Do You Remember the Y2K Bug? (fastcompany.com) 241
harrymcc writes:
In the late 1990s, lots of people were concerned that the Y2K bug could lead to power outages, financial collapse, riots, and worse when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000. Hundreds of books about the problem and suggestions on how to respond (quit your job, move to the country, stockpile food) not only capitalized on this fear but helped to spread it.
Over at Fast Company, I marked the 20th anniversary of the "crisis" with a retrospective on the survival guides and what we can learn from them.
The article calls them "an eternally useful guide to how not to give people advice about technology and its role in their lives... They provided a brief layperson's guide to the origins of the problem, and then segued into nightmare scenarios."
They had scary titles like Time Bomb 2000 and The Millennium Meltdown. Their covers featured grim declarations such as "The illusion of social stability is about to be shattered... and nothing can stop it" and garish artwork of the earth aflame and bombs tumbling toward skylines. Inside, they told readers that the bug could lead to a decade or more of calamity, and advised them to stockpile food, cash, and (sometimes) weapons. There were hundreds of these books from publishers large and small, some produced by people who turned the topic into mini-media empires...
Spoiler alert: When January 1, 2000, rolled around, nothing terrible happened. By then, techies had spent years patching up creaky code so it could deal with 21st-century dates, and the billions invested in the effort paid off. Some problems did crop up, but even alarming-sounding ones -- such as glitches at nuclear power plants -- were minor and resolvable.
On December 31st, 1999, Roblimo posted a call for comments from Slashdot readers, writing "This thread ought to make an interesting chronicle of Y2K events -- or non-events, as the case may be."
But NBC had even filmed a made-for-TV Y2K disaster movie (which Jon Katz called "profoundly stupid and irresponsible.")
And one survivalist videotape even featured an ominous narration by Leonard Nimoy.
Over at Fast Company, I marked the 20th anniversary of the "crisis" with a retrospective on the survival guides and what we can learn from them.
The article calls them "an eternally useful guide to how not to give people advice about technology and its role in their lives... They provided a brief layperson's guide to the origins of the problem, and then segued into nightmare scenarios."
They had scary titles like Time Bomb 2000 and The Millennium Meltdown. Their covers featured grim declarations such as "The illusion of social stability is about to be shattered... and nothing can stop it" and garish artwork of the earth aflame and bombs tumbling toward skylines. Inside, they told readers that the bug could lead to a decade or more of calamity, and advised them to stockpile food, cash, and (sometimes) weapons. There were hundreds of these books from publishers large and small, some produced by people who turned the topic into mini-media empires...
Spoiler alert: When January 1, 2000, rolled around, nothing terrible happened. By then, techies had spent years patching up creaky code so it could deal with 21st-century dates, and the billions invested in the effort paid off. Some problems did crop up, but even alarming-sounding ones -- such as glitches at nuclear power plants -- were minor and resolvable.
On December 31st, 1999, Roblimo posted a call for comments from Slashdot readers, writing "This thread ought to make an interesting chronicle of Y2K events -- or non-events, as the case may be."
But NBC had even filmed a made-for-TV Y2K disaster movie (which Jon Katz called "profoundly stupid and irresponsible.")
And one survivalist videotape even featured an ominous narration by Leonard Nimoy.
Maybe we shouldn't. (Score:5, Informative)
In many ways we should probably have let things fail because now a sizeable minority of complete cretins think it was a myth.
Look at any science based advice on the problems that a no-trade deal crashing out form of Brexit will cause the UK. The fat idiots respond with it being "Project Fear" and frequently cite the y2k issues as a reason we don't need to avoid it or do anything. Because the Y2k preparations were victims of their own success.
Re:Maybe we shouldn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
The science on Brexit varies wildly on expected impact. In general, future predictions of large changes (science based or otherwise) are amazingly inaccurate. As far as economic predictions go, those are even worse.
Re: Maybe we shouldn't. (Score:2)
"The science on Brexit varies wildly on expected impact. In general, future predictions of large changes (science based or otherwise) are amazingly inaccurate. As far as economic predictions go, those are even worse."
Of course the big predictions are hard to make, it's like predicting what will happen next if you file for divorce, quit your job, and put your house up for sale all at once. The best scientific models could show you anywhere from super happy snagging a trophy wife, bigger house, better job to
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Brexit will make UK a cheap land for tourists.
