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Curious thing is, you almost never see articles addressing possibility that the reason we didn’t see major disruption or catastrophic events was because a lot of skilled human effort went into fixing the issue….

I was told that basically everyone super overreacted and thought the world was going to end by the machines turning evil

I agree with this 100%. A lot of us worked on fixes to make bad things not happen.

Jesus fucking Christ. What a waste of resources… 😞 Did it seriously burn through a century's worth of paper and ink??

A similar thing impacted telcos with their switches. I found several while I worked at the phone company. One in 2015 was a busy long distance switch that wasn’t reporting the right dates to the billing system, as a result 15yrs of LD calls through that switch went unbilled.

At one point we had 80,000 y2k project managers on a mail list discussing y2k issues and solutions. Averaging 400+ emails each day.

I worry that the apparent non-event of Y2K means that Y2.038K won’t be allocated the proper funding to fix.

I've met people who think it was a hoax largely because they were unaware of the Y2K compliance industry. I think 98-99 is better described as "mass hysteria." People just said whatever they wanted and that overwhelmed anything about audits and insurance that happened years before.

I was in the middle of that remediation… nuts is a good word for it. What terrified us wasn’t what we knew about. It was what weird Assembler or COBOL was lurking in some disused basement of the Main Frame that was going to rise up on that day and kill the Bank

Next up: dismantling the oligarchy

My recollection is that not much needed to be changed, just that it all needed checking.

It shouldn’t. The issue was dates being stored as just the last two digits (00 = 1900 or 2000?) and the common practice now is to store everything as four digit years to avoid ambiguity. So there will be no confusion between 2100 and 2000

How did a bank write a 30-year mortgage between 1971 and 2000?

I remember around the time of y2k we discovered that all our Cisco switches had a hardcoded default passwords in the firmware. Put there by Cisco and we had to get firmware upgrades and/or new routers. Our network guys were not impressed. Never got hacked that we knew of. 🫤

People also forget it wasn't just 1999-12-31, I was working for the IT department of an internationally well know department store and an a customer tried to pay with a new credit card that had an expiry date of Jan 2000, it was rejected by the validation system. This was in 1995.

My first job after I graduated, was 18 months of COBOL on OS400, rewriting code for Y2K. On-call that NYE. Damn, memory lane 🖥️

Most people have no idea of the work that went on in 1999 to avert a disaster. Retirees were brought back as they knew the ancient computer languages that many systems ran on which had to be reprogrammed.

😂👏👏👏

Underrated post! Kou win the internet todak!

The Y2K problem was like the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia ep "Charlie Work". Charlie does loads of crazy stuff to get the bar past its annual health inspection. At the end the gang says it's "not a big deal because they always pass it", giving no recognition to work done by Charlie to pass it

Reminds me of the War of the Worlds hoax. Newspapers reported mass hysteria and looting (not true). That led to the narrative that it was not actually a big deal. But it was, switchboards went nuts not with panicked calls but, neighbors checking on each other

I think the bigger problem is that a lot of people took it super seriously, but the problems were largely averted, so then they all decided that it was not a big deal and they had been conned. It’s a no-win situation

I was at the monopoly bookstore online store that night and we had pizza, the infrastructure team. Then we waited patiently for the production servers to explode. They did not. We then waited for the stupid Exchange server to die. It did not. WHAT IS THIS BONKERS NONSENSE? Even the AS/400 was happy.

Totally, my coworkers and I literally spent years planning and working thru the changes, testing and scheduling. And I knew the same effort was going on everywhere

And they continued to spout the fear-mongering even after the problems were mostly resolved, right up until the new year was starting. It was a very serious, very big deal, that got resolved, and yet was still over hyped at the same time somehow. @_@

I wish the same could be said about climate change and the regulation of AI.

I was a bit miffed at the time and asked my computing studies teacher what the go was She told me companies tested computers ticking over to 01/01/00 and shit went down Wasn't miffed after that

My father has worked in tech his whole career. As 1999 was ending, I finally asked him if it was as big of a deal or worth the stress that I was seeing in the news. His answer was: "It's already fixed." It was a problem, but the professionals handled it like professionals, and here we are now.

This is important.

Yes, this is what I was referring to... Generally not a problem as long as we have moved on from 32-bit systems or 32-bit systems which have been patched, and yes, this is typically Unix and Linux systems.

As someone who grew up around tech but not in the industry at the time, this is 100% correct. If not for that hard work, things would have been very different.

It’s always a damned if you do, damned if you don’t in those situations. Solve the problem too well and people will claim you overhyped it. Don’t solve it well enough and people will claim you failed.

DIDN'T happen, the reaction from regular people has always been 'that was a lot of fuss over nothing', not realising it's only *because* of the insane amount of work that went into it, that made it seem overblown because nothing major happened. Apparently we took the wrong lessons from it 🥺

ah yes understandable 🧀

something NOT happening. The devs had to add a "critical hit avoided" text for people to even start noticing it. And it still wasn't popular! "We spent $10m to renovate this bridge and now it won't collapse" is unpopular because you can't demonstrate the counterfactual!

I accept it was a big potential problem, not helped by some practitioners. My IT Head asked for a big bonus to prevent our systems crashing. I suggested that was what we paid him for, so he should avoid a crash if he wanted to keep his job. He did.

Bill you should meet Elon musk! The two of you might be able to come up with a solution if it hasn't been taken already! Thank you

The SEs of the company I worked for at the time thought otherwise. You may have heard of the company. IBM.

People made a lot of money, thats what happend. The rest where fools.

The Y2K bug was an example of a problem that would have hurt businesses more than industrials. So it makes sense why the urgency to solve it was there. If the problem was localized to just the peasants (like lead pipes in a run down apartment), nothing would have been done about it at all.

Imagine working on something, and you know in 2044 it'll trigger a bug, but your boss wants you to work on new feature X right now first. Repeat that a million billion times until it's almost too late. It's like climate change, only we actually *addressed* Y2K before it got bad. 😐

I do think "it will get replaced by then" was also a common thought. Tech was improving so rapidly that it seemed silly to expect the system wouldn't be replaced in a decade. Also, 2000 wasn't considered the near future - it was "The Year 2000." Very mystical and far off, until it wasn't.

Or any other creative product. Obv. a computer has more moving parts than a marble statue, but I'd love to hear the deep dive on how much tech after a certain point has the potential staying power of the polaroid camera, the solar pocket calculator, the magnetic compass. Idk the software equivalent.

I had an old PC, like 10 years old. I heard the Y2K stuff, so I tested it by copying the files I needed, then set it to December 31 1999, 11.59PM. It simply went on to January 1, 2000, 0.00AM. No one had done any remedial work on it. Then I set it back to the real date & time & forgot about it.

I got covid and was the sickest I've ever been, and that was WITH the vaccine. Some people would say "see, the vax doesn't work" but I just dread to imagine how much worse it would have been without.