by kkdaemas on 3/12/20, 12:38 PM with 371 comments
by dwheeler on 3/12/20, 2:52 PM
The Y2K bug did not become a crisis only because people literally spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to fix it. And in the end, everything kept working, so a lot of people thought it wasn't a crisis at all. Complete nonsense.
Yes, it's true that all software occasionally has bugs. But when all the software fails at the same time, a lot of the backup systems simultaneously fail, and you lose the infrastructure to fix things.
by Diederich on 3/12/20, 4:31 PM
A global retailer you've definitely heard of that used to own stores in Germany spent a lot of time preparing for Y2K. This was a long and painful process, but it got done in time.
But problems still slipped through. These problems ended up not being that big and visible because a large percentage of the code base had just been recently vetted, and a useful minority of that had been recently updated. Every single piece had clear and current ownership.
Lastly, there was an enormous amount of vigilance on The Big Night. Most of the Information Systems Division was on eight hour shifts, with big overlap between shifts at key hours (midnight in the US), and everyone else was on call.
As midnight rolled through Germany, all of the point of sale systems stopped working.
This was immediately noticed (the stores weren't open, but managers were there, exercising their systems), the responsible team started looking into it within minutes, a fix was identified, implemented and tested within tens of minutes, and rolled out in less than an hour.
Pre-Y2K effort and planning was vital; during-Y2K focus, along with the indirect fruits of the prior work, was also critical.
by davismwfl on 3/12/20, 1:49 PM
There was a decent influx of older devs using the media hype as a way to get nice consulting dollars, nothing wrong with that, but in the end the problem and associated fix was not really a major technical hurdle, except for a few cases. It is also important to understand a lot of systems were not in a SQL databases at the time, many were in ISAM, Pic, dBase (ouch), dbm's (essentially NoSql before NoSql hype) or custom db formats (like flat files etc) that required entire databases to be rewritten, or migrated to new solutions.
My 2 cents, it was a real situation that if ignored could have been a major economic crisis, most companies were addressing it in various ways in plenty of time but the media latched on to a set of high profile companies/government systems that were untouched and hyped it. If you knew any Cobol or could work a Vax or IBM mainframe you could bank some decent money. I was mainly doing new dev work but I did get involved in fixing a number of older code bases, mainly on systems in non-popular languages or on different hardware/OS because I have a knack for that and had experience on most server/mainframe architectures you could name at that time.
by protomyth on 3/12/20, 3:10 PM
I see this as a big problem because Y2038 is on the horizon and this "not a big deal" attitude is going to bite us hard. Y2K was pretty much a financial server issue[1], but Y2038 is in your walls. Its control systems for machinery that are going to be the pain point and that is going to be much, much worse. The analysis is going to be a painful and require digging through documentation that might not be familiar (building plans).
1) yes there were other important things, but the majority of work was because of financials.
by saberworks on 3/12/20, 6:22 PM
We basically inventoried every unclassified computer system on the base. If it was commercial, off-the-shelf software that could be replaced we recommended they replace it. If it could not be replaced with newer version (because it ran software that could not or would not be replaced) we replicated and tested it by changing the computer hw clock. In all cases we recommended shutting down the computer so it wasn't on during the changeover.
Most home-grown systems were replaced with commercial software.
One interesting case was a really old system, I think it had something to do with air traffic control. It was written by a guy who was still employed there and he was still working on it. I got to interview him a bunch of times and found the whole situation fascinating and a little depressing. Yes, he was storing a 2-digit year. He didn't know what would happen when it flipped. He didn't feel like there was a way to run it somewhere else and see what would happen (it's very difficult to remember but I think it was running on a mainframe in the comm squadron building).
The people in charge decided to replace it with commercial software. Maybe the guy was forced to retire?
Overall the base didn't have any issues but only because they formed the "y2k program management group" far enough ahead of time that we were able to inventory and replace most everything before anything could happen.
by rabboRubble on 3/13/20, 3:57 AM
Then came 2000-Feb-29 and it happened, I had a risk management system hosted out of the UK that just didn't work. Had to file the system failure through to internal global management and domestic regulators.