The Ale is not bad.
I like Cheddar and lamb dishes.
I guess they won't kick out the Parkistani and Indian restaurants.
To bad they hate EU "immigrants" so much that only die hard sailing enthusiasts will visit them.
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I'm eagerly anticipating the combination of English economic collapse and their moving outside of EU tariffs tanking the price of Cotswald cheese.
It is time for England to take their turn as an American colony. Give us all your cheese.
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The science on Brexit varies on expected impact as much as climate change does. It's "settled science" that it's going to be nasty for Brexit, the only question is just how big of a pole the economy will be violated by.
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a sizeable minority of complete cretins think it was a myth.
Maybe because they were not told that the main technical issue was the year stored on only 2 digits, and advancing from '99' to '00' had software "think" it was back to 1900.
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But to take one example, my washing machine was supposed to shake itself to bits and self-combust because it thought it had time-travelled to the victorian era. How many washing machines, even now, even know what the date is, much less care? A few wifi-enabled smart washing machines where you can program a cycle for some date in the future maybe, but nothing back then.
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Re: Maybe we shouldn't. (Score:2)
Atent food shortages a predicted outcome of a no deal Brexit? You might still go home and have dinner, but it'll cost more and be smaller
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Re:Maybe we shouldn't. (Score:5, Informative)
Amazingly, computer systems fail all the time. Even if the bugs weren't fixed nothing major would have happened. The world would still turn.
That's actually stupid.
It is true that there are computer system failures happening all the time, but they don't all fail at the same time on the same day.
The hospital I worked at did have a y2k bug that caused a system to be completely unusable and down for two days while the vendor scrambled to fix it. It was a big problem with no workaround, and that was just one system.
BILLIONS & BILLIONS WERE SPENT ON Y2K (Score:5, Insightful)
Back circa 1997-1999, contracting on Y2K cleanups* was vastly more profitable [in the short term] than moving to Silicon Valley and joining a Dot-Com startup.
We survived Y2K because we threw MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY at the problem.
*Cleanups which required ancient graybeard/silverback knowledge of obscure DOD/IBM/DEC/CDC/DG/HP/Sperry-Burroughs-Unisys systems & programming languages.
How many of you could debug erroneous assumptions about clock behavior on a 16-bit [or, God forbid, 8-bit] CPU in a system which was built way before CORBA & XML & IEEE standards, using languages like ALGOL, COBOL, and Ada?
Lots of people used Y2K as an excuse to finally ditch all of their 8-bit & 16-bit software, and upgrade to semi-modern 32-bit software, because it was an excuse which the Bean Counters in Finance [God bless their cold hard hearts] could actually understand.
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Amazingly, computer systems fail all the time. Even if the bugs weren't fixed nothing major would have happened.
That's BS. Most computer systems don't matter very much, but some matter a lot. One that especially matters is payroll. If no one got paid in January, the world might still turn but it would have been a very ugly world. And almost all large companies used ADPs mainframe-based systems back then.
You can highlight quite a few other "common points of failure" that would have been pretty bad, mostly financial.
You can mock the "Y2K ready" stickers on desktop PCs, and fair enough, but important fixes also happ
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I tried to explain to my friend that even if the computers at the power company failed, they could just set the clocks back on the computers and restart them, but they still hoarded dry goods and filled their bathtub with cold water on New Years Eve.
What Failed? (Score:2)
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Most severe error was the incorrect down's syndrome risk assessments sent to mothers which resulted in two abortions from a low risk group, and a high risk group having four children with down's.
Re:What Failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plenty of things failed. Including a web site's date counter that proudly displayed "1-1-100 Yay, no Y2K bugs!!"
And would fail again - I dealt with a device that had a y2010 bug - One part of the code assumed it was using Binary-coded decimal, which uses 4 bits to represent 0 through 9, and another part assumed raw binary, in which 4 bytes count all the way up to 15. I forget whether the bcd parser saw a half-byte at 10 (1010) and crashed, or the bcd code sent 10 as 00010000, which the other part read as 16, and assumed that 6 years had passed.
