was anyone else disappointed that planes were not literally falling out of the sky on Y2K?
anyway, here are some real world examples of actual problems that did occur
I did like the Leonard Nimoy video with experts attempting to rate how bad things were going to be :)
and of course the Y2K survival kit commercial was unintentionally hilarious with the shattered glass and sirens going off in the background
did anyone here have to deal with issues caused by Y2K, or spend time preparing systems beforehand?
I worked at Microsoft at the time, and much ass was busted to implement fixes and test our product (with other teams doing the same, I assume) before the rollover occurred. On call as the clock ticked over to midnight in our time zone, and…I ended up playing Age of Empires for eight hours because nothing happened.
But don’t be fooled: nothing happened because of the tremendous amount of work done beforehand to make sure nothing happened.
I worked at Intel Corp and there were many assessments and mitigations made, including some fixes. It was certainly a non-zero effort!
I was only a teenager at the time, but even then I thought that surely smart people had been looking at this issue and coming up with solutions before Y2K was going to happen
I never understood the media hysteria, but now that I’m older I see the general media is clueless when it comes to tech so that’s probably why the ‘panic’ (and of course they can always find some ‘expert’ to claim that doomsday is coming!)
but now that I’m older I see the general media is clueless
Only it seems they are becoming more clueless every year. Probably because they believe that the opposite should be true because of poking touchscreens with their fingers so much every day.
I was interning at a power company at the time and they were mostly worried about weirdos and militia trying to pull a stunt. I walked into Operations one day and there was the scariest man I’ve ever seen, in a black suit with a shoulder holster. He said his job was to keep an eye on things and get to know everyone. He looked like a Dashiell Hammett character and smiled all the time, especially when nothing was funny.
IT came around, pulled everyone’s computer apart, and then sealed them back up with tamper-evident tape. And of course everyone asked me if their power would be ok and I legally couldn’t answer. Clock hit midnight and nothing happened except Scarface wasn’t around when I got back from holiday vacation.
We’d handled everything like a year beforehand but it was a weird couple of months.
I was on a train, and as it struck midnight this girl started shrieking about how “the millennium bug had got her phone”. My friend taps her on the shoulder and says: “we’re in a tunnel”. Good times.
Spent the majority of 1998/9 re-coding retail systems to handle both Y2K and the introduction of the Euro. Good times. Thankfully the language the systems were developed in (Clipper) had the concept of an ‘epoch’ which told it how to interpret 2-digit years, so it was mostly a thing of re-setting the epoch, recompiling and testing… lots of testing.
I was still a student and had an older laptop running Windows 3.1, which was offline with the exception of using Terminal for dial up access to my university’s library catalog and a few local bulletin board systems. In the six years since 1994, it hadn’t ever seen an update. Back then, if you didn’t have internet access, you could write a letter to Microsoft to get updates sent to you. I never did.
In any case, when the moment came, I just rolled the date back to 1972 (or rather, “72”), which was the last leap year starting on a Saturday. That seemed to work, since the only programs I used much at the time were Word and Excel, and neither seemed to be bothered by the date.
I’m still not sure whether the switch to “72” was necessary, or if an almost completely offline version of Windows would have existed happily in “00”.
It was pretty obvious that the only things that were going to break are paper forms with “19__” printed on them.
I think that the test systems I helped set up for my clients made it pretty obvious that they would have run into a variety of problems had we not done something. Most issues would not have been business ending, but there were a couple that would have made life quite interesting for a few months.
Preventative action is always tough to justify, because it always looks unnecessary when it works.
There’s actual counterexamples in the article, including the fact over 300 billion USD was spent to (mostly) prevent it.
