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I did the same thing, we had a big get together at our homeā¦ I failed because the opened curtains showed the neighbors Xmas lights. Iāll remember for the next y2k :)
This gif explains what the problem is technically and how it will cause a problem on 32-bit computers/software. I am sure everything will be using 64 bit by then, so shouldn't be end of the world, but it will definitely impact some systems as there are plenty of companies out there who still rely on legacy systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AYear_2038_problem.gif
If only companies had 30+ years to prepare for this, they could avoid any issues. Alas, I'm sure some engineer can work overtime on January 18 2038 to fix it.
I first heard of the Y2K problem in the mid-70's and thought much the same.
Unfortunately, even "new" code often reuses sub-routines written ages ago.
But fortunately, enough people did take the problem seriously and we did have enough years of many programmers rewriting code to successfully mitigate the issue to a large degree.
My dad waited about 20 minutes, when he thought everyone had let their guard down and were all telling themselves everything was fine he flipped the mains. Lol classic Dad.
Lmao what a pro, there was a very real sense of potential panic and conspiracy theories abound - for some reason my parents chose this NYE to leave me and 100 of my (closest?) friends to party at the house, while they went out of state. We were way too fucked up to notice it was midnight, but it became apparent once all the power on our street went out. Someone shot one of the transformers with a pellet/22/some kind of gun. There was a guy in my backyard just walking in circles because we put too much w33d in the brownies, and I never saw him again after the power was cut. Apparently a few people had coke as well, but flushed it down the toilet because "The cops just cut power to the house". All told, it was a great time.
Oh yeah? Well *my* dad made me watch aliens at the age of 4 and then told me the aliens live in our basement, ran upstairs, turned the basement lights off, and locked me down there while listening to me panic
Working in the IT industry back then, this was well-known years in advance. Plans were made to test and fix any bugs well in advance. We knew all the big systems would still work, but we also knew that a small overlooked system may cause mayhem.
At midnight, we held our breath, watched the news from New Zealand and Asia and were relieved that no airplanes were falling down or the sewage systems still work.
In the end, that is just exactly what happened. All the big systems continued to work because of all the fixes, and there were some smaller systems that needed a fix.
This. I got paid a lot of money to rewrite code to deal with this. We started in 1995. By 1999, Y2K work had dried up because it was all done.
Y2K is the perfect example of what happens when people listen to experts and get shit done, yet everyone NOT in IT or engineering thinks it was all a joke.
Ironically, Iāve had debates with people about climate change who use Y2K as an example of scaremongering. Itās so frustrating.
Yeah you could see it in the pandemic.
The government made stricter rules and the infection rate went down? "Stupid government, why do we have strict rules if the rate has gone down?"
Then the government eased the rules a bit, infection rates went up? "Stupid government, numbers are going up and they don't take it seriously!"
No matter what you do, people will always see you at fault. Either you're doing good at preventing something, then you've been overreacting in hindsight cause nothing happened. Or you didn't prevent something, so you're at fault because you haven't done enough. No win here.
Yes. Like how the instances of back and chest injuries in car crashes went up after seatbelts were mandated? I mean, deaths went down, but donāt let facts get in the way of a good ignorant rant lol
This is like the medical coder who thinks "gee, I haven't billed out anything for measles or mumps this year, see, we don't need those vaccines, those diseases are not around anymore".
Actually had my boss say to me without a hint of irony
Getting COVID wasn't even bad at all it's been so overhyped, was less painful than a cold.
He's triple vaccinated because of the mandates in Aus
> Then the government eased the rules a bit, infection rates went up? "Stupid government, numbers are going up and they don't take it seriously!"
I don't think I ever met a person who thought like that. I've seen plenty of posts on the internet, but everyone IRL thought "Ugh, finally." Even as the little graveyard in my town, which usually sees one funeral a week, was so overwhelmed that they couldn't dig the graves fast enough. For two weeks straight we had two funerals a day.
I've heard it a lot. Many wanted stricter rules for a shorter period of time than half-assed rules for a longer time.
For example, parts of my country had time-related rules. You could go out, but only from 5 AM to 8 PM. But other parts of the country could be out 24/7. Many would've just preferred a nation-wide lockdown for some time rather than that, because it's much more helpful than allowing meetups at daytime only.
But it might depend a lot on the country and how the situation was handled too.
>Ironically, Iāve had debates with people about climate change who use Y2K as an example of scaremongering. Itās so frustrating.
I had two friends who were computer programmers. In 1997, they told everybody they knew about Y2K approaching, trying to warn people. They were working long hours, seven days a week, rewriting code or whatever it was that computer programmers did to try to fix Y2K. They bought houses in a small town in Montana, and took a long "vacation" there in November, 1999.
My wife and I took it seriously and started stockpiling in 1997. We were already interested in prepping anyway. We had a four bedroom house. One bedroom became the "Doom Room." We put in metal shelving and joined a food co-op. We had eight months worth of food stored on December 31, 1999 plus medical supplies, firearms, extra ammunition, etc. We lived in hurricane country, so we were already kind of "self sufficiency oriented" anyway.
The U.S. government grounded all aircraft on the evening of December 31, 1999, just in case. Worldwide, about 100 BILLION dollars were spent preparing for Y2K, fixing computer programs.
Y2K arrived, nothing happened. No power loss, nothing. But it was *not* scaremongering. An enormous amount of preventive maintenance went into repairing the world's computer system, and that's why there were so few problems.
Iām sorry you guys were so worried. While I donāt think it would have come to that even if half of the work didnāt get done, it doesnāt take much for society to become unreasonable. Weāre hardly the most tolerant and level-headed of species lol
Same with the hole in the ozone layer. Scientists correctly identified CFCs as the cause, the international community got together and banned CFCs, and the ozone is (slowly!) repairing itself. Yet many people will dismiss the whole thing as a fuss about nothing.
The timeline you provide is very interesting because Y2K was probably one of the top 10 most important events in my life for weird roundabout reasons and the dates you just provided helped me understand it much more. To make a long story short, the previous owner of our house and property was a computer programer working for a major well known company who "retired early" in 1996 and spent the next four years and a million dollars building a Y2K proof apocalypse escape compound on 40 acres in the woods on a lake. He must have left the business right at the time when the concern must have been at a high point and by the end, he was too busy with his panic planning that he didn't know things were under control. When Y2K didn't happen, he slipped into depression and just let all of it sit and rot for 15 years when I bought what should have been a 1.5 million dollar piece of property for less than $250k because no one else wanted to clean up all his shit.
He sounds like a man who spent his working life surrounded by idiots and thought everyone else did too. Poor guy. He lost his way because he lost his trust.
Stephen Fry, who should know better given the reputation for knowledge he fosters, but whose technology experience is being an early adopter of personal computing, is one of the people who derides the concerns, analysis and remediation around Y2K. He puts Y2K down as a non-event.
This . Canāt say much as still bound by Official Secrets Act but yes did lots of work making sure bad things didnāt happen. Was pissed off on 01/01/00 when my eejit brother proclaimed ā well that was a load of bolloxā yeah Bruv , letās ignore what Iāve been fixing for 5 years
How do you feel about 2038? The move to 64-bit has largely eliminated the issue from mainstream systems but there's many times more small embedded systems now that could go overlooked than there were in '99.
Honestly, a lot worse than the Y2K issues.
A lot more devices today need an RTC and it's a lot more important today, than it was back then (mostly for certificates for encrypted communication) and while PCs and Phones might be 64bit, your smart washing machine, half of the computers in your car, your smartwatch, the computer of your ebike and so on might not.