Of course, if the world hadn't been scared into getting stuck in and fixing the problem, them many of those doomsday scenarios would actually have happened. When they got stuck in to preparing, Y2K bugs were found in all sorts of critical places, and, thankfully, fixed.
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Plenty of things failed. Including a web site's date counter that proudly displayed "1-1-100 Yay, no Y2K bugs!!"
I still have a screenshot of the New York TImes web page saying "January 1, 19100". On New Years day most web sites looked like that for a while. It was because of the getYear() library call (in C, Perl, Java, Javascript, and probably others) which returned an integer number of years since 1900. Lots of software was simply prepending "19" to the function return instead of numerically adding 100 like it was supposed to.
At my job at the time I remember one thing with an embedded controller that got brick
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I'm sure there will be fun times when Unix time_t rolls over past 2^31-1. "We're going to party like it's 2037!"
The vast majority of *nix systems have already moved to 64 bit time and will be unaffected.
It isn't so much "unix time" that is the problem as a certain style of representing time in C. So while OSes have already fixed the main stuff, it is applications that will have problems.
It will turn out to be a widespread problem with old 32bit embedded systems programmed in C, rather than a *nix problem. They will require firmware updates, when even possible.
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Re:What Failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know of two things:
VISA and Mastercards failed to be processed ... except that happened when the first "expires in 2000" versions were issues way back in 1996.
The manufacturing plant I worked at had all the engineering data for the model year 1998 vehicle vanish due to a poorly written purge process when the data for the first Model Year 2000 vehicles were pre-released .. but that took place in 1998 (I spent weeks rebuilding that data).
People freaked out so much about "bad data goes in must lead to the end of the world." That ignored that fact that bad data goes in ALL THE FRACKING TIME ... and that we just deal with it.
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Systems do indeed fail often, bad data is entered regularly.
But not to every account simultaneously.
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Exactly. Systems fail ALL THE TIME. The world doesn't end.
Because we fix them and they don't all fail at once. If everything failed at once there's every chance the "world would end". At least the modern world we come to understand.
* I was responsible for applying vendor patches to fix critical problems with refinery safety systems related to Y2K. You had available fuel. You're welcome. Shit I remember when the refinery across the river tried to send their FCC furnace into orbit. The entire country's fuel supply chain was bounced and it took 2 months to stabilise.
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I worked for a Tier 3 ATM networking company. One of the clients was China, they had one of their core FRATM switches fail as they hadn't got around to patching it (or it couldn't be patched I wasn't privy to the exact details). Since the area was mainly agricutural in nature the Chinese govt didn't really care, continuous electricity was considered a luxury in that area at that time.
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Here's my personal y2k bug.
I bought a house and closed on it around December,1999 - January, 2000.
Some part of the closing attorney's software package had a y2k bug that resulted in the title document that was filed in the county's land office showing the purchase date as being in January,1900. Classic, huh? The closing documents were ok, only the title as filed was wrong so there's a mismatch as well. So now I have the possibility that if there had been any problem with any of the past owners legal rights
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), I could be in the position of not having a legal title to the house I had paid for if some lawsuit arose, or if I wanted to sell the house in the future, or if my kids inherited it.
Not really, at least, not after a while. Every state in the US has "adverse possession" rules that kick in after 18 months or so (varies East to West). Just by virtue of living there uncontested, you own the place.
What causes mayhem is if a leanholder on some other possible owner of the place forecloses on that guy, resulting in you being evicted, but that can happen even if all your paperwork is correct, as many people discovered in 2008.
Lawyers love that shit because they can run up a bunch of billable hours arguing (laughing?) about it with each other and I'd have to pay for it.
That part's certainly true.
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I am not a lawyer, but that sounds like a typographical error caused by the machine used to reproduce the form, not a material problem with the filing.
If you live in a backwards enough State you still get screwed, but in most places that isn't a real problem and is easy to correct.
Regardless, you can always sue the property to fix the title. (seriously, see "in rem")
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Quite a few SCADA/HMI systems in a factory I work for (as an employee of a contractor) had problems and a few of them would have failed if we did not patch them.
SCADA/HMI are "those monitors/keyboards/pointing devices that operators of various manufacturing / processing facilities use to actually control the factory." Long time ago it was walls with blinking lights, buttons and paper graphing machines. The screens display temperature, pressure, flow, position and state of equipment, ... and let operators ch
Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Do You Remember the Y2K Bug?"