I was thrilled. First because that system owner had refused to conduct global integrated testing so I could blame the SO. Had the request, negotiation, and finally the outright refusal in writing. The failed system was relatively trivial domestically. Risk wasn't calculated one day on a global platform that and that risk didn't hit my local books. Ha ha sucks to be you. Most importantly, I was thrilled because I could point to the failure and say "see, that is what would have happened x100 if we hadn't nailed the project." It was a great example for all the assholes who bitched about the amount of money we spent.
by __d on 3/12/20, 8:29 PM
Basically all of our software was written in COBOL, and most COBOL data is processed using what we'd consider today to be string-like formats. And to save space (a valuable commodity when DASD (aka hard drives) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and stored a few megabytes of data) two-digit dates were everywhere.
I started in 1991. The analysis had been done years before, and we knew where most of the 2-digit problems were, so it was just a matter of slowly and steadily evolving the system to use 4-digit dates where possible, or to shift the epoch forward where that made sense.
Every few months we'd deploy a new version of some sub-system which had changed, migrate all the data over a weekend, and cross off another box in the huge poster showing all the tasks to be done.
External interfaces were the worst. Interbank transfers, ATM network connections, ATM hardware itself, etc, etc. We mostly tried to switch internal stuff first but leave the APIs as 2-digit until the external party was ready to cut over. Similarly between our internal systems: get both ready internally, migrate all the data, and then finally flick the switch on both systems to switch the interfaces to 4-digit.
Practically, it meant that we our development group (maybe 30 people?) was effectively half that size for 5 or 6 years in the early 90's as the other half of the group did nothing but Y2K preparation.
All of these upgrades had to be timed around external partners, quarterly reporting (which took up a whole weekend, and sometimes meant we couldn't open the branches until late on the Monday after end-of-quarter), operating system updates, etc, etc. The operations team had a pretty solid schedule booked out years in advance.
We actually had two mainframes, in two data centers: one IBM 3090 and the other the equivalent Armdahl model. We'd use the hot spare on a weekend to test things.
It was a very different world back then: no Internet, for a start. Professional communication was done by magazines and usergroup meetings. Everything moved a lot slower.
I left that job before Y2K but according to the people I knew there, it went pretty well.
by Sparkware on 3/12/20, 7:02 PM
Every system, every piece of hardware - both in the data centers and in the hospitals - had to be certified Y2K compliant in enough time to correct the issue. As I recall, we were trying to target being Y2K ready on January 1, 1999 but that date slipped.
A "Mission Control" was created at the Data Center and it was going to be activated on December 15, 1999, running 24 hours a day until all issues were resolved. Every IT staff member was going to rotate through Mission Control and every staffer was going to have to serve some third shifts too.
I left Columbia/HCA in June, 1999 after they wanted to move me into COBOL. I had no desire to do so and I took a programming position with the Tennessee Department of Transportation.
I remember my first day on the job when I asked my boss what our Y2K policy was. He shrugged and said "If it breaks, we'll fix it when we get back from New Year's".
What a difference!!!
by marcus_holmes on 3/12/20, 11:00 PM
Their billing and management system was written in COBOL, and contained numerous Y2K bugs. If we did nothing, then the entire billing system would have collapsed. That would mean Welsh people either receiving no bills, or bills for >100 years of gas/water supply, depending on the bug that got triggered. Very quickly (within days) the system would have collapsed, and water/gas would have stopped flowing to Welsh homes.
Each field that had a date in it had to be examined, and every single piece of logic that referenced that field had to be updated to deal with 4 digits instead of 2.
I wasn't dealing with the actual COBOL, I managed an Access-based change management system that catalogued each field and each reference that needed to be changed, and tracked whether it had been changed or not, and whether the change had been tested and deployed. This was vital, and used hourly by the 200+ devs who were actually changing the code.
