[blackdog]

Y2K was a scam. Every company and institution had to hire armies of techies to certify they were Y2K Compliant. There was no such thing.

Fast forward to the AI phenomenon. Merely history repeating itself.

[Dr. Sivana]

Y2K was a scam. Every company and institution had to hire armies of techies to certify they were Y2K Compliant. There was no such thing.

Overblown, but not a scam. I was hired in November 1999, and discovered on my first day that the company ERp/Accounting system was most certainly NOT Y2K compliant, and I had 50 days get it right with little budget, and all the dos workstations had to be replaced as well as the main server to replace the Novell based Compaq 486 running the ERP. Yes, our ERP was the exception, but the problem was that not everyone hlknew what their system wouod do.

[Pox]

Y2K was a scam?

Were you a coder prior to or after Y2K?

I coded. I wrote code in the 90’s and took into account the issue with 2 digits being used as the year and insured my code would work beyond Y2K. This was in COBOL.

The code written in programming languages prior to Y2K typically only used 2 digits for the year. Billions of lines of code.

The reason it looked like a scam is due to all the effort poured into fixed that code, or replacing it, to make sure the problems posited would not come to pass.

You have no idea WTF you're talking about, IMO.

[zeugma]

Y2K was a scam. Every company and institution had to hire armies of techies to certify they were Y2K Compliant. There was no such thing.

Bull. I know for a fact that without remediation, the switches MCI used at the time would fail hard. We tested it in our lab, and yup, the things crashed and wouldn't function without hands-on intervention. I believe MCI was the 2nd largest telecommunications company in the US at the time. That wouldn't have been pleasant.

It is likely that things were never as dire as some claimed, but there would have been some pretty large issues had we not tested, remediated, and validated things. In our case, we likely could have gotten all of the switches up in a few days, but call detail records would likely have been severely messed up.