Of course. I even had to update things, fix code, all kinds of stuff. I knew at the time it was probably overblown, but there were real/valid concerns. Plenty of notice, discussion, and prep time allowed for things to work out fine.
I think a far scarier technological crisis will be a major solar flare or similar astronomical event that creates a large-scale EMP. That is something that is essentially unpredictable and very difficult to address. Since it is likely to damage power systems and electronics, it really could zap us back to the dark ages, instantly.
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>"I believe that absolutely critical systems are shielded anyway, because EMP is a real possibility as an opening move in a nuclear first strike. At least all the military stuff will still be working, and we can build from there"
Military stuff yes. But everything else dwarfs that, especially when it comes to every-day importance. I can't even imagine how bad it would be if all or most non-military systems and power just "stopped" and for who-knows-how-long. It will be a disaster so much worse than hum
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Actually, it's not true.
If an abnormally large CME were to pass through the earth, it will compress the earth's magnetosphere on the side that faces the earth and extend it outwards on the night side. The effects would, in fact, be global.
If an event on the scale of the Carrington Event [wikipedia.org] were to happen today, even very conservative estimates don't anticipate modern society taking
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An EMP has nothing to do with the sun. ...
You explode an nuclear war head in the upper atmosphere and you have an EMP below (around) it.
Most stuff is not hardened against an EMP anyway
A plane wont crash, neither a ship, probably not a tank, but cars already are tricky, and your radios wil be toast.
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If the military stuff is the only things that work then expect your population to be decimated far worse than any war due to a disabled military would be capable of.
As for shielding, that's just not a possibility in many cases. Solar events like the Carrington Event couple to lines that are thousands of km long.
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Niether EMP nor solar flares matter much to equipment without an antenna. Power grids are the world's biggest antenna, but fortunately the people who operate then are well are of that fact.
Nukes can fry equipment that's relatively close to them, but then nukes can fry everything that relatively close, so the EMP aspect is perhaps exaggerated.
but are we ready for the 2^32 bug? (Score:2)
In a few years (September of 2038, I think?), older software (and older hardware) that still uses 32-bit integers for times and dates are all going to have a similar problem.
Re:but are we ready for the 2^31 bug? (Score:3)
2^32 seconds is roughly 136 years. Y2038 is when signed 32-bit numbers (counting from the Unix epoch) overflow. Y2038 will trigger the 2^31 bug, not the 2^32 bug.
Re:but are we ready for the 2^31 bug? (Score:4, Funny)
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It's at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Fun fact: Y2K38 is now closer to the current day than Y2K is.
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It'll probably start happening a few months before that. I was the main guy working on an embedded systems product about 5-8 years ago, and I made an attempt at seeing what would happen and if I could fix it. First of all, I found the date/time stuff flaking out in January 2038, but then I wasn't really able to fix it, because I was using the "standard" UNIX/POSIX date library code that came with the IAR compiler.
There was source code to it deep in one of those directories of random crap that gets installe
Y2K was a huge success (Score:5, Insightful)
It was completed on time. It worked. The magnitude of the failure events was miniscule. And the customers (eg every human on the planet) were not negatively impacted in any real way. In fact, most of them didn't even notice. You don't see projects with outcomes that good.
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I thought she was joking until she quit a few weeks before the end of the year to retreat into her bunker. Never heard from her again.
Door lock of the bunker had a bug so it wouldn't open in 2,000.
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Yep. That always winds me up. I know for a fact that a number of systems were vulnerable because I and my friends and colleagues were working on fixing them. The most serious issue I know of was one that a friend of mine worked on to fix the UK Passport issuing system. That was the worst one to fix because the software had been designed with the expectation that the system would be replaced in 1999. It wasn't just a case of expanding a date field. All sorts of programming and design decisions had been taken
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So Dec 31st 2006 might be in the first calendar week
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That does not sound plausible.
Can you elaborate?
Why would either of DD-MM-YYYY versus DD-MM-yyyy end up in the wrong year? And can such a format be affected by number of week?
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Why would either of DD-MM-YYYY versus DD-MM-yyyy end up in the wrong year? And can such a format be affected by number of week?