We finished making all the changes by about December 1998, at which point it was just mopping up and I wasn't needed any more. I bought a house with the money I made from that contract (well, paid the deposit at least).
The cost was staggering. The lowest-paid COBOL devs were on GBP100+ per hour. The highest-paid person I met was on GBP500 per hour, enticed out of retirement. They were paid that much for 6-month contracts, at least. Hyder paid multiple millions of pounds in contract fees to fix Y2K, knowing that the entire business would fail if they didn't.
Still less than the cost to rewrite all that COBOL. The original project was justified by sacking hundreds of accounts clerks, replaced by the COBOL system and hardware. By 1998 the hardware was out of date, and the software was buggy, but the cost-benefit of a rewrite made no sense at all. As far as I'm aware Hyder is still running on that COBOL code.
by jerf on 3/12/20, 2:37 PM
Unsurprisingly, humans are not good at accounting for black swan events, and even less so for averted ones.
by smoyer on 3/12/20, 3:00 PM
There's a very current equivalent - if we're good about social distancing, people may talk about COVID-19 the same way.
by GnarfGnarf on 3/12/20, 7:05 PM
Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't have.
Even in the late 80's I had to argue with some colleagues that we really shouldn't be using two-digit dates anymore.
I worked with 80-column punched cards in the 70's, every column was precious, you had to use two-digit years. When we converted to disc, storage was still small and expensive, and we had to stay with two-digit years.
by wglb on 3/12/20, 7:56 PM
First, enormous amounts of money was spent on repairs to the extent that they could be done. I know of some 50-year-old processes that didn't have the original source any longer. Significant consultant time was used in what at times resembled archeology.
Second, there was a little downturn in new projects after the turn, as budgets had been totally busted.
There was one consultant who preached doom and gloom about the collapse of civilization when that midnight came. He went so far as to move his family from NYC to New Mexico. He published on his web page all sorts of survivalist techniques and necessities. When the time came, his kids, who apparently didn't share the end-of-the-world view, woke him up and said "Dad!! New Zealand is dark!!!" but of course it wasn't.
The lesson there was that there was a tunnel vision about exactly how automated stuff actually was. While there were enormous systems with mainframes, Sun servers, workstations doing all this work, what the tunnel vision brought was the perception that excluded the regular human interactions with the inputs and outputs and operation of these systems. Not so fully automated after all.
There were a few disasters--I remember one small or medium grocery chain that had POS systems that couldn't handle credit cards with expiration dates beyond 12-31-1999 and would crash the whole outfit. The store was unable to process any transaction then until the whole thing was rebooted. They shortly went out of business.
by acdha on 3/12/20, 5:59 PM
This was victim of its own success: since the work was largely completed in time nobody had the huge counter-example of a disaster to justify the cost. I'm reminded of the ozone hole / CFC scare in the 1980s where a problem was identified, large-scale action happened, and there's been a persistent contingent of grumblers saying it wasn't necessary ever since because the problem didn't get worse.
by csixty4 on 3/12/20, 2:57 PM
There were a lot of two-digit dates out there which would have led to a lot of bugs. Companies put a lot of effort into addressing them so the worst you heard about was a 101 year old man getting baby formula in the mail.
The media over-hyped it, though. There was a market for books and guest interviews on TV news, and plenty of people were willing to step up and preach doom & gloom for a couple bucks: planes were going to fall out of the sky, ATMs would stop working, all traffic lights were going to fail, that sort of thing. It's like there was a pressure to ratchet things up a notch every day so you looked like you were more aware of the tragic impact of this bug than everyone else.
That's the part of the crisis that wasn't real, and it never was.
by codezero on 3/12/20, 4:23 PM
Leading up to the change over there was a lot of work to make sure all the systems would be OK, and that underlying software would also be OK, but keep in mind, auto-update on the Internet wasn't super common.
I ended up getting one call from a customer that night where they had a valid Y2K bug in their software, and since it wasn't in Red Hat's system, they moved along to their next support person to call :)
It was a thing, but much less of a thing because of the work put into getting ahead of it.
by ecpottinger on 3/12/20, 2:55 PM
Also one of the major results of the Y2K bug, IT department finally got the budgets to upgrade their hardware. If they had not gotten newer hardware I am sure there would have been more problems.