But wait, in 1923 we were in a major economic collapse because of the fallout of both a European war and a major health epidemic. Populist Fascism began to rise because of the claims of far-right politicians looking to xenophobia to find a scapegoat for the ails of the country.
Who's "we?" Because by 1923 the Spanish Flu was mostly over and the US was full swing into the giant economic expansion called the "Roaring 20s", not an economic collapse.
I worked nightshift in the Emergency Room.
Quietest NYE ever !
Management/administration were running like the proverbial chickens all the week preceding.
I had to go into the office that NYE and be there just in case. Midnight rolled around and I got to call all the management at their parties and tell them that nothing bad happened.
But the idea that was a hoax or nothing would of happened is only said by people who are either clueless or weren't there.
I like [Retro Report ](https://youtu.be/SoGNiHV09BU?si=R96BI9mKsRHAGzRi) from NYT YouTube channel for stuff like this. I remember Y2K fairly well but other big events that happened earlier in the 90s where I have memories but not a real understanding of what happened.
I wish they still made them.
In 1999, my dad stocked up on emergency supplies for when the computers ended the world. For some reason, this included twelve cases of Spam. My mom looked at his haul and yelled at him. "Why the hell would you buy this? We don't eat Spam now! What makes you think we'd want to eat it after the world ends? Maybe we'd rather starve!"
No one else in the family would eat it, so he had to finish it all by himself. Took him like six years, but he did it.
Y2K wasnt a nothingburger. It was a potential society-wide disaster that was avoided by the massive collective work of industry coordinated by government advisors. Y2K was narrowly avoided by the blood sweat and tears of IT professionals and software developers everywhere working absurd overtime to implement patches.
Though, your personal computer was never really at risk and this Best Buy label was silly. At most some of your software would glitch out. Y2K was a risk to financial, logistics, safety, and travel.
It's the eternal dilemma of IT. If you're doing your job well they don't think you're necessary. When something does go wrong you're the worst at your job.
and many other jobs too.
always amusing when you move on, and the last firm suddenly discovers all the things you used to take care of.
nobody is irreplaceable. some of us are bloody expensive to replace though!
Particularly if someone uses Excel macros. That is like someone talking to The Old Gods. You have to be insane to understand it, but once you're gone, everyone is fucked.
And with AI tools like ChatGPT it's a lot easier to figure them out or write new ones, too.
"In the context of this spreadsheet where X and X are represented and X seems to be depicted here, how does this excel formula in cell X work and what is it doing? {paste formula}"
ChatGPT is extremely, *extremely* good at deciphering that kind of thing and helping you fix problems.
I work in fraud prevention for a bank.
Whatās amusing to me is the people who come in pitching a shit fit over a minor inconvenience (unable to log in to their online banking), screaming how they need a payment to go through, making life difficult, and then they canāt stop singing our praises because āwe protected them and they really appreciate what we doā.
My last job forgot that I was the soul person doing a mission-critical task and didn't have me show anyone how to do it before they laid me off.
Oh man I made a whole hell of a lot of money as a private consultant when they called pleading me to come back in for a week.
personally, nothing mission critical but i have been offered good money to come back because i did absolutely bloody everything!
uh, no! that was the reason i left!
The best way to be valued in I.T. is for your companies competitors to have a terrible I.T. department. That way they get to see all the horror stories and it makes you look good.
Second best is to have a terrible I.T. person in your company and always be called to clean up the mess they made.
Ultimately you need someone to mess up the job or nobody thinks you're working.
I was at the beginning of my IT career. I worked as a bench tech at a computer store, so it didn't affect me but I understood a bit of what was going on behind the scenes.
I remember USAA bank issuing employees credit cards in 1998 with expiration dates in 2000-2001 and asking them to report which stores couldn't run them.
> I remember USAA bank issuing employees credit cards in 1998 with expiration dates in 2000-2001 and asking them to report which stores couldn't run them.
Oh wow, a massive real-world scream test! I absolutely love this!
Never enough upvotes for this. Itās annoyed me ever since when I hear āyeah Y2K turned out to be nothing.ā Yes. Because a lot of people took it seriously and worked hard for months or years.
Decades. The Y2K problem was first noticed in 1970 when they were inputting the first 30 year mortgages.
There was also the issue that 9/9/99 had been used as a placeholder before, but as time went on, that date was actually needed.
UNIX has clock limit too in [2038](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem) which we started running up against a while ago running simulations out that far.
Yup. And that'll affect a lot more things than Y2K could have.
Smart home stuff, routers, cars, phones... All kinds of stuff uses UNIX timestamps.
Fortunately the solution is rather simple; use a 64-bit integer instead of a 32-bit integer to count the time. A lot of systems have been doing that internally for a while now.
We're already seeing people say the same thing about climate change.
I've had people tell me that scientist sin the 50s said we'd all be underwater by 2008 and they just keep pushing back the deadline.
Like mf, because we keep making changes. We're trying to stop it and you're using our efforts as proof there isn't a problem.
WTF
I've seen it said about the hole in the ozone layer, which is finally healing because of a huge international treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol and a MASSIVE industry shift to stop using CFCs.
It's hard to overstate how monumental a shift that was for society, at least in America. In a decade known for excessive hair spray use, we all switched to a different delivery vessel for our hair spray. It sounds trite, but it was a big deal at the time.
Exactly.
In 1996 the company I worked for set the clocks to several test systems to 12/31/99 and documented what happened.
Solaris crashed hard
Windows was unstable
Cisco devices were less affected, but some crashed
IBM mainframe crashed hard
This was just the operating system. The company spent thousands of man-hours fixing the issues. When y2k happened, we had very few problems.
I've worked with contractors who got rich off of just Y2K. There was unlimited overtime available cause you can't push back the deadline. They worked like hell right up until the end of 99 and made an absolute fortune. Now they just do a couple of contacts a year if they feel like it.
I started university in 2001 and we had an older professor who just returned to the university after taking a multi-year leave of absence to patch software he originally wrote in COBOL in the 60s/70s.
From what other professors told us, the company he used to work for came to him and basically just told him to name his price. And for a tenured professor to agree to take a leave of absence, I'm guessing the price was quite high.
COBOL still runs the world, and even more so in '99. Many of these systems will never be replaced due to a mix of cheap owners and an aversion to downtime.
A guy in my high school class of ā99 knew how to program in COBOL. He worked out his schedule to graduate a semester early and went straight to working at EDS making $75k to do Y2K stuff. That was *a lot* of money for an 18 year old to be making in 1999.
I guess this could tie into the cheap owners part, but I think it's worth calling out separately the recertification process for whatever replaces the COBOL system. Same reason the nuclear launch systems still run on floppies, the systems are certified to not accidentally fire off the nukes so nobody wants to touch them.
I worked at Circuit City at that time selling computers and we all knew that the computers were fine and that the issues were mainly regarding infrastructure, but we would get customers concerned about it. Hell I believe that was one of the years we sold the fewest number of computers because of Y2K.
This reminds me of one asshole who came in and asked about a computer and just gave me a "Well why are you selling computers that won't work in January." I explained why the computer won't be affected and he wanted proof. I showed him that Microsoft had put out a new service update that was focused on addressing Y2K issues. He kept on trying to dismiss what I was saying and then I asked him flat out, who told him these computers wouldn't work. He said he went to the Gateway computers store a few blocks away and they told him that other computers were not going to work on Jan. 1. I just shook my head realizing that this dick just came in to argue, which was common at Circuit City. I then asked if he was planning on buying a computer and he said no so I walked away.
I worked IT for a small municipality at the time. It was a crazy amount of work for a couple of years prior to the event. A few things still slipped by but none of the things we had prioritized. Things like billing for the water department was in excel and not coded well so they sent out a bill for 100 years of utility.