See for example http://userguide.icu-project.o... [icu-project.org]
January 1st 2020 will be on a Tuesday. The first calendar week of the year 2020 goes from Sunday, Dec 29th 2019 to Saturday, Jan 4th 2020 according to US rules, or from Monday, Dec. 30th 2019 to Sunday, Jan 5th 2020 according to European rules.
If you want to print out the correct calendar week and year, you print "Week 1 2020" for dates from Dec. 29th 2019 to Jan 4th 2020 in the USA, and Dec. 30th 2019 to Jan 5th 2020 in Europe. The last three (US) or t
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Well you don't hear about them, because they went smoothly. But for every project that did go super smooth there'll always be some manager wondering if we overshot and spent way too much time and resources on it. I mean we all know it takes this much time to get a system 90% working, much more for 99%, even more for 99.9% so if it feels like we solved 99.999% of the problem wasn't it massively overblown? I mean the critical systems obviously had to be fixed, but I can't help thinking there was a whole lot o
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Yeah, I wrote the Y2K report for the startup I was working for at the time, and then I implemented its suggestions. I figured out what had to be updated, and then I updated it. And if I hadn't, there would have been problems. But I did, so there weren't.
Y2K was a potential nightmare scenario, but then we handled our business, and most of us slept just fine. I know I did.
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I think the thing that gets people is no one ever demonstrated any single real world program that would of failed dramatically.
Sure it is theoretically possible that some banks servers would have crashed, becoming unusable. It might even be possible that they could corrupt all the data at the same time, catch fire, and disable smart sprinkler system that they also happen to control.
But in reality, all anyone ever saw for real world results were wrong dates in the task bar. Theoretically, if my visa bill sim
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Yeah,
but a canceled insurance or mortage contract would be a problem or a pension fond.
Perhaps not for the individual(if it has no problem that s/he don't get her pension paid till the bug is fixed) but for the company that has to manually fix hundreds or even millions of contracts. And handle manually the monthly reoccurring same mistake for each contract.
The people who thought fire break out are simply idiots, but the people who thought if we do nothing, nothing bad happens, even more so.
My favorite conspiracy theory (Score:2)
My favorite conspiracy theory was very short lived.
I remember being in Minnesota on the evening and night of January 31, 1999. Reports were starting to come in from Asia, Australia, etc., that clocks had rolled over to the year 2000, and pretty much everything was fine. We even get to Europe, and to GMT, and, yeah, everything's fine.
Here was the conspiracy theory: it was just the radio reports we were receiving over in the states. In fact, everything had fallen into flames and chaos, and they were tryin
Sure I remember (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why I also remember that those books and articles were standard niche fare and very few people actually took much notice of them so it's not at all clear why we should 20 years later. If the argument is 'but, but we could learn something so people don't write and read them when worried about the next fake calamity'. To which I'd respond, 'boy howdy, you sure don't get human nature do you'.
The technical problem was very real and never really manifested because some much more sober minded people simply went and fixed it. Where I worked we had a few very minor issues that escaped our net but they were trivially fixed.
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Some of this expense was certainly unnecessary; but it was
Enormous amount of work done to fix it (Score:5, Interesting)
Y2K Bug (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a little too easy to trivialize the Y2K bug today. It really was quite a big deal at the time and if left unaddressed would have had disastrous consequences. It's a bit of an understatement to say that it was dealt with through truly herculean efforts by very large numbers of people working very large numbers of hours. Billions of dollars were spent on labor to address the Y2K bug. So much money was spent that the following few years resulted in short budgets for IT departments and a lot of IT people were forced out of the field for lack of work.
My father worked at a very large manufacturer at the time where he headed up their Y2K effort. Quite a few sites were less than timely in working with corporate which had a deadline that could not be extended. One site in particular stood out for blowing corporate off and refusing to cooperate with remediation efforts. They were running short on time and corporate made the decision to get the undivided attention of the plants.
He arranged permission for a demonstration to make a point to the plant as well as the rest of the company. He went onsite and rolled the date forward on the system controlling one of the manufacturing lines. It stopped working immediately. The plant tried everything they could to get it working again to no avail - for months. Heads rolled at the plant and the message was clearly heard by operations worldwide that were suddenly quite interested in participating.