Finally, in my area the main reason companies failed from IT problems is because of problems with their database, but it turns out their backup are not good or have not been done recently. Many companies tried to be cheap and never updated their backup software, so even if they did backup their data the backup software could really mess things up if it used 2 digit dates to track which files to update.
Things go very bad if you lose Payroll, Accounts Payable or Accounts Receive-able.
by tachoknight on 3/12/20, 4:24 PM
by ebrenes on 3/12/20, 2:54 PM
Some historians seem to think that it was a real crisis in which the US pioneered solutions that were used across the world: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/30/lessons-yk...
by SideburnsOfDoom on 3/13/20, 10:15 AM
+ because it was going to fall.
- Are you certain?
+ yes.
- but it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen.
Minority Report , 2002
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVGQHw9jrsk
People worked for years in the late 1990s replacing systems that were not Y2K compliant with new ones that were.
It is becoming ever more common to question the veracity of disaster averted through effort. And it is very dangerous.
by AndrewDucker on 3/12/20, 2:53 PM
Except we didn't:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#On_1_January...
by msla on 3/12/20, 4:04 PM
by y-c-o-m-b on 3/12/20, 4:23 PM
The panic was also very real despite not being proportional to the actual problem, but just like any other media-induced widespread panic, it served as a means to make lots of profit for those in a position to do so. Media companies squeezed every last drop of that panic for ratings... well into the year 2000 when they started spreading the story that Y2K was the tip of the iceberg, and the "real" Y2K won't actually start until January 1, 2001.
As an immigrant to the US, I got to see the weird side of American culture in how people tend to romanticize (for lack of a better word) post-apocalyptic America. Kind of like the doomsday hoarders of today are doing. It's like they think a starring role on the Walking Dead is waiting for them, except in real life.
by f2000 on 3/13/20, 4:49 AM
by blihp on 3/12/20, 2:58 PM
by PappaPatat on 3/12/20, 3:30 PM
For the place I worked at (large international company) it was a G*d send opportunity. All the slack that had been build up in the past by "cost reducing" management suddenly had a billable cost position that nobody questioned.
Of course there where some actual Y2K issue solved in code and calculations, but by large the significant part of the budget was spend on new shiny stuff, to get changes approved and compensate workers for bonuses missed in the previous years.
We had a blast doing it, and the biggest let down while following the year roll over from the dateline and seeing nothing like the expected and predicted rolling blackouts.
by 0xff00ffee on 3/12/20, 5:18 PM
YES. It was real.
I was finishing an engineering degree (CSE) in 1992 and several of my peers took consulting jobs to work on Y2K issues. For nearly a decade a huge amount of work was done to review and repair code.
Y2K is the butt of many jokes, but the truth is: it didn't happen because the work was done to fix it. Sort of ironic.
by kitteh on 3/12/20, 2:38 PM
by franze on 3/12/20, 9:06 PM
by billpg on 3/12/20, 2:39 PM
by fapjacks on 3/13/20, 6:53 AM
by Gatsky on 3/13/20, 12:51 AM
by nineteen999 on 3/13/20, 6:58 AM
However, one issue I did run into nearly two years later was when UNIX time_t rolled over to 1 billion seconds. The company I worked with at the time was running WU-IMAP for their email server, plus additional patches for qmail-style maildir support. We came into work on September 10th 2001 and all the email on our IMAP server was sorted in the wrong order.
Turns out there was a bug in the date sorting function in this particular maildir patch (see http://www.davideous.com/imap-maildir/ - "10-digit unix date rollover problem"). I think we were the first to report it to the maintainer due to the timezone we were in. First time for me in identifying and submitting a patch to fix a critical issue in a piece of open source software! My co-worker and I were chuffed.
