at times. Yes, you needed to deal with someone being born in 1899 and having surgery in 2001, and both dates have to exist on the same screen at the same time.
Then there's the GPS headache, with a time format that wraps around in roughly 19.6 years. Sucks if you want a device that lasts 20
Success (Score:2)
We Worked Hard and Everything Was All Right (TM) (Score:3)
Around '97 we began Y2K testing on our systems and uncovered the alarming fact that we stood to suffer a cascading failure which would shut down our operation for at least a couple of years, put 5k people out of work, and upend our market segment globally. This had more to do with the sensitive nature of our chemical processes and custom DCS controls, so I wouldn't call it representative of industry as a whole, but at least for us, Y2K was a real horror story. No planes falling out of the sky or satellites crashing to Earth, but it would have resulted in thousands of miles worth of seized pipelines, vessels, and precision machinery that would have to be cut out and totally replaced.
We had an IT team with roughly 60 professionals across the spectrum from telecom to applications, though, and all the code was ours. Still, by the time Y2K rolled around, we were all at home (but carrying pagers). Most of us had dedicated up to half a year doing testing, remediation, and mock runs. Just setting up the testing environments kept us busy for quite a while. As an IT professional, I can testify it was the best of times. There was a lot of hype, and much of it was undeserved, but I hope those coming after realize it wasn't all smoke and mirrors.
Firsthand Experience (Score:3)
I've been a Systems Administrator since the 1990's. I was relatively well informed leading up to Y2K due largely to my brother who was handling it for a government agency. We had a Unix system running the main financials and such at my job. It was Data General gear, if I recall correctly. In the months leading up to Y2K I performed a test where the hardware clock was rolled forward to January 1, 2000. The system was not even able to boot! If we had not tested in advance and hurriedly transitioned to a different platform, we would have been dead in the water
.
When there were not widespread crashes at the start of the new millennium, many people declared that Y2K had been overhyped. The truth is, however, that IT people doing due diligence prevented a lot of failures.
Manufactured non-issue (Score:2)
Many systems had genuine issues but they were recognized, fixed, tested, ready to go when the time came. The panic was totally unnecessary.
I observed 0000 1 January 2000 three times: New Zealand UTC+13, first place west of the International Date Line with lots of computers. 0000 UTC (of course...), then 0000 local (Toronto, UTC-5). I was doing my Master's research in satellite data communications at the time and noted in mid-December that one of the satellites I was working with would be in the sky at 000
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Coolest post in this entire thread.
Who knows? (Score:2)
2038 (Score:2)
We're closer to 2038 now than to 2000. And that bug will not be a "To few digits to display" bug.
First issues already occurred, for example, in systems that calculate when people will retire.
The world didn't melt down because we FIXED it (Score:2)
The world didn't melt down because we FIXED the Y2K problem.
For those of us who were busy preparing (Score:2)
it seemed like a joke then, too. And it was a joke, only the punch line wasn't very funny.
(We had a guy who spent all his money on silver and gold, and quit to go hide out in the hills. Last we hear from him, he was bragging about making his living smuggling dinosaur fossils out of Montana, a practice that is . . . not illegal. But he was very specific about the smuggling.)
always surprises (Score:2)
Back then I was working at a bank, we tested much in advance everything we could think of: banking app, network and such and everything on the business side went smooth over Y2K. With one single exception: There was a small FoxPro for DOS app reading the data from the access control system and turning it in something HR used to account employees presence at work. It took me a couple of days to replace that app with a new one (input data from a text file, produce a nice print).
For those who weren't there... (Score:2)
Yes lots of systems were upgraded. I myself repaired and/or replaced dozens if not hundreds of boards. We got nowhere near all of them and there were plenty of Y2K 'bugs'... turns out very little logic actually depends on what particular year it is [especially where that is some cosmetic rolling of the arbitrary human numbering] and virtually all of it relates to displaying dates so nothing was brought down. I was discovering y2k bugs on systems sitting and doing their jobs years after the event itself.
If y
Y2K was a PC/Windows problem..... (Score:2)
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Overblown (Score:2)
I thought it was a bit overblown, but got a nice bonus by being part of a 3 month product that made the company 10 million dollars.
So I can't complain too much.
'Y2K Seems Like a Joke Now, But in 1999 ... (Score:2)
There
I recognized the problem in 1989 and over the course of 2 years had updated all of our code to support years above 1999 using a very simple routine that performed date comparisons and did date arithmetic instead of doing it directly in the code. I was able to do it at my leisure as I worked on updates to the code during the normal business process.
I'm sure there were many software engineers that were just as observant.
Only the ignorant a
It was all over by 1998 (Score:2)
I worked at a police dept at Y2K (Score:2)
Had a Y2K incident years before 2000 (Score:2)
Of course we were able to restore from backups and within a few days found the bad date compare and fixed it, but we started looking for other similar code in every other program th
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Yeah, the electricity trading system that manages power on the grid and IIRC the air traffic control system both needed complete revamping. Not planes falling from the sky, quite, but definitely planes landing without safe landing instructions.
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Electricity trading is a dynamic process where shifts in supply sometimes has to be shifted from one region to another with only a few minutes of notice. If for example Asarco starts up another aluminum smelter that exceeds the current available supply then traders need to notify their operations staff that excess power can be diverted from an adjoining region. Then the ops staff need to wave their wands and chant their incantations to ensure that it's brought into their section of the grid in a controlle