Posted on 12/23/2019 9:00:15 AM PST by Textide
Motorola was nuts. Posters everywhere.
We were using the UNIX system for everything Iridium.
A good 4 years before. 1996
Yeah, I mean in 1900 flying had not been invented yet and so the planes just dropped like rocks.
No joke, I had someone tell me that.
Now I did make some preparations but it was mostly the same kind I did every winter in case there was a bad ice storm.
Er, “throw another log on the fire”.
It was a Driver Analysis program in IBM Assembler, with a seven-year, forward-and-backward, sliding window for analyzing citations, convictions, revocations, reinstatements, etc., all with two-digit years.
The green-bar printout of the source code was about 9 or 10 inches high, maybe 2200 pages, 55 lines per page, about 121,000 lines of code.
By May of 1995, the entire system had been reengineered to a database system that is probably still running today.
Y2K was an opportunity to modernize old systems.
Under-discussed: nobody could seriously think of years beyond “nineteen something”. The two-thousands were only discussed when unavoidable, and then as an unreal abstract. Mental blocks past 1999.
Then year ticked over to 2000 and everyone could deal with it fine.
I caught my wife starting to stock up on things more than usual and told her to stop listening to the chicken littles running about all that BS, as most programs that needed fixed were repaired two years before then, and more than 2/3rds of all programs it was not even an issue.
Kind of reminds of the climate nazis running around now.
As soon as AZ drivers licenses came out with an expiration past 2000 I knew everything would be fine. If ADOT can handle, anybody can handle.
Around '88 or so I got a job at a major telecommunications company. As a condition of accepting employment I stipulated that I'd be off for the week before and after 01/01/00. My manager at the time didn't really get why I cared about it, and agreed. I was the only person in my entire dept that had that time off when it finally rolled around.
Ended up hanging with relatives in Alabama for the two weeks. Spent the day and night listening to shortwave broadcasts. What I was most especially interested in was not midnight local time, but midnight Zulu, since that's the time that any really important computers would be running.
I recall hearing a lot of stuff that never made the news. Though we'd spent a lot of money where I worked to get everything ready, some stuff still happened. None of which was reported. I do know for a fact though, that if we'd not spent the money it would have been catastrophic. We found bugs during the runup that were show-stoppers.
Afterwards, when everyone was saying it was a non-event, I, for one, knew better.
My company spent 30 million dollars to prevent any impact by Y2K. The CIO was later fired because he spent all that money and nothing happened.
bump
What would have been the cost if that wasn't done?
I recall knowing that is was going to be nothing. All I could do was see the hysteria and shake my head. Same way I see the TDS on display from the Left, just shake my head.
After the party, host and hostess shall retire to the circa 1999 chamber to work up a solution to the crashing birth rate and global cooling.
Great stories in this thread! Thanks to all for contributing.
Y2K when you can just say 4.41 pounds?
Two of us had to be at the office until after midnight. We then spot checked everything and headed home by 3 AM.
I agree with you! I know our tests failed before the changes.
Pisses me off too. We had to modify several programs but before we could do it we had to upgrade the database. Then we found out that the server needed the latest operating system to run the database. Then we found out the server had to be upgraded to run the latest OS. Fun times. The struggle was real!
I was a field service tech for Unisys corp at the time running around like crazy doing PC upgrades entire network upgrades..
A lot of $$$ was spent on new technology those couple of years.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.