Of course, we swiftly forgot about it the next day when planes crashed into the NY World Trade Center.
by tobias2014 on 3/13/20, 12:29 AM
by jedberg on 3/12/20, 3:55 PM
But that couldn't be more wrong.
by DreamSpinner on 3/13/20, 1:17 AM
Keep in mind that it was also used as a significant contributing factor to replace a lot of major legacy IT systems (especially accounting systems) at big organisations (a lot of SAP rollouts in the late 90s had Y2K as part of the cost justifications).
The company I worked for ran a Y2K Remediation "Factory" for mainframe software - going through and change to 4 digits, checking for leap year issues, confirming various calculations still worked.
I worked on a full system replacement that was partially justified on the basis of (roughly) we can spend 0.3x and do y2k patches, or spend X and get a new system using more recent technologies and UIs.
There were still problems, but they were generally in less critical systems as likely major systems had been tested, and were remediated or replaced.
Keep in mind that there was often much more processing that occurred on desktop computers (traditional fat client) - so lots of effort was also expended on check desktop date rollover behaviour. Once place I worked at had to manually run test software on every computer they had (10's of thousands) because it needed reboots and remote management was more primitive (and less adopted) at the time.
by barkingcat on 3/13/20, 1:19 PM
I worked in QA in one of their bank teller application development branch offices, so all I did for weeks was enter in date times between 99 and 00 into the software and test that the fixes were successful.
The unique thing about Y2K was that the problem was well understood and came with an actual deadline, so you could project manage around it.
Any normal bug couldn't be project managed this way, and you can't just throw interns at regular problems, whereas with Y2K, if you had the money, you can just assign people to look at every line of code to look for date handling code.
by unoti on 3/12/20, 8:30 PM
by mncolinlee on 3/13/20, 1:20 AM
In the UK, there were some medical devices (my memory says dialysis machines) that malfunctioned over the issue.
There is an important lesson about the behavior of the media in this. They whipped out people into a survivalist, doomsday prepper frenzy over an issue that could be solved simply by updating BIOS, software, and/or hardware.
With that said, the effort was very expensive because so much software and hardware needed to be audited at every company.
by bridgerj on 3/13/20, 1:55 AM
The answer to the first question is yes. There was a potential problem. However the companies and government departments that were affected had started planning in the early 90s, and they prepared during the decade. Many took the opportunity to embark on huge system upgrades. It was just one of many issues CIOs dealt with.
The answer to the second question is no. The huge disaster scares were not justified. Banks, airlines, insurance companies and government departments had already fixed their systems, just like they fix other problems.
What happened was that consulting companies, outsourcers and law firms suddenly realized there was a huge new market that they could scare into being. They started running campaigns aimed at getting work from mid size businesses.
The campaign took off because it was an easy issue for the media and politicians to understand. It also played into the popular meme that programmers were stupid. The kicker was the threat that directors who failed to prepare could be sued if anything went wrong. Directors fell into line and commissioned a lot of needless work.
In summary, there was the professional work carried out by big banks, airlines etc, generally between 1990 and 1997, and the panic-driven, sometimes pointless work by smaller firms in 1998 and 1999.
by jarkkom on 3/12/20, 4:15 PM
Because of all the preparation and upgrades being done, I think only incident we had when Y2k migration manager sent out "all clear"-email after rollover - Unix mail client he used formatted date on email as "01/01/19100" - though I suspect he knew of the issue and didn't upgrade on purpose just to make a point.
by harry8 on 3/13/20, 2:07 AM
Nobody. None.
Everybody got a good landing in the pilot's sense of a good landing being one you walk away from. Think of your boss, all the people you work with and ever have. And they all suceeded.
So crisis, no. No way everybody pulls it off if it were a real crisis. But damn it made sales easy by consultants to all of the above who spent big. "Planes will drop out of the sky!"
A very powerful way to sell is through fear. We got sold the iraq war on weapons of mass destruction that could kill us in our beds here! And this was used and abused by consulting firms to make sales to managers and boards of directors who have no clue what a computer is and what it does and think hackers can whistle the launch codes etc. That fear based sales job happened on mass and was a vastly bigger phenomenen than y2k. But having said that there were so many people who bought the fear sales job that employed them that they still believe it. Many will post here about it and you can weigh it all up for yourself.
