Posted on 12/23/2019 9:00:15 AM PST by Textide
Agreed. The Y2K problem was both very real and also way overhyped. I had to do a lot of coding, testing, evaluation of old code, and documenting of Y2K preparedness. There were lots of things I and others had to fix. But nothing that would automatically launch nuclear missiles, forget mortgage balances, or can the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. :)
"I sit in a cubicle and I update bank software for the 2000 switch. You see, they wrote all this bank software and to save space, they put 98 instead of 1998. So I go through these thousands of lines of code and uh, it doesn't really matter. I, uh, I don't like my job. I don't think I'm gonna go anymore."
My recollection follows, but my question was always “how hard is it to fix such a problem?” - it seemed to me that finding the problem was step one, and then replacing a few lines of code was step two - and DONE.
Anyway - I was a “networking stocks” writer for Motley Fool at the time and I recall an analyst named Ed Yardeni (he is still around) was the first to yell “Y2K Fire!” about 9 months before the event. He predicted the end of the world if the problem was not fixed (and he also implied it was not fixable). I was in email contact with one of the TV network news “runners” at the time (I forget her name) and I was watching her on TV - where her “beat” that night was to watch and report on the Y2K problem all NYE night of 1999. When the midnight passed and nothing happened I emailed her and asked “So, where is Ed Yardeni right now?” and sure enough she had him on the phone on national TV within 20 minutes. She asked “what do think? are we in the clear?” and he just sort of slunk away and said “well, I can’t say if we fixed it, or if it was not as dire as I expected, but it looks like we are in the clear, so far.....”
I got into a argument with a Climate Changer who used Y2K as an example of how people can solve big problems in advance as long as they try. My recollection was that I never heard any companies saying “we definitely have a big problem and we are working hard to fix it before NYE.” My recollection is most companies said “Well, we have looked into it and we are making a few programming changes, but we don’t anticipate any real problems.” It truly seemed like no big deal to me at the time.
As an engineer in the solar business I had to explain to a lot of people not to panic and then nothing was going to happen
I could’ve been very unscrupulous and used fear to make a lot more sales but I made plenty of sales anyway telling the truth
We had a group of friends from our church who came to our home every year to celebrate New Years. The men wore Tuxes and the women wore evening dresses.
Some were very concerned, and I suggested that we watch or listen on tv/radio,NYC first when New Year was there at EST, then Chicago for CST, Denver for MST and gay Frisco for PST.
There were some nervous people until after the Chicago New Years.
Later those alarmists are whom now I call: Intellectuals Yet Idiots and Gorebull Warmer Alarmists.
Fake news really kicked in after that bs.
Doing what? IT workers and programmers knew nothing about Cobol and/or Fortran, the languages used to write the codes banks, etc, used in the 20th century.
Institutions and businesses were having guys come out of retirement to fix the issue.
I was taking Computer Information Systems at California State University at that time. It was pretty wild. We (students) had to suffer through some really sorry programming teachers because the area's programming teachers had been called to prepare for Y2K.
Same here! At the time I worked for a company that provided a console management software package for our WAN swithces (provided on floppy disks) and each switch required the s/w. Then there was another option of purchasing a S/W package that would manage a larger number of swithes from one location. If a customer had maintenance with us then the Y2K fix was provided as a part of the maintenance but if you didnt have maintenance, we would onboard you after a recert fee and the cost of a two year service contract.
Made Presidents Club that year and wound up taking over the service business for the company!
Oh yea, the S/W fix was needed as the call detail reports would spit out a date of 1900, that was it.
There were a lot of doomcrying hucksters on talk radio spewing the most unhinged crap you could imagine. They’d say that all cars would stop running and any other bogus lies they could come up with. Naturally if you bought the hucksters’ books and/or tapes you would be able to survive. Lol. I can’t begin to imagine how much overpriced gold suckers bought.
It all blew away on Jan 1, 2000. Many talk radio hosts got canned instantly. It was glorious to behold.