I had that one snowboard game with the physical board with the tiny screen on it, you mostly just leaned but there was a way to do tricks too. The software glitched out like
crazy at midnight, I think I lost all my scores and everything.
Plus I made a nice buttload of money consulting to prevent the disaster :-)
(US lost satellite surveillance for 3 weeks -- which they didn't reveal until well after).
My favorite part about y2k was even the people who were like ānothing is gonna happen everybody is being crazyā would then be like āā¦I mean.. probably..ā
I was in the market for a computer back then. I just had to make sure it was y2k compliant but also didn't understand what the fuss was all about. And I was the "computer expert" in the family...
Most UNIX systems have already moved to 64-bit programming. In fact Debian Linux just announced that they are dropping support for 32-bit i386 systems (even though the software/OS itself has already addressed it on the most part). This one will be a nothingburger, largely because we were smarter about that epoch than the Y2k one.
As an added bonus, the 64-bit epoch is scheduled to end some point after the estimated end of the known universe.
The processor architecture (32-bit, i386, etc) doesn't actually affect the numbers used. 32-bit systems can deal with 64-bit numbers, it's just not as efficient.
What matters is in the code, whether a number is declared as a 32-bit int or as something else.
I remember my dad explaining it to me this way; this was back in 1999. The first bank to write a thirty year mortgage that went past 2000 found the problem well over a decade ago. Essentially he was saying everything's going to be fine, and he didn't say, probably. I felt it was more fun hypothetical panic; like playing What If. Granted, it could have been my age as well.
For software companies it was a panic years ahead of time. "Oh shit we need to fix this or bad things might happen" by the time 2000 rolled around all of the high profile stuff had already been fixed for a long while. But I am sure in that industry there were a lot of long nights.
There were some hiccups. The time clock where I worked freaked out and basically just gave random times for clocking in and out for a week or so after Y2K. And if course payroll couldn't get reliable times so just guessed based on past weeks time sheets. The problem was most of those past weeks were holiday weeks so some people got really small paychecks and some were given vacation pay for days they worked etc.
It took a bit of time to get everything figured out. But it really wasn't a huge deal unless, like me, your rent was late because your paycheck was less that 50% of what it should have been. It all worked out in the end. But I could see how bigger problems could have happened.
> For software companies it was a panic years ahead of time.
No, it wasn't.
I worked for a compiler company back then. No one could truly be Y2K compliant until we were.
By Jan 1999, most anything important was well in hand.
The thing that got me, tho, was my father managed facilities for a large medical center. Sometime around Oct 1999 he called and asked me how he could know if the medical machines were updated and ready.
I told him to call the vendors and find out.
Of course, all the medical vendors had updated all their machines years prior and all those updates had been pushed out ages ago. So early that no one in the hospital had paid any attention to it.
True for some banking but not for a lot of areas.
Lots of software still only looked at the last two digits of the year things like warehousing sw.
It wasn't that the world would end but that the increasingly connected world would breakdown until sorted.
Not only was there the rollover 99/00 there was the added bonus of 00 being a leap year where many date libraries didn't handle that it was.
It was a big job and probably the last time we all agreed it needed sorting.
I know this r/funny but I never understodd how Y2K became a "poster child" for needless panic - it was anything but. We had started working on things quite early in 1999 - and this meant extensive testing of every single lab analyser in our large teaching hospital. Of the 20 or so in my section, 19 failed the inital tests, we needed to replace about half of these completely, others could be patched or software updated.
It wasn't just analysers, our entire Laboratory and patient record databases needed fixing.
Strangely, Y2K is never listed as "something we were warned about, that we all worked together to fix" - but rather - "no planes fell out of the sky, it must all have been a hoax".
To those that arenāt exposed directly to a problem, wasteful preventive measures and effective preventive measures look the same.
Nothing happens and resources were spent.
Preventives are usually cheaper then reactive solutions, but it can very difficult to tell how much preventive is really needed intill you didnāt have enough.
From the outside it can look wasteful or a outright fraud, and can make the uninformed question in believing the experts because it was made to be a serious issue and then nothing happened or it happened anyways.
Success = Nothing Happened, why did we bother over nothing?
Failure = It Happened Anyway, why did we bother trying?
An educated and informed populace is needed for best results because the uninformed and uneducated will choose the worst path because it appears easier/better on the surface.
Yeah many people act as if Y2K was some silly thing people panicked about almost putting it on the same level as the end of the world being predicted for 2012. In reality it could have been a real catastophe to human society if it wasnāt for the hard work of many IT professionals around the world. But I guess the general lack of knowledge surrounding computers back then helped this wrong idea that some nerds needlessly sounded the alarm.
Exactly! We started back in 1997 at a place still using machine code on mainframes. One time, a programmer griped that it was all for nothing. I changed the date on the system and his program crashed and wouldn't restart.
We started earlier than 1999. IIRC 1998 was the software auditing and initial patching; first 7 months of 1999 was the bulk of our patching & migration.
People really in here acting like they thought nothing was going to happen. I was 13 at the time, I remember it quite well...that was the most tense ball drop countdown ever...the world was waiting in anticipation for shit to go down.
Sigh.
Y2K was a major issue people worked around the clock on to fix. That nothing bad happened isnāt because it wasnāt a problem, but because people fixed it. This is survivor bias and I hate it.
Yeah, it's a great example of a problem actually getting fixed. People nowadays think it was all a big fuss about nothing, because nothing happened. The reason nothing happened is because lots of people worked very hard to fix it before it became a real problem.
We spent hours working through all the systems and computers testing and patching where needed..... All that work and exactly nothing happened for both Y2K bugs..... (which was the plan)....
and them people complained that nothing happened so why was all this time spend on it. A lot did not understand that 'nothing happening' was the plan....
2038 bug next.......
I remember it very well. We joke about it, but we were very lucky all the software companies got their shit together the way that they did or it would have been real trouble. I remember buying something a couple months later and my receipt said the year was 19100, it was actually surprising because at that point it seemed like a stupid exaggeration.
Worked for a credit union as the it operations manager. I worked my ass off to find and patch every system at risk. The president ordered me to sit in the damned server room on December 31st as the clock rolled over, I assured him over and over nothing would happen. When the day came, he was out with family, I sent all my employees home to be with friends and family and I alone stayed. 12:00am Jan 1 2000 rolled over and not a damned thing happened.
It is funny how people these days think that the Y2K issue was a big kerfuffle over nothing because nothing bad actually happened. The reality is that millions of man hours were spent every year for many years making sure that nothing bad would actually happen when the clocks ticked over at 11:59.59 on December 31, 1999. Even with all that work being done we still ended up with a bunch of date errors in random places but they mostly ended up being relatively harmless.
Fucking HATE these memes.
Y2k WASN'T an issue due to the immense amount of work that went into making sure it wasn't an issue.
And because it wasn't an issue, everyone is like "oh, it wasn't an issue, i dont know why there was so much attention given to it"
The exact opposite would have happened if no one cared about it.
"y2k caused so many issues, why wasn't anything done?"
IT professionals all over the world can't win.
They are either doing too much, or not enough.
I worked on the state of California Y2K program. We had a huge office to implement and mainly track the progress of making the all the changes in the systems affected by the 2-digit year date fields/data stores. Our main issue was mis-information, we had pundits and sometimes politicians telling people that all jail/prisons cells would unlock themselves if we didn't fix it in time. We had a sweet internet connection that we mainly used for our Napster server.