Not to worry, you'll get another chance at this in 2038 when the Unix 32 bit time bug hits. Think of it as a ticking environmental time bomb where billions of embedded devices that aren't worth saving or can't readily be updated suddenly become paperweights. IOT meet your maker.
Y2K: Busy times (Score:3)
I remember it well. I worked in snack food packaging and automation systems at the time. All our customers demanded "Y2K Certifications" from us, stating that our equipment was either Y2K compliant or show cause why it's non-compliance would not impact their production. It took a while for our suppliers to give us that information, and we had maybe 1,000 486 SBCs whose BIOS wasn't Y2K compliant - but the rollover didn't cause any issues. We had to test every SBC variant we used (about a dozen; 8 486's and 4 Pentium's).
This was all started in late 1988 and our customers demanded the info (and any remediation necessary) by mid 1999.
There was legal liability on this... we would be responsible for all lost production if we certified our systems and they failed. Our owner hated giving away money... he took a very active interest in all of this!
My plan of 2000 (Score:3)
A lot of the books were garbage and put out scenarios that couldn't actually happen. Microwave ovens showed time but didn't know dates so those couldn't be affected, same with most cars at the time.
Surveys for all vendors asking if they were going to be Y2K compliant.
Product lines with CPU were checked. Many didn't have any time functions, and the ones that did passed.
Every piece of software was checked. One database system was going to roll over to 1980 and the problem was client side and was installed on most machines and the software had no tech support. I looked at the executable and the math for date calculation and modified it to calculate correctly on every client.
About 2001Q3 I got a note there was one client that I didn't know because it was only used once every 5 years on a strange circumstance..
I did some Y2K "mitigation" (Score:3)
Kinda.
A major auto manufacturer had a budget for Y2K mitigation and no plan or real need for any mitigation in one of their stamping plants. I got sent out there to look at PLCs for a week and make sure nothing went wrong. So, I connected to all the PLCs, saved everything to disk, and looked at the code just in case. The PLCs (most PLC programs, esp. at that time) had no idea what external time was; these didn't even have real-time-clocks. Then spent the rest of the time waiting for something to happen & shooting the bull with the electricians. Nothing went wrong.
I've no doubt there were plenty of real issues that were handled before the rollover, and clearly the world did not end in 2000.
From my experience it was a boondoggle.
Get's old hearing this ... (Score:2)
The biggest impact is on The Spelling Bee (Score:2)
All these immigrants were college graduates, fighters who
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Almost all the visas went to Indians.
There was no other source for the thousands of people needed. When Indira Gandhi made computer education a priority in the Indian universities she was resoundingly mocked for "wasting" the money when it could be better spent on [insert need here]. The investment has paid off a thousand-fold.
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His 17 year stewardship was a mixed bag. Fell under the influence of Socialists in UK when he was in college, fell under the influence of Communists. The final blow was w
What do you mean? (Score:3)
What do you mean "do you remember the Y2K bug?"... I WROTE the Y2K bug! :-)
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What do you mean "do you remember the Y2K bug?"... I WROTE the Y2K bug! :-)
Steve Wozniak comes pretty close. I seem to remember a documentary about how they'd skimp and save on components and bits everywhere and one of those was a two-digit year for the Apple rather than Unix time. That was 1976-77 and the IBM PC wasn't until 1981, of course they did two-digit calculations on punch cards before that too but those computers didn't really have any native idea of date and time. In fact, the system clock is an even later invention you usually had to tell it when it was on boot instead
In the Year 2000 (comp.software.year-2000) (Score:3)
Google Groups: comp.software.year-2000 [google.com], 37,106 topics
I worked the prep and on the night (Score:4, Informative)
I was an Oracle DBA and we worked with inhouse devs for about 18 months prepping all our DB apps, then patching and prepping the DBs. Then we worked from 3pm on the 31st Dec, we watched the fireworks over London for about 10 mins and then spent 2 hours checking all the apps and finally went home around 6am. We got paid 5x hourly rate plus a couple of grand bonus for giving up the once in a lifetime evening.
Still get people saying "Y2K, what a load of fus over nothing!". Screw you, nothing happened 'cos thousands and thousands of people all over the world worked for 2 years prior to it just to be ready for it.