I was an engineer working on avionics automated test equipment. We just put earlier dates into the computers that couldn’t handle the year 2000. No problem.
There’s a lot on money in selling apocalypse.
A relative invested in a gas generator. About 3 years later, there was that power outage that took down a good chunk of the eastern US and parts of Canada. I had a landline and called my relative on their landline (landlines generate their own power).
I was startled to hear the radio in the background until I remembered the gas generator. They had the only power on their street for a few days.
Y2K scam facilitatated entry of close to half million cheap indian programmers (via h1b - another continuing scam) to USA
I was working at an IT company at the time.
In my mind, it created the dot.com bubble.
I couldn't have stated this better.
The system I supported was an HP-UX/C app that already handled most dates correctly. The only bug found was in February because it did not use the 400 year rule for leap years. Found and fixed it in less than a day.
As others have pointed out, this is a situation that could have been bad, because the Y2K bug was a real thing, but just goes to show how American know-how and hard work can rise to the occasion when necessary.
Now I remember a poster here on Free Republic that I used to have a lot of fun with. I'm pretty sure "Jethro Tull" was his handle here. He was convinced that we had have a TEOTWAWKI situation on our hands and that there was nothing we could do about it. (Reminds me of how "global warming" zealots are today). In his view, the entire electrical grid was going to go dark forever at the strike of midnight and that planes would fall out of the sky.
So he was talking of how he had a cabin in the woods, with multiple generators and huge caches of canned tuna fish and baked beans, etc. I used to joke with him that I would find him afterwards because he'd be the only guy out in the woods with all those lights blazing from his generators. He'd tell me that he'd shoot me if I ever tried that with all the guns and ammo he had stored up. I'd reply back that I'd just wait until he ran out of bullets, and then I'd climb over all the dead bodies to stake a claim on his canned tuna.
He did not like that at all. Jethro was not known for his sense of humor. He was pretty quiet after Jan 1 and he eventually got himself kicked out of the forum for something or other.
Maybe he's here under another name.
Thanks for mentioning that. It’s become cliche that Y2K was some kind of phony panic. In fact, there was massive prep work and tech investment in the years leading up to the deadline. Those years are typically called the “Clinton Boom.”
I was working for a textile company in 1999. Most of our software (IBM AS400 based) was already “fixed” because it was a leased product. The code we developed in house was easily modified.
From an IT perspective, it was not a major undertaking. A simple field length change. If your database used externally described files, it was a cakewalk.
Too early to worry about the year 9999 to 10,000 event.
I remember a Y2K clock at Books-a-Million. It was a digital clock that counted down to 01/01/2000.
It was kind of cool.
That’s the only thought I gave it.
My mother indiscriminately watched TV preachers constantly. She was elderly and home-bound and they had her absolutely terrified. There was still bottled water stacked in her house when she died about 10 years ago.
Agreed. Not too many industries were at risk, but the one I was in at that time - banking - was probably the most exposed. We spent a lot of time fixing 25 year old code. And as mentioned, took advantage of the naive bosses to put in a long wish list of enhancements.
One quirk - on some systems it was decided that 50-99 would be 1950-1999 and 00-49 would be 2000-2049. Knowing the industry and how slowly code is updated, we might be looking at a Y2.05K issue.
I was at work, testing before the clock ticked over, testing after.
Early the morning of 12/31, we were getting reports from various IT forums, as New Year's Day dawned in Japan, Korea, and Australia. Lots of fixes went in on 12/31 due to those early reports, minor stuff because millions of people were paying attention, and were responding.
All the retarded slugs complaining that "Nothing Happened" still have no clue how much real work was done; how many real problems were fixed before, during, and after; whether any of the fixes were necessary.
They just want to see their catastrophe, dammit.
Just like the retarded slugs now, complaining that Trump isn't doing anything about the Deep State Cabal, Barr and Durham are DS plants, Sessions dindunuffin, Nothing is Habbening, WAAAAAAAAAAA!
Retarded Slugs. Just like that.
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