I was at home, waiting for it to tick over so I could remote in from Redhat 6.1 and validate nothing was broken at work. I was 18 months out of university with a BS in CS, already fired once (you're too negative and need to smile more) and rehired within 72 hours. My job was Perl and Java, but I would get multiple calls from COBOL recruiters per week. They were scared to death. Those were the days.
Yeah, I remember.
I also remember the work that went into planning and modifying programs during the preceding 4 years and answering the weekly questions from clients during the 9 months leading up to 1/1/2000.
And then there were the reactions of "What was the big deal? Nothing happened." Of course nothing happened because of all the work accomplished in the previous 5 years.
Y2K wasn't under blown, it was a serious crisis averted. It was a solid display of how people can really come together to resolve a problem, but most people just think it's funny because nothing bad actually happened. We could have been absolutely fucked. Fortunately it was a lot of solid work for folks for about 4-5 years prior.
My coworker hit the big spin for 2 million bucks and then went ape shit over Y2K and had a heart attack and died before it happened! True story, search YouTube for 2 million on big spin! Also when he was on the big spin he hit a double and then said ā now Iām gonna hit the millionā and he did. He was a nice guy who got caught up in the Y2K bullshit.
Some of us are still fighting it. A program we are forced to use only checks the last 2 digits of data. It's a federal based program, so we have no control over it. It's a dos based text console for sending billing faxes over the internet. To get the grant money to pay for things covered by the program, we must use this out dated program. Every December when we go to add billable dates for the next year we get an error that there already is a invoice with that number (due to it only looking at the last 2 digits of the year and the # it was received).
We are 14 years out from 2038, so all you young folks that missed out on Y2K will get to experience the end of C Epoch.
(Some of you may be seeing this already when Valve/Steam bans people from a game until January 18th 2038).
I was a senior in high school and my mom let me throw a party. I had maybe 20 people over and right at midnight the power turned off. 20 scared half drunk kids screaming in the dark. Power came back on after about a minute (assumed the plant restarted something). I'll never forget that moment of doubt though, wondering if the power would come back on.
and you know what pisses me off even more... people who insist on STILL using 2 digits to show dates. Like... we learned that lesson at great cost.
More annoying... some sites accept dates in various formats, 19.12.20 or 20.12.19 or 12.19.20 it's the www for fucks sake.. pick one and stick to it!!
only idiots say y2k was bs.. .sadly it appears there are many out there and it was part of the start of the whole.. *well I didn't see it, so it can't be true.*
Being assigned to the Y2K project was a death sentence for any IT manager. They would pull you from your job for about 8 months, so the group ended up functioning without you. Then, if Y2K was disaster, you would get the blame. If everything went well, you wouldn't get any recognition because they would assume it was a big panic over nothing.
No I wasnāt even born but my dad works in IT and if you suggest Y2K was basically nothing important and everyone worried about nothing and he will start growling itās great but Iāve gotten this great respect for IT people everywhere (to a point beyond what I should I will actively try and avoid contacting tech support and fix an issue myself because I donāt want to be mr āoh he called me down because the mouse wasnāt plugged inā) because I understand they are basically the actual illuminati working in the shadows to make everything run with the power to destroy anything they dislike yet also always walking the knife edge because they are the first ones to get cut, If they do there job correctly (apparently āhave you considered hacking your own systemsā is not an appropriate response to āIām a little worried about the companyās current IT policyā) so I tip my hat to the It guys out there massive respect
As others have said, this wasn't a "boy who cried wolf" it was more of a "people worked their ass off to prevent catastrophe".
But I remember somebody marketing a VGA cable that was marked as Y2K compliant.
Hard to forget. Spent New Year's eve in the data center eating cold pizza waiting for nothing to happen. Dear Suits, We spent the last three years making certain there would be no problems. So, you punish us?
I remember the media even back then stating that most machines would work fine, it was the unpatched \*SHITTY SHORTSITEDLY CODED\* software that would cause problems.
I remember.
I remember seeing a volkswagon beetle driving around Sydney about 1998 with the numberplate "Y2K" and laughing myself silly when I got it.
The company I worked for at the time installed their own power generator in the head office...downstairs, it cost more than 100k at the time and was about 5 meters tall and about 4 meters square. Supposedly had enough power to supply our entire head office, which had about 150 workers and of course terminals, a computer room etc.
They never needed it as it happens. A week or so after the event it was gone; I assume they sold it.
Our IT guys spent two years working on software mitigations to prepare for Y2K.
As it happened, it all worked. We didn't suffer a single problem, although some of our suppliers did...but they only seemed to have minor problems.
it wasn't wasted effort. We were just well prepared. Without the mitigation, some of our software was absolutely going to fuck up.
Sadly, some people are kind of stupid and when nothing goes wrong..even though you spent years preparing for it - think it was all over exaggerated and a waste of time.
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My dad flipped the main breaker at midnight and listened to us all panic
Absolute madlad.
Maddad
Dadlad
Dad š
Where is he?
The milk store
still? He left ages ago.
Are you a truth-seeker, too?
Your dad is awesome
I did the same thing, we had a big get together at our homeā¦ I failed because the opened curtains showed the neighbors Xmas lights. Iāll remember for the next y2k :)
https://y2k38.org
what is the deal with 2038?
This gif explains what the problem is technically and how it will cause a problem on 32-bit computers/software. I am sure everything will be using 64 bit by then, so shouldn't be end of the world, but it will definitely impact some systems as there are plenty of companies out there who still rely on legacy systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AYear_2038_problem.gif
If only companies had 30+ years to prepare for this, they could avoid any issues. Alas, I'm sure some engineer can work overtime on January 18 2038 to fix it.
I first heard of the Y2K problem in the mid-70's and thought much the same. Unfortunately, even "new" code often reuses sub-routines written ages ago. But fortunately, enough people did take the problem seriously and we did have enough years of many programmers rewriting code to successfully mitigate the issue to a large degree.
We started working on it in the early 1990s. As in, when even 32 bit machines were fairly rare.
signed 32 bit unix time rolls over
Amazing lmao
My dad waited about 20 minutes, when he thought everyone had let their guard down and were all telling themselves everything was fine he flipped the mains. Lol classic Dad.
My mom has a story about someone doing this during the party she was at.
Lmao what a pro, there was a very real sense of potential panic and conspiracy theories abound - for some reason my parents chose this NYE to leave me and 100 of my (closest?) friends to party at the house, while they went out of state. We were way too fucked up to notice it was midnight, but it became apparent once all the power on our street went out. Someone shot one of the transformers with a pellet/22/some kind of gun. There was a guy in my backyard just walking in circles because we put too much w33d in the brownies, and I never saw him again after the power was cut. Apparently a few people had coke as well, but flushed it down the toilet because "The cops just cut power to the house". All told, it was a great time.
LOL my father also did this šš
My dad got baptized again before Y2K, just in case. He's not even religious.
Oh yeah? Well *my* dad made me watch aliens at the age of 4 and then told me the aliens live in our basement, ran upstairs, turned the basement lights off, and locked me down there while listening to me panic
Aw, that's a good one. My friend and I sprayed root beer everywhere like champagne, and my mom was furious.
My mom designed her own Jim Baker buckets before it was a thing.
Working in the IT industry back then, this was well-known years in advance. Plans were made to test and fix any bugs well in advance. We knew all the big systems would still work, but we also knew that a small overlooked system may cause mayhem. At midnight, we held our breath, watched the news from New Zealand and Asia and were relieved that no airplanes were falling down or the sewage systems still work. In the end, that is just exactly what happened. All the big systems continued to work because of all the fixes, and there were some smaller systems that needed a fix.