So yeah there were y2k issues, some got dealt with in advance, some didn't but nothing like the hype of 1999. Nothing like it.
by rossdavidh on 3/12/20, 4:44 PM
So, it's a mix. It was real, it was well-handled, but there was also some hype, and even some hype that served a real (covert) good purpose.
by mattsears on 3/13/20, 4:25 AM
by ralphc on 3/13/20, 1:10 AM
by adrianmsmith on 3/12/20, 12:42 PM
I lived and worked as a software developer through the Y2K "crisis" (although I wasn't working on solving the crisis myself). Everyone was very worried about it. Nothing really went wrong in the end.
Was that because there was no problem? Or because everyone was worried about it and actually solved the problem? I don't think it's easy to tell the difference really.
by vlan0 on 3/12/20, 5:45 PM
He spent New Years in a DC of a big financial firm in NYC. Apparently the firm was so worried about a failure they shelled out big bucks to have UPS maintenance staff onsite during the cut-over "just in case".
by zhoujianfu on 3/13/20, 5:28 AM
by ninju on 3/12/20, 8:47 PM
The potential for large disruptions in financial, real-time and other systems would have occurred if not for the effort applied.
Unfortunately some problems require a certain level of media-awareness and/or hysteria before we devote the necessary resources to fix the problem before it become a crisis
by gentle on 3/12/20, 7:21 PM
Airplanes were probably never going to fall out of the sky at the stroke of midnight, but I personally fixed tons of bugs that had potential impacts in the dozens of millions of dollars.
by ArnoVW on 3/12/20, 2:40 PM
Just like the crisis we are currently facing in our health systems, it seems unlikely that we would have had enough IT resources to deal with the issues in real-time.
This is one of the cases of a "self-denying-prophecy", much like acid rain. There was an issue, we collectively dealt with it (better yet, we actually anticipated!), and now people are saying that in the end there was no issue.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190823-can-lessons-from...
by ZacharyPitts on 3/13/20, 3:04 AM
Of course though, because we had spent the previous few months setting clocks forward to see what broke, and fixing it.
by andrewfromx on 3/12/20, 6:15 PM
by Japhy_Ryder on 3/12/20, 6:09 PM
by eb0la on 3/12/20, 3:07 PM
One of them, was running calculations 24/7 for a research group at the university and fortunately they were able to stop the jobs in time for an OS upgrade.
by anigbrowl on 3/13/20, 6:24 AM
by zzo38computer on 3/12/20, 9:51 PM
by CiPHPerCoder on 3/12/20, 2:53 PM
const DATE_COMPUTERS_DID_NOT_EXIST = /* arbitrary */;
/* snip */
if (Date::now() < DATE_COMPUTERS_DID_NOT_EXIST) {
Computer::selfDestruct();
}
I think it's a great lesson in the failings of the public imagination and should serve as a warning to not give into moral panics.
by samch93 on 3/13/20, 6:43 AM
by yarrel on 3/13/20, 4:56 PM
Pre-Y2K I worked to fix loan systems that would have failed had their Y2K bugs not been fixed. Not getting a loan isn't accidentally launching a nuclear missile, but it affects your credit score and stops you buying a car.
Enough of this kind of failures would have had a severe effect on the economy, up to and including causing an economic crisis.
by jason_slack on 3/13/20, 12:23 PM
I looked at every system and decided the fix and coded it up from Delphi, Access, SQL, VB, QBASIC and c++.
It was quite enjoyable and I was enjoying a glass of wine and a steak on the dreaded evening, which was a Friday. Not a single phone call until Monday morning when my boss said take a few days off but pay attention to my pager. I put it in the refridgerator :-)
by JJMcJ on 3/12/20, 10:18 PM
Big companies (banks, insurance, health care) had elaborate contingency plans.