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Well, most people did not get the Y2K bug. ... just nitpicking :D
And most did not get the 'once in a lifetime event' either.
The new millennium started at the end of 31st of December 2000 and rolled into 1st of January 2001
February 2nd, 2000 (Score:3, Funny)
2nd of February 2,000 was the first date in over thousand years (since 30th September 999) not to contain the digit 1. All our builds broke
...but you won't. Continue drooling. (Score:2)
It is in this context that dangers are trumpeted by politicians.
Keep that in mind.
The Y2K doomsday prepper mentality (Score:4, Funny)
I recall the hype about Y2K very well. I was never that concerned about it, because (contrary to the ravings of the doomsday crowd), I knew that people weren't going to leave systems unpatched when their ability to make money depended on them.
But it was interesting who fell for the hype. One of my colleagues, a full professor of Computer Science, had a habit of posting occasional rambling messages to the department listserv about how man was out of balance with the environment. He was definitely a bit of a weird bird, but he was a successful researcher and a good teacher, so everyone ignored his public philosophical musings.
During Christmas break of 1999, he and his wife left the state. What everyone later learned was that they spent the break holed up in a survivalist camp in New Mexico, waiting for the world to collapse from the Y2K bug. While doing some online searches about Y2K glitches, I ran across some postings on the Internet made by his wife, right up through and beyond Jan. 1, 2000. The gist of her posts were as follows:
Before Jan. 1: "The end is coming. My husband and I are in a safe place with others who have also prepared. We don't know how long it will be, if ever, before civilization will get back on its feet, but we're ready for whatever comes."
Around Jan. 2: "Don't be fooled. The software failures have already begun, and the government is suppressing the news to keep people from panicking."
Around Jan. 7: "Our systems have collapsed, but the government is hiding it from us. Don't be fooled by the appearance of normalcy. The truth will be revealed soon."
During the second week of January my colleague returned to work. What could he do? Spring semester was beginning, and he had to teach his classes. For weeks afterwards I read posts from his wife where she and like-minded doomsday preppers kept rationalizing how their expectations of society's collapse were at complete odds with the reality all around them. Even months later, some die-hards kept arguing that one of the most massive conspiracies in history was hiding the actual disaster of Y2K.
Cans of beans (Score:2)
Another report came from an insurance company handling pension payments. Their software could handle people with birthdates in the previous century, but they figured that in January 2,000 all pens
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Today everyone uses a date class.
If one handles dates with strings or a struct of three integers I would chain him down in the basement onto a wall.
No (Score:2)
My computer asks me the date every time I boot.
I guess I'm old-school.
I remember it from 1990 (Score:2)
The first company I worked for developed an accounting/financials system. We first hit the Y2K bug when one of our customers entered an invoice with a 10 year payment schedule. They final payments, entered for a year 2000 date that was stored as YYMMDD 000101, 000201 etc, showed up on an aging report as being 90 years past due.
Most of the programmers spent a few weeks going through all our code to check for years stored as 2 digits.
It was more fearmongering than a bug (Score:4, Funny)
We were supplied with cards that corrected the problem for one of those systems, but during testing, we found that since the software paid no attention to the time, it was quite unnecessary to install the. So we didn't install them.
One other system that could not be upgraded merely displayed the time as 100-01-01 and so on following the rollover.
Everything else worked fine
We did have several real Y2K failures though.
My favourite was the regional president that set his computer clock to Jan 01 2000 to see what would happen.
What happened was that all his email disappeared.
I got the panicky call, and found that he had enabled a setting to delete emails over a year old.
Q: How do I get them back?
A: You don't.
We had other "failures" that occurred during testing, but can't remember 'em any more. Good thing.
ignorant summary and mostly ignorant comments (Score:2)
The nations main financial and insurance apps did have issues, were tested and patched for it, I worked in that but there really were a massive amount of them.
There were important systems that failed, though none caused disaster. The USA's imaging satellites were out for a few days, look up the news at the time. 10,000 credit card swiping machines made by Racal failed. Five percent of Japan's cash dispensers failed. Some baggage handling and reservation systems failed.