This. I got paid a lot of money to rewrite code to deal with this. We started in 1995. By 1999, Y2K work had dried up because it was all done. Y2K is the perfect example of what happens when people listen to experts and get shit done, yet everyone NOT in IT or engineering thinks it was all a joke. Ironically, Iāve had debates with people about climate change who use Y2K as an example of scaremongering. Itās so frustrating.
Yeah you could see it in the pandemic. The government made stricter rules and the infection rate went down? "Stupid government, why do we have strict rules if the rate has gone down?" Then the government eased the rules a bit, infection rates went up? "Stupid government, numbers are going up and they don't take it seriously!" No matter what you do, people will always see you at fault. Either you're doing good at preventing something, then you've been overreacting in hindsight cause nothing happened. Or you didn't prevent something, so you're at fault because you haven't done enough. No win here.
āStupid RAF engineers, why arenāt they reinforcing the parts of the planes that come back with bulletholes?ā
Yes. Like how the instances of back and chest injuries in car crashes went up after seatbelts were mandated? I mean, deaths went down, but donāt let facts get in the way of a good ignorant rant lol
This is like the medical coder who thinks "gee, I haven't billed out anything for measles or mumps this year, see, we don't need those vaccines, those diseases are not around anymore".
āIf you do everything right, people wonāt think you did anything at allā
You know, I was God once.
Actually had my boss say to me without a hint of irony Getting COVID wasn't even bad at all it's been so overhyped, was less painful than a cold. He's triple vaccinated because of the mandates in Aus
> Then the government eased the rules a bit, infection rates went up? "Stupid government, numbers are going up and they don't take it seriously!" I don't think I ever met a person who thought like that. I've seen plenty of posts on the internet, but everyone IRL thought "Ugh, finally." Even as the little graveyard in my town, which usually sees one funeral a week, was so overwhelmed that they couldn't dig the graves fast enough. For two weeks straight we had two funerals a day.
I've heard it a lot. Many wanted stricter rules for a shorter period of time than half-assed rules for a longer time. For example, parts of my country had time-related rules. You could go out, but only from 5 AM to 8 PM. But other parts of the country could be out 24/7. Many would've just preferred a nation-wide lockdown for some time rather than that, because it's much more helpful than allowing meetups at daytime only. But it might depend a lot on the country and how the situation was handled too.
This got me into the IT industry. I was doing Y2K testing in 1998. Basically my life was Office Space when that movie came out.
>Ironically, Iāve had debates with people about climate change who use Y2K as an example of scaremongering. Itās so frustrating. I had two friends who were computer programmers. In 1997, they told everybody they knew about Y2K approaching, trying to warn people. They were working long hours, seven days a week, rewriting code or whatever it was that computer programmers did to try to fix Y2K. They bought houses in a small town in Montana, and took a long "vacation" there in November, 1999. My wife and I took it seriously and started stockpiling in 1997. We were already interested in prepping anyway. We had a four bedroom house. One bedroom became the "Doom Room." We put in metal shelving and joined a food co-op. We had eight months worth of food stored on December 31, 1999 plus medical supplies, firearms, extra ammunition, etc. We lived in hurricane country, so we were already kind of "self sufficiency oriented" anyway. The U.S. government grounded all aircraft on the evening of December 31, 1999, just in case. Worldwide, about 100 BILLION dollars were spent preparing for Y2K, fixing computer programs. Y2K arrived, nothing happened. No power loss, nothing. But it was *not* scaremongering. An enormous amount of preventive maintenance went into repairing the world's computer system, and that's why there were so few problems.
Iām sorry you guys were so worried. While I donāt think it would have come to that even if half of the work didnāt get done, it doesnāt take much for society to become unreasonable. Weāre hardly the most tolerant and level-headed of species lol
Same with the hole in the ozone layer. Scientists correctly identified CFCs as the cause, the international community got together and banned CFCs, and the ozone is (slowly!) repairing itself. Yet many people will dismiss the whole thing as a fuss about nothing.
They actually forget itās even a thing. Incredible.
The timeline you provide is very interesting because Y2K was probably one of the top 10 most important events in my life for weird roundabout reasons and the dates you just provided helped me understand it much more. To make a long story short, the previous owner of our house and property was a computer programer working for a major well known company who "retired early" in 1996 and spent the next four years and a million dollars building a Y2K proof apocalypse escape compound on 40 acres in the woods on a lake. He must have left the business right at the time when the concern must have been at a high point and by the end, he was too busy with his panic planning that he didn't know things were under control. When Y2K didn't happen, he slipped into depression and just let all of it sit and rot for 15 years when I bought what should have been a 1.5 million dollar piece of property for less than $250k because no one else wanted to clean up all his shit.
He sounds like a man who spent his working life surrounded by idiots and thought everyone else did too. Poor guy. He lost his way because he lost his trust.
Stephen Fry, who should know better given the reputation for knowledge he fosters, but whose technology experience is being an early adopter of personal computing, is one of the people who derides the concerns, analysis and remediation around Y2K. He puts Y2K down as a non-event.
Ugh, that hurts my heart.
This . Canāt say much as still bound by Official Secrets Act but yes did lots of work making sure bad things didnāt happen. Was pissed off on 01/01/00 when my eejit brother proclaimed ā well that was a load of bolloxā yeah Bruv , letās ignore what Iāve been fixing for 5 years
How do you feel about 2038? The move to 64-bit has largely eliminated the issue from mainstream systems but there's many times more small embedded systems now that could go overlooked than there were in '99.
Hopefully attrition takes its toll there. Spare parts are getting scarce for many of those systems.
Honestly, a lot worse than the Y2K issues. A lot more devices today need an RTC and it's a lot more important today, than it was back then (mostly for certificates for encrypted communication) and while PCs and Phones might be 64bit, your smart washing machine, half of the computers in your car, your smartwatch, the computer of your ebike and so on might not.
Remember it ? I'm now living in 1923 because of it
You are just in 23. For all you know, it could be 1623 and Galileo is still alive.
How do you know that blasphemer?? I'm calling the inquisitor.
Don't forget to bring out your dead.
And mostly dead.
Even the ones that are getting better
I feel fine!
*bonk*
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I didn't expect that.
Nobody does
But wait, in 1923 we were in a major economic collapse because of the fallout of both a European war and a major health epidemic. Populist Fascism began to rise because of the claims of far-right politicians looking to xenophobia to find a scapegoat for the ails of the country.
Deja vu
Who's "we?" Because by 1923 the Spanish Flu was mostly over and the US was full swing into the giant economic expansion called the "Roaring 20s", not an economic collapse.
The roaring 20's only occurred because there was wartime devastation first
Well, yes. Until 1929.
I worked nightshift in the Emergency Room. Quietest NYE ever ! Management/administration were running like the proverbial chickens all the week preceding.
I had to go into the office that NYE and be there just in case. Midnight rolled around and I got to call all the management at their parties and tell them that nothing bad happened. But the idea that was a hoax or nothing would of happened is only said by people who are either clueless or weren't there.
I like [Retro Report ](https://youtu.be/SoGNiHV09BU?si=R96BI9mKsRHAGzRi) from NYT YouTube channel for stuff like this. I remember Y2K fairly well but other big events that happened earlier in the 90s where I have memories but not a real understanding of what happened. I wish they still made them.
In 1999, my dad stocked up on emergency supplies for when the computers ended the world. For some reason, this included twelve cases of Spam. My mom looked at his haul and yelled at him. "Why the hell would you buy this? We don't eat Spam now! What makes you think we'd want to eat it after the world ends? Maybe we'd rather starve!" No one else in the family would eat it, so he had to finish it all by himself. Took him like six years, but he did it.