There were some failures, but nothing to disrupt life for 99.9% of the population, unless you call a website that says it's
January 5, 19100
There have been other problems. Day 10,000, but VAX and Unix systems, some programs had problems, once again mostly cause they didn't allow for the longer strings.
by GekkePrutser on 3/12/20, 8:31 PM
Climate sceptics often use these as an excuse. "Yes but there was sooo much hubbub about those and it proved to be nothing".
Well, yes it is nothing now because it was decisively and effectively handled. The ozone layer is still recovering but on a steady path there, and acid rain is reduced to the point of not really being an issue anymore (at least in the western world!).
Stuff really would have gone wrong with Y2K. Maybe not armageddon but yes. There was a problem.
by FWKevents on 3/13/20, 3:36 PM
by tstrimple on 3/13/20, 2:05 PM
by lasereyes136 on 3/13/20, 3:54 PM
Just a public service announcement that the decisions you make today for good reasons can, in retrospect, be seen as a huge mistake. The future view of your decisions will always have better knowledge than you have when you make that decision.
by GoldenMonkey on 3/12/20, 1:24 PM
by Springcleaning on 3/13/20, 7:35 PM
I remember visiting a smaller hotel in the UK early 2000 where the check-in terminal had a Y2000 Approved sticker with a serial number. That made sense, but in the room everything with a plug, including the hair dryer had such a sticker.
by nsxwolf on 3/12/20, 2:24 PM
by Fnoord on 3/12/20, 6:34 PM
I do realize it could've been a lot worse if it were not thanks to the many efforts of people in the tech industry.
And in case you wonder: I would bet the same is going to happen with regards to 32-bit and 2038.
by spamizbad on 3/13/20, 2:08 PM
The media did sensationalize it with stuff like "Planes falling out of the sky!" but there would have been massive disruptions due to systematic date/time issues. Tons of money was spent testing systems to ensure they're Y2K compatible and if not these systems were either patched or hastily replaced with something that was.
by generalpass on 3/12/20, 4:31 PM
I recall being in Seattle on New Years Eve and there were cops everywhere in full battle dress with armored personnel carriers and nobody was out partying like it was 1999, which was a shame because the weather was unusually mild.
by cronix on 3/12/20, 7:40 PM
by andrewdubinsky on 3/13/20, 2:34 PM
by ivanhoe on 3/13/20, 12:33 AM
by altitudinous on 3/13/20, 8:30 AM
by HackerLars on 3/13/20, 3:09 PM
by SkyMarshal on 3/13/20, 1:47 AM
The Indian IT outsourcing industry was effectively created by the Y2K bug. Those companies did a large amount of the bug fixing.
by strickinato on 3/12/20, 6:59 PM
by justizin on 3/13/20, 12:01 AM
this is basically ALL OF LIFE in IT OPERATIONS. lol.
by JSeymourATL on 3/12/20, 3:17 PM
It's certainly true an absurd amount of resources went into 'fixing' the problem.
Apply to this to any crisis du jour-- drugs/terrorism/climate/viruses etc...
Never let a Good Crisis go to waste.
by nerfhammer on 3/12/20, 4:43 PM
I could see why people would be worried that banking software written in COBOL in 1983 would break and had to spend significant sums of money making sure it didn't. Since it was an extremely predictable problem with a specific, known, non-negotiable deadline everyone who had money to lose if there were a problem had plenty of time and incentive to prevent it.
by kentbrew on 3/13/20, 4:52 AM
by phonebucket on 3/12/20, 8:37 PM
by senthil_rajasek on 3/12/20, 4:43 PM
(Shameless plug, here is my humorous take on it)
by wjdp on 3/12/20, 6:04 PM
by snvzz on 3/13/20, 8:30 AM
They're still working on it now, and not fully prepared.
