I don't know how many of you all remember late 1999.

[Srkdqltr]

Remember how many were on the news and talk shows saying that when the time changed to the year 2000 cars with computers and planes would stop. Water and power would shut off because computer programmers didn't think to program for the year 2000?
Remember how they were never heard from again. And how stupid we felt when we found we didn't need to fill the bathtub with water or take extra money out of the ATM?
Remember that?
Hopefully we will feel that again after the vote.

[LearnedHand]

1. To be fair

Last edited Tue Oct 22, 2024, 05:33 PM - Edit history (1)

Disaster was averted because of the largely invisible backend updates, not because it wasn't a pending disaster.

[Whatthe_Firetruck]

66. They spent over a decade...

Identifying where all the problems would be, coding fixes, and putting them in place. So when the date came around it was largely anticlimatic to the public, which is how it's supposed to be.

[LearnedHand]

72. Exactly

This part was invisible to most people, so the press spun it as a huge nothingburger. Totally unfair to the people who coded their hearts out to avoid the disaster.

[Simeon Salus]

75. "Office Space" with Ron Livingston and Jennifer Aniston

The one nice thing which came out of Y2K, IMHO.

At least somebody documented the uselessness of the coding, even if in parody.

?

[DeepWinter]

2. I remember

the insane amount of money companies/corporations poured into Y2K system upgrades and preventive care. If you were in IT at that time, you could write your own checks.

[wysimdnwyg]

29. This

I couldn’t tell you how much effort my company put into making the changes to four digit years in code. I was in QA at the time, and it felt like all I did for months was to come up with new ideas for how we could test the code changes.

Having been in IT both before and after y2k, I’ve seen firsthand how something so simple could have completely broken a system. Extrapolating out, I understand that it was never going to be as bad as the “end of the world” doom and gloom suggested, but without all the work I, my colleagues, and everyone else involved in fixing it performed, it could have been devastating.

As it relates to this election, don’t assume it will work out. We have to put in the work to ensure a non-devastating result for the country.

[niyad]

51. Happy 21st DUnniversary.

[wysimdnwyg]

76. Thanks!

I don’t post much, but I’m here every day.

[slightlv]

54. Unless you were working for IT for a company

at that time, then it was your salary, plus the overtime (if you weren't salaried... I was). I was DoD contractor, and spent all New Years Eve and some of New Years day swatting problems with our Novell network. Lots of work, all of it pretty lonely, except for panicked phone calls. I was the one-man IT department, and that night I wished for at least one assistant! (LOL)

But before that, I worked at a Consortium of Libraries, and let me tell you the prep work for that began more than a year in advance. Should have stayed there until after Y2K! I was hired for another job with a DoD contractor, and it was a very busy night. Don't know what the main office did to prepare, but we in the sticks were playing whack-a-mole most of the night.

So, if you didn't have problems with Y2K, and think it was all overblown, well... thank your IT tech. We worked hard that night!

[da svenster]

64. we worked hard in the decade before that...

but that night was a knuckle biter for many of us.

i was lucky. our whole team (all 4 of us - owner, manager, and 2 code monkeys including myself) was on call that night. and didn't get called. nor did we get called on our new year's day.

but the week before we were scrambling with last minute things.

yeah, if y'all didn't see anything on Y2K thank a lot of very dedicated IT folks. we worked our backsides off making sure january 2nd was going to happen.

[Karma13612]

3. Oh do I remember.....

[Cirsium]

4. Not the best comparison

Are you saying that fears about a fascist takeover are equivalent to worries about potential Y2K glitches?

One is a real threat and the other wasn't, just for a start.

[Srkdqltr]

5. Well just the extreme hand wringing over Kamala loosing. I think she has a very good chance of winning.

We should keep a positive attitude rather than writing her off too soon.

[LeftInTX]

8. We're talking about voting vs technology

[Cirsium]

15. You are doubling down now

Fearing a Fascist takeover is not "writing her off" nor does it have anything to do with keeping a positive attitude.

[TwilightZone]

12. Many of the potential Y2K issues were dealt with well ahead of time.

Part of the reason it was a non-event is because companies spent innumerable hours identifying potential issues and updating code for infrastructure, banking, transportation, security, and other key industries well before the end of the year.