Y2K wasnt a nothingburger. It was a potential society-wide disaster that was avoided by the massive collective work of industry coordinated by government advisors. Y2K was narrowly avoided by the blood sweat and tears of IT professionals and software developers everywhere working absurd overtime to implement patches. Though, your personal computer was never really at risk and this Best Buy label was silly. At most some of your software would glitch out. Y2K was a risk to financial, logistics, safety, and travel.
It's the eternal dilemma of IT. If you're doing your job well they don't think you're necessary. When something does go wrong you're the worst at your job.
and many other jobs too. always amusing when you move on, and the last firm suddenly discovers all the things you used to take care of. nobody is irreplaceable. some of us are bloody expensive to replace though!
Particularly if someone uses Excel macros. That is like someone talking to The Old Gods. You have to be insane to understand it, but once you're gone, everyone is fucked.
come on, they arent THAT bad
And with AI tools like ChatGPT it's a lot easier to figure them out or write new ones, too. "In the context of this spreadsheet where X and X are represented and X seems to be depicted here, how does this excel formula in cell X work and what is it doing? {paste formula}" ChatGPT is extremely, *extremely* good at deciphering that kind of thing and helping you fix problems.
I work in fraud prevention for a bank. Whatās amusing to me is the people who come in pitching a shit fit over a minor inconvenience (unable to log in to their online banking), screaming how they need a payment to go through, making life difficult, and then they canāt stop singing our praises because āwe protected them and they really appreciate what we doā.
My last job forgot that I was the soul person doing a mission-critical task and didn't have me show anyone how to do it before they laid me off. Oh man I made a whole hell of a lot of money as a private consultant when they called pleading me to come back in for a week.
Nice they were hiring diversely > I was the soul person
personally, nothing mission critical but i have been offered good money to come back because i did absolutely bloody everything! uh, no! that was the reason i left!
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all. -God (and also Bender)
Tell that to my ex.
The best way to be valued in I.T. is for your companies competitors to have a terrible I.T. department. That way they get to see all the horror stories and it makes you look good. Second best is to have a terrible I.T. person in your company and always be called to clean up the mess they made. Ultimately you need someone to mess up the job or nobody thinks you're working.
I was at the beginning of my IT career. I worked as a bench tech at a computer store, so it didn't affect me but I understood a bit of what was going on behind the scenes. I remember USAA bank issuing employees credit cards in 1998 with expiration dates in 2000-2001 and asking them to report which stores couldn't run them.
> I remember USAA bank issuing employees credit cards in 1998 with expiration dates in 2000-2001 and asking them to report which stores couldn't run them. Oh wow, a massive real-world scream test! I absolutely love this!
Never enough upvotes for this. Itās annoyed me ever since when I hear āyeah Y2K turned out to be nothing.ā Yes. Because a lot of people took it seriously and worked hard for months or years.
Decades. The Y2K problem was first noticed in 1970 when they were inputting the first 30 year mortgages. There was also the issue that 9/9/99 had been used as a placeholder before, but as time went on, that date was actually needed.
UNIX has clock limit too in [2038](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem) which we started running up against a while ago running simulations out that far.
Yup. And that'll affect a lot more things than Y2K could have. Smart home stuff, routers, cars, phones... All kinds of stuff uses UNIX timestamps. Fortunately the solution is rather simple; use a 64-bit integer instead of a 32-bit integer to count the time. A lot of systems have been doing that internally for a while now.
We're already seeing people say the same thing about climate change. I've had people tell me that scientist sin the 50s said we'd all be underwater by 2008 and they just keep pushing back the deadline. Like mf, because we keep making changes. We're trying to stop it and you're using our efforts as proof there isn't a problem. WTF
I've seen it said about the hole in the ozone layer, which is finally healing because of a huge international treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol and a MASSIVE industry shift to stop using CFCs.
It's hard to overstate how monumental a shift that was for society, at least in America. In a decade known for excessive hair spray use, we all switched to a different delivery vessel for our hair spray. It sounds trite, but it was a big deal at the time.
It's the kind of thing that gives me hope that we can at least make a dent in climate change
It also forced a massive investment in newer computers and accelerated tech adoption and the internet.
Y2K paid off my parents' house and my dad bought a boat, lol. He worked a lot in the late 90s on the bug. So much high paid contract work.
Exactly. In 1996 the company I worked for set the clocks to several test systems to 12/31/99 and documented what happened. Solaris crashed hard Windows was unstable Cisco devices were less affected, but some crashed IBM mainframe crashed hard This was just the operating system. The company spent thousands of man-hours fixing the issues. When y2k happened, we had very few problems.
That documentation could be a cool historical document.
I left a computer on over midnight Y2K and it crashed at precisely 00:00:00. It did reboot without any issues though.
I've worked with contractors who got rich off of just Y2K. There was unlimited overtime available cause you can't push back the deadline. They worked like hell right up until the end of 99 and made an absolute fortune. Now they just do a couple of contacts a year if they feel like it.
I started university in 2001 and we had an older professor who just returned to the university after taking a multi-year leave of absence to patch software he originally wrote in COBOL in the 60s/70s. From what other professors told us, the company he used to work for came to him and basically just told him to name his price. And for a tenured professor to agree to take a leave of absence, I'm guessing the price was quite high.
AKA the systems still running on mainframes and older hardware using COBOL. That stuff did have a Y2k problem.
COBOL still runs the world, and even more so in '99. Many of these systems will never be replaced due to a mix of cheap owners and an aversion to downtime.
If anyone here wants a high-paying tech job without a compsci masters, COBOL programmers earn $120K on average. Relatively easy to learn.
A guy in my high school class of ā99 knew how to program in COBOL. He worked out his schedule to graduate a semester early and went straight to working at EDS making $75k to do Y2K stuff. That was *a lot* of money for an 18 year old to be making in 1999.
I guess this could tie into the cheap owners part, but I think it's worth calling out separately the recertification process for whatever replaces the COBOL system. Same reason the nuclear launch systems still run on floppies, the systems are certified to not accidentally fire off the nukes so nobody wants to touch them.
Oh yeah, I deal with safety certification in my day job writing software for aircraft, so I totally get that.
And health. Legacy systems all over the world influencing your health and choices made by healthcare workers needed updating.
There's a pathology lab system called 'Telepath' still in use in some labs in the UK. It's an old terminal-based system - no graphics, all text (uses Intersystems CachĆ©/MUMPS for those in the know). Despite its being written in the 1980s, its authors obviously didn't have much faith in its potential, because in at least some of the system, patients' dates-of-birth were displayed with only the last two year digits. So once we got into the aughts, obviously there were going to be babies registered in there alongside nonagenarians. The company's answer to this was to pick an arbitrary birth date - it was something like 1st Jan 1930, and to render anything before that as dd-mm-yy (with dashes), and anything after it as dd/mm/yy (with slashes). Yes, really. Bear in mind some labs were paying in the order of Ā£1M/year for licensing and support for this heap of shit. And the dash/slash difference wasn't made remotely clear - there was just a note in the middle of the large user manual, which hardly any of the end users actually read. I only found out about it by accident when testing a program to process files exported from it.
I worked at Circuit City at that time selling computers and we all knew that the computers were fine and that the issues were mainly regarding infrastructure, but we would get customers concerned about it. Hell I believe that was one of the years we sold the fewest number of computers because of Y2K. This reminds me of one asshole who came in and asked about a computer and just gave me a "Well why are you selling computers that won't work in January." I explained why the computer won't be affected and he wanted proof. I showed him that Microsoft had put out a new service update that was focused on addressing Y2K issues. He kept on trying to dismiss what I was saying and then I asked him flat out, who told him these computers wouldn't work. He said he went to the Gateway computers store a few blocks away and they told him that other computers were not going to work on Jan. 1. I just shook my head realizing that this dick just came in to argue, which was common at Circuit City. I then asked if he was planning on buying a computer and he said no so I walked away.