The BSDs fare much better on that, as most of them have done this a long time ago.
by sys_64738 on 3/12/20, 5:45 PM
by pintxo on 3/12/20, 6:38 PM
by dreamcompiler on 3/12/20, 8:49 PM
by HackerLars on 3/13/20, 3:07 PM
by pabs3 on 3/13/20, 1:21 AM
by terrislinenbach on 3/13/20, 3:39 PM
by rconti on 3/13/20, 5:36 AM
All I know is, I plan to retire by age ~57 (before the 2038 bug hits :) )
by hprotagonist on 3/12/20, 4:23 PM
by jkingsbery on 3/12/20, 5:21 PM
by eyegor on 3/13/20, 2:56 AM
by keithnz on 3/13/20, 1:35 AM
by bob33212 on 3/12/20, 2:36 PM
by IshKebab on 3/12/20, 2:59 PM
But actually most software uses epoch time or something similar. So the scope of the problem was much smaller than the news implied.
by kevin_thibedeau on 3/12/20, 4:45 PM
by 29athrowaway on 3/12/20, 4:12 PM
by olliej on 3/12/20, 7:54 PM
The trick yo avoiding predictable crises is to actually doing something before it happens in order to avoid it.
by Marazan on 3/12/20, 8:54 PM
by Wiretrip on 3/12/20, 3:56 PM
by rhacker on 3/12/20, 2:45 PM
by thaumaturgy on 3/12/20, 7:04 PM
Yeah, it was a big deal. Pretty much all dev work was done by me and one other guy. How much dev work could a school district have back then? Oh, lots. Every school, and in some cases individual educators, would send in requests for various reports, and each one required configuring a mainframe job, running it, and doing some kind of thing with the output (conversion to a "modern" format on a 3.5" disk or printing it or something). Every payroll cycle required a lot of manual labor, every report card cycle, there were daily student attendance jobs, and this particular district had a rather advanced, for the time, centrally-managed network across the entire district with Solaris DNS.
So on top of all this regular workload, we had to go over pretty much every single line of COBOL in that mainframe, visually, and search for Y2K-related bugs. There were many. The Solaris box needed to be patched too, and the first patches that came out weren't great and I didn't know what I was doing yet either.
So we started on this in earnest in Summer of 1997, while everyone was out of school. We ran a lot of test jobs, which involved halting all regular work, monkeying around with the mainframe's date, and then running a payroll job to see what blew up. By late 1999, my mentor there was pulling multiple all-nighters. He had a family of his own too and it really impacted his health.
There were mountains of greenbar printouts in our little office, all code, with bright red pen marks. Such was life when working on a mainframe at the time. The school district also brought out of retirement the guy who had written much of the key operating system components for our mainframe. I believe he came on as a consultant at rates that would be pretty nice even by today's standards.
In the end, school restarted after winter vacation and most things ran okay. A few jobs blew up where we had missed something here or there, but everyone by then had got sort of accustomed to the chaos and it just needed a phone call to say, "it broke, we're working on it, call you tomorrow".
Rough estimate, there was probably over a thousand hours' worth of labor to fix it all. Had that not been done, virtually nothing in that school district would have worked correctly by the beginning of 2000. (Some things started failing a month or two in advance, depending on the date arithmetic they needed to do.)
And these weren't just "year 100" printer errors; a lot of things simply barfed in some fancy way or another, or produced nonsense output, or -- in the most fun cases -- produced a lot of really incorrect data that was then handed off to other jobs, which then produced a lot of even more incorrect data, and then saved it all to the database.
by stretchwithme on 3/12/20, 8:29 PM
by wrmsr on 3/13/20, 3:50 AM
by mywittyname on 3/12/20, 3:43 PM
by dhosek on 3/12/20, 1:52 PM
That said, none of the bugs would have been critical to the operations of the services. Everything was in the billing systems and I think if unfixed it would have been more of a reputation hit than anything.
Also, "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
by bjourne on 3/12/20, 2:55 PM
Compare that to the CFC situation in the 80's. Scientists agree that the mitigating actions we took saved the ozone layer. Or compare it to the current global warming crisis. Scientists tell us that if we do nothing, we will suffer catastrophic climate change.
Media never tells you the truth, but the scientists usually do. So you listen to them.