Standing 'Watch'. (Score:2)
Climate Deniers vs. Y2K (Score:2)
Think about how the climate deniers would have handled Y2K:
1. There is no Y2K bug
2. [n/a]
3. There is a Y2K bug, but it is too late to do anything about it
Granted, there are differences: Y2K was to affect everyone like climate (banking, point of sale, accounting, investments, taxes, ...etc), but it was the domain of specialists, and a plan was drawn and action taken by them. The public did not need to take action.
Now, we have an analogous problem with climate:
1. There is no warming (some even claim climate i
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X. Fearmongers publishing horror scenarios that are extremely unlikely to happen, and unsupported by experts in the field.
Apparently now (Score:2)
Apparently not - over the last 5 years I have seen appallingly stupid date handling start to creep back into software development - including use of 2-digit year representation.
I mitigated the flu bug on Y2K (Score:2)
My usual NYE was attending ballroom dance party, however, I came down with the flu some days before. With the big 2000 coming along, many expect disaster i.e. ***every*** cop in Santa Clara county (day, swing, grave, reserves) was placed on duty. I figured may as well be on the dance floor when the world comes to an end. I was able to get over the flu and make to the dance party, and lots of other dancers at the party. Returning home about 0130 there were NO OTHER CARS on the roads.
I heard later someone r
It's still with us. (Score:2)
I haven't seen actual problems with dates inside the software, but there is no shortage of user interfaces that display dates with 2-digit years that are at best irritating and quite often ambiguous. I work at an international business that deals with date formats from around the world and 2-digit dates are a genuine problem, and it completely erodes my trust in software that is getting dates wrong this long after the software provider should have learned better. MS Excel still makes non-Y2k compliant dat
It was overrated? (Score:2)
Leave it to software developers ... (Score:2)
... to refer to the 'Year 2000 problem' as Y2K. Which is how they got into this situation in the first place.
The only Y2K problem that I saw was ... (Score:2)
Y2K was the (at that time) ultimate in scare tactics based on nothing. The REAL Y2K problem came in 1970, when mortgage bankers were having difficulty in calculating 30 year loans, and that problem was solved pretty quickly.
In fact, the only problem I noticed, as the Year 2000 rolled around the globe, was the web site of "internet inventor" Al Gore, whose website displayed the date as "1/1/19100". Because after 1999, the next year s OBVIOUSLY 19100, right?
https://www.gocomics.com/adama... [gocomics.com]
Speaking of.... (Score:2)
"...profoundly stupid and irresponsible" I wonder how Jon Katz is doing these days.
Sure I do (Score:2)
I'm so old, there's a picture of me in one of the pyramids.
Stupid arguments (Score:2)
The basic premise was that things that had no earthly reason to be concerned with the current year would inexplicably fail when the last two digits of the year would flip from 99 to 00.
Please explain why a water pump is concerned with the current year? Why would an airplane 'fall out of the sky' as many claimed? Why would a nuclear plant either blow up or shut down on New Year's Eve?
It was just such a stupid waste of resources, spent because non-technical leaders and politicians mindlessly followed the advi
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No, banking, telecom, power, and inventory systems were going to crash, and it was a very real thing. If you think you can do without banks, communications, electricity and groceries then yeah, it was overblown.
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Here in Denver, the city cancelled the NYE fireworks and basically advised us to huddle with our loved ones and wait for the end. The ensuing embarrassment made the next year's fireworks extra big.
But my favorite memory is ads for the Y2K Blowgun, which you were supposed to use to feed your family on squirrels through the apocalypse.
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Systems fail all the time but separate systems all over the world simultaneously failing at the same time? That's special, just as you're obviously special; a nibble short from being a full word so to speak.
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It was much more a mainframe/midrange issue, and databases that had been ported from them. Since most of the midrange computers like the PDP8s and AS400s were being phased out in the late '90s and the workload being moved to Windows servers Microsoft got a lot of unearned blame. It was mostly a DB issue (although there were a few desktop PCs that had BIOS problems), not an OS issue.
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> they made a killing selling the Y2K fix to existing customers
What sort of contract charges the customer to fix program crashing bugs?
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There was a similar problem recently with the GPS "epoch" rollover affecting a number of older airliners, primarily in African and Asian airlines. The GPS systems couldn't calculate where they were.