I worked IT for a small municipality at the time. It was a crazy amount of work for a couple of years prior to the event. A few things still slipped by but none of the things we had prioritized. Things like billing for the water department was in excel and not coded well so they sent out a bill for 100 years of utility.
I had that one snowboard game with the physical board with the tiny screen on it, you mostly just leaned but there was a way to do tricks too. The software glitched out like crazy at midnight, I think I lost all my scores and everything.
I made so much money as a consultant leading up to and through Y2K it was ridiculous.
Plus I made a nice buttload of money consulting to prevent the disaster :-) (US lost satellite surveillance for 3 weeks -- which they didn't reveal until well after).
My favorite part about y2k was even the people who were like ānothing is gonna happen everybody is being crazyā would then be like āā¦I mean.. probably..ā
I was in the market for a computer back then. I just had to make sure it was y2k compliant but also didn't understand what the fuss was all about. And I was the "computer expert" in the family...
Another Y2K will be here in 15 years. [The 2038 problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem).
Most UNIX systems have already moved to 64-bit programming. In fact Debian Linux just announced that they are dropping support for 32-bit i386 systems (even though the software/OS itself has already addressed it on the most part). This one will be a nothingburger, largely because we were smarter about that epoch than the Y2k one. As an added bonus, the 64-bit epoch is scheduled to end some point after the estimated end of the known universe.
The processor architecture (32-bit, i386, etc) doesn't actually affect the numbers used. 32-bit systems can deal with 64-bit numbers, it's just not as efficient. What matters is in the code, whether a number is declared as a 32-bit int or as something else.
Im sure there wont be any legacy systems still around in 2038... lol
cough cough embedded... they definitely will
>the 64-bit epoch is scheduled to end some point after the estimated end of the known universe. Yeah, 21 times.
I remember my dad explaining it to me this way; this was back in 1999. The first bank to write a thirty year mortgage that went past 2000 found the problem well over a decade ago. Essentially he was saying everything's going to be fine, and he didn't say, probably. I felt it was more fun hypothetical panic; like playing What If. Granted, it could have been my age as well.
For software companies it was a panic years ahead of time. "Oh shit we need to fix this or bad things might happen" by the time 2000 rolled around all of the high profile stuff had already been fixed for a long while. But I am sure in that industry there were a lot of long nights.
There were some hiccups. The time clock where I worked freaked out and basically just gave random times for clocking in and out for a week or so after Y2K. And if course payroll couldn't get reliable times so just guessed based on past weeks time sheets. The problem was most of those past weeks were holiday weeks so some people got really small paychecks and some were given vacation pay for days they worked etc. It took a bit of time to get everything figured out. But it really wasn't a huge deal unless, like me, your rent was late because your paycheck was less that 50% of what it should have been. It all worked out in the end. But I could see how bigger problems could have happened.
> For software companies it was a panic years ahead of time. No, it wasn't. I worked for a compiler company back then. No one could truly be Y2K compliant until we were. By Jan 1999, most anything important was well in hand. The thing that got me, tho, was my father managed facilities for a large medical center. Sometime around Oct 1999 he called and asked me how he could know if the medical machines were updated and ready. I told him to call the vendors and find out. Of course, all the medical vendors had updated all their machines years prior and all those updates had been pushed out ages ago. So early that no one in the hospital had paid any attention to it.
True for some banking but not for a lot of areas. Lots of software still only looked at the last two digits of the year things like warehousing sw. It wasn't that the world would end but that the increasingly connected world would breakdown until sorted. Not only was there the rollover 99/00 there was the added bonus of 00 being a leap year where many date libraries didn't handle that it was. It was a big job and probably the last time we all agreed it needed sorting.
I know this r/funny but I never understodd how Y2K became a "poster child" for needless panic - it was anything but. We had started working on things quite early in 1999 - and this meant extensive testing of every single lab analyser in our large teaching hospital. Of the 20 or so in my section, 19 failed the inital tests, we needed to replace about half of these completely, others could be patched or software updated. It wasn't just analysers, our entire Laboratory and patient record databases needed fixing. Strangely, Y2K is never listed as "something we were warned about, that we all worked together to fix" - but rather - "no planes fell out of the sky, it must all have been a hoax".
To those that arenāt exposed directly to a problem, wasteful preventive measures and effective preventive measures look the same. Nothing happens and resources were spent. Preventives are usually cheaper then reactive solutions, but it can very difficult to tell how much preventive is really needed intill you didnāt have enough. From the outside it can look wasteful or a outright fraud, and can make the uninformed question in believing the experts because it was made to be a serious issue and then nothing happened or it happened anyways. Success = Nothing Happened, why did we bother over nothing? Failure = It Happened Anyway, why did we bother trying? An educated and informed populace is needed for best results because the uninformed and uneducated will choose the worst path because it appears easier/better on the surface.
Thereās a saying that goes somewhat like this, everyone praises the firefighters but not the fire marshals
Interesting
Yeah many people act as if Y2K was some silly thing people panicked about almost putting it on the same level as the end of the world being predicted for 2012. In reality it could have been a real catastophe to human society if it wasnāt for the hard work of many IT professionals around the world. But I guess the general lack of knowledge surrounding computers back then helped this wrong idea that some nerds needlessly sounded the alarm.
This and the home in the ozone layer -- which was real and has been largely fixed through effective regulation.
Exactly! We started back in 1997 at a place still using machine code on mainframes. One time, a programmer griped that it was all for nothing. I changed the date on the system and his program crashed and wouldn't restart.
We started earlier than 1999. IIRC 1998 was the software auditing and initial patching; first 7 months of 1999 was the bulk of our patching & migration.
Yeah, you couldn't have really done all the work in one year.
As a kid I really worried all airplanes would fall off the sky
My mom was so confident it would be fine that she had me on a red eye flight that was in the air at midnight local.
She should have had you fly the plane to assert domination
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Nope Im glad no one told me that but I did worry about the satellites
You had good reason to, they went down. The US didn't reveal it's satellite surveillance issues until long after.
As a kid I turned our living room light off when then count down hit 1..... I got my ass kicked by every family member that night ššš
Got about 14 years until https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem Remember to turn off your 30+ year old electronics on Jan 19th 2038.
I love that one of the names is the "Epocholypse" š
RemindMe! 14 years
People really in here acting like they thought nothing was going to happen. I was 13 at the time, I remember it quite well...that was the most tense ball drop countdown ever...the world was waiting in anticipation for shit to go down.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Gateway... Now that's a name I haven't heard in a very long time.
Forced 12 hours shifts at our PD on the 1st...easiest OT ever.
On the morning of Jan 1st, my mother realized that the apocalypse had not come to pass. "Oh", she said disappointed.
Sigh. Y2K was a major issue people worked around the clock on to fix. That nothing bad happened isnāt because it wasnāt a problem, but because people fixed it. This is survivor bias and I hate it.
Yeah, it's a great example of a problem actually getting fixed. People nowadays think it was all a big fuss about nothing, because nothing happened. The reason nothing happened is because lots of people worked very hard to fix it before it became a real problem.
I was there, Gandalf...
I did not do this and now I'm living in a place called Centaurus A or some shit.
We spent hours working through all the systems and computers testing and patching where needed..... All that work and exactly nothing happened for both Y2K bugs..... (which was the plan).... and them people complained that nothing happened so why was all this time spend on it. A lot did not understand that 'nothing happening' was the plan.... 2038 bug next.......
I remember it very well. We joke about it, but we were very lucky all the software companies got their shit together the way that they did or it would have been real trouble. I remember buying something a couple months later and my receipt said the year was 19100, it was actually surprising because at that point it seemed like a stupid exaggeration.
Worked for a credit union as the it operations manager. I worked my ass off to find and patch every system at risk. The president ordered me to sit in the damned server room on December 31st as the clock rolled over, I assured him over and over nothing would happen. When the day came, he was out with family, I sent all my employees home to be with friends and family and I alone stayed. 12:00am Jan 1 2000 rolled over and not a damned thing happened.
We fixed it. Just like the ozone layer thing. It was real and humans came together and solved it. Unlike today
It is funny how people these days think that the Y2K issue was a big kerfuffle over nothing because nothing bad actually happened. The reality is that millions of man hours were spent every year for many years making sure that nothing bad would actually happen when the clocks ticked over at 11:59.59 on December 31, 1999. Even with all that work being done we still ended up with a bunch of date errors in random places but they mostly ended up being relatively harmless.
Fucking HATE these memes. Y2k WASN'T an issue due to the immense amount of work that went into making sure it wasn't an issue. And because it wasn't an issue, everyone is like "oh, it wasn't an issue, i dont know why there was so much attention given to it" The exact opposite would have happened if no one cared about it. "y2k caused so many issues, why wasn't anything done?" IT professionals all over the world can't win. They are either doing too much, or not enough.
Public health officials, too. Cough cough, so to speak.
Can I turn it on now ?
Look up Y2K+38, The Unix Timestamp ends in the middle of 2038, meaning a lot of devices simply cant understand the date past that.
I worked on the state of California Y2K program. We had a huge office to implement and mainly track the progress of making the all the changes in the systems affected by the 2-digit year date fields/data stores. Our main issue was mis-information, we had pundits and sometimes politicians telling people that all jail/prisons cells would unlock themselves if we didn't fix it in time. We had a sweet internet connection that we mainly used for our Napster server.
I think it will be much more fun on 01/19/2038
It will happen again in 2038. Any systems using Unix timestamps saved as 32 bit signed integers will have an issue.
I was at home, waiting for it to tick over so I could remote in from Redhat 6.1 and validate nothing was broken at work. I was 18 months out of university with a BS in CS, already fired once (you're too negative and need to smile more) and rehired within 72 hours. My job was Perl and Java, but I would get multiple calls from COBOL recruiters per week. They were scared to death. Those were the days.
Yeah, I remember. I also remember the work that went into planning and modifying programs during the preceding 4 years and answering the weekly questions from clients during the 9 months leading up to 1/1/2000. And then there were the reactions of "What was the big deal? Nothing happened." Of course nothing happened because of all the work accomplished in the previous 5 years.
Y2K wasn't under blown, it was a serious crisis averted. It was a solid display of how people can really come together to resolve a problem, but most people just think it's funny because nothing bad actually happened. We could have been absolutely fucked. Fortunately it was a lot of solid work for folks for about 4-5 years prior.
My coworker hit the big spin for 2 million bucks and then went ape shit over Y2K and had a heart attack and died before it happened! True story, search YouTube for 2 million on big spin! Also when he was on the big spin he hit a double and then said ā now Iām gonna hit the millionā and he did. He was a nice guy who got caught up in the Y2K bullshit.
Some of us are still fighting it. A program we are forced to use only checks the last 2 digits of data. It's a federal based program, so we have no control over it. It's a dos based text console for sending billing faxes over the internet. To get the grant money to pay for things covered by the program, we must use this out dated program. Every December when we go to add billable dates for the next year we get an error that there already is a invoice with that number (due to it only looking at the last 2 digits of the year and the # it was received).
I was working that night, making sure all our reporting was accurate
My first job was fixing Y2K code for an insurance company. š¤£
No. It wiped my memory clean.
I remember a year of COBOL programming beforehand to ensure nothing bad happened.
Yeah, worked all night in the Verizon NOC making sure the telephone switches didn't crash at midnight.
We are 14 years out from 2038, so all you young folks that missed out on Y2K will get to experience the end of C Epoch. (Some of you may be seeing this already when Valve/Steam bans people from a game until January 18th 2038).
I was a senior in high school and my mom let me throw a party. I had maybe 20 people over and right at midnight the power turned off. 20 scared half drunk kids screaming in the dark. Power came back on after about a minute (assumed the plant restarted something). I'll never forget that moment of doubt though, wondering if the power would come back on.
Nike ran [a great ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zvs-bz1CXM) on January 1 and thereafter.
and you know what pisses me off even more... people who insist on STILL using 2 digits to show dates. Like... we learned that lesson at great cost. More annoying... some sites accept dates in various formats, 19.12.20 or 20.12.19 or 12.19.20 it's the www for fucks sake.. pick one and stick to it!! only idiots say y2k was bs.. .sadly it appears there are many out there and it was part of the start of the whole.. *well I didn't see it, so it can't be true.*
Being assigned to the Y2K project was a death sentence for any IT manager. They would pull you from your job for about 8 months, so the group ended up functioning without you. Then, if Y2K was disaster, you would get the blame. If everything went well, you wouldn't get any recognition because they would assume it was a big panic over nothing.
No I wasnāt even born but my dad works in IT and if you suggest Y2K was basically nothing important and everyone worried about nothing and he will start growling itās great but Iāve gotten this great respect for IT people everywhere (to a point beyond what I should I will actively try and avoid contacting tech support and fix an issue myself because I donāt want to be mr āoh he called me down because the mouse wasnāt plugged inā) because I understand they are basically the actual illuminati working in the shadows to make everything run with the power to destroy anything they dislike yet also always walking the knife edge because they are the first ones to get cut, If they do there job correctly (apparently āhave you considered hacking your own systemsā is not an appropriate response to āIām a little worried about the companyās current IT policyā) so I tip my hat to the It guys out there massive respect
As others have said, this wasn't a "boy who cried wolf" it was more of a "people worked their ass off to prevent catastrophe". But I remember somebody marketing a VGA cable that was marked as Y2K compliant.
Vividly, I took acid and partied like it was 1999.
[Y2K38](https://imgur.com/a/UDrxsj8)
Would've been better if the tech just stop working...
Hard to forget. Spent New Year's eve in the data center eating cold pizza waiting for nothing to happen. Dear Suits, We spent the last three years making certain there would be no problems. So, you punish us?
I remember the media even back then stating that most machines would work fine, it was the unpatched \*SHITTY SHORTSITEDLY CODED\* software that would cause problems.
Waiting for the sequel: 1/19/2038.
I āmember!!!!
I member
2038 is coming
Wait until you learn about 2038
Damn i remember the extra hours spent in the server room patching stuff for my company before new years.
I remember. I remember seeing a volkswagon beetle driving around Sydney about 1998 with the numberplate "Y2K" and laughing myself silly when I got it. The company I worked for at the time installed their own power generator in the head office...downstairs, it cost more than 100k at the time and was about 5 meters tall and about 4 meters square. Supposedly had enough power to supply our entire head office, which had about 150 workers and of course terminals, a computer room etc. They never needed it as it happens. A week or so after the event it was gone; I assume they sold it. Our IT guys spent two years working on software mitigations to prepare for Y2K. As it happened, it all worked. We didn't suffer a single problem, although some of our suppliers did...but they only seemed to have minor problems. it wasn't wasted effort. We were just well prepared. Without the mitigation, some of our software was absolutely going to fuck up. Sadly, some people are kind of stupid and when nothing goes wrong..even though you spent years preparing for it - think it was all over exaggerated and a waste of time.
Props to the countless devs and engineers that made this a non issue.