It was never likely going to be the complete disaster it was often predicted to be, but planning ahead almost certainly helped.

We have a chance to cut this potential disaster off as well.

[Cirsium]

21. Good point

"Innumerable hours identifying potential issues..."

Identifying the problem is the important first step.

[BattleRow]

22. Hey,ever prep for an extreme hurricane?

Water in the bathtub,as much cash as possible,meds,etc.,etc.

Better to have it and not need it ,than need it and not have it.

Cue Project 2025...

[kcr]

63. The other WAS a threat

It was taken seriously, and lots of hard work and planning prevented it. It's a shame that this myth of Y2k being a nothingburger persists.

[Cirsium]

84. Yes

My mistake. Thanks for the correction.

[displacedvermoter]

6. Went to library conference planning program where the

speaker posited that anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent of the businesses in the US would go out of business as a result of Y2K crashes.

We were preparing for something that didn't come to pass, but those of us who planned months in advance really didn't feel stupid, we were glad we didn't have to deal with the crisis.

You are right, hopefully we will feel the same way come January 20, 2025!

[lame54]

11. Why was Y2K more widely believed than...

Climate change
We've had decades to prepare for it but instead wallowed in denial

[da svenster]

52. because alas...

Y2K was something people could understand and businesses had no choice but to fix it if they wanted to continue past 2000-01-01. radical self interest was the driving force and we lived in a more rational world then (for a given value of rational - after all, we were well in to the rush limpballs and art bell era).

climate change doesn't have a set in stone date. we can't look at a calendar and say "that's the day. right there. that's when things are gonna all go kerflooey."

[zonemaster]

7. Got news for you. That threat was real.

I worked at a tech company that had all kinds of software - both licensed (costing multiple millions of dollars, annually) and engineer-written. I know for a fact that some of that code definitely would have failed had we done nothing to handle the under-specified date format. In our group of a few hundred electrical engineers, all had tasks assigned to review code and look for date-format dependencies that might make the code misbehave after January 1st, 2000. Suspect code segments went into a long list for more detailed review and re-coding, where necessary. It took several weeks. It was real. Had we worked at a company that handled power grid, water treatment or other civil infrastructure, things would have been much more intense.

The fact that no major upsets happened is not a data point that the threat wasn't real. It is much more a testament to the dedication to 10's of thousands of engineers spending probably millions of man hours combing through code, setting up simulations and making fixes to an incredibly immense and critical codebase.

[localroger]

13. It is also a testament that major threats CAN be averted

It cost billions of dollars and millions of man-hours of work, but what would have been a major catastrophe was made into a minor hiccup because it was taken seriously.

[displacedvermoter]

17. Sounds trivial but libraries all over the world were

concerned about how much cataloging, circulation, and inventory data were going to be lost. The safety of huge databases was in doubt, thankfully we did a lot of planning we didn't need to have done.

[da svenster]

53. same was true of banks...

decades before the 90s ramped things up in the manufacturing, distribution, and other realms.

[Jmb 4 Harris-Walz]

18. Agree -- it could most definitely have been disaster in the making. Luckily the worst that ended up happening

was some dates reverted to 1900 instead of 2000.

Thanks to all the dedicated coders for saving the day!

Today, another disaster awaits, but once again many many people are doing everything possible to avert disaster again. And WE WILL WIN!

[Earthrise]

19. Thanks for the perspective! I was a teenager at the time and didn't

following the news. I just heard about the panic, and then... not much happened.

I'm glad the right people understood what could happen and got it done. I'm glad it happened in 1999, when many people were still being treated well by their company, felt loyal, and got the job done.

[sinkingfeeling]

9. I spent all New Years Eve at Walmart HQ to be sure all of

the 'fixes' worked. And yes, without code circumventions, many things would have stopped working.

[Duncan Grant]

10. The catapult of disinformation is unyielding.

I like how you framed this. I feel similarly.

[Earthrise]

14. Yep. Water, stock up on basics, and get cash. No one I knew believed

it would affect them personally, but everyone took precautions because everyone else was anxious.

I bet vast wads of cash were spent in the weeks following - it might burn a hole in your pocket.

[miyazaki]

16. It was a cold fart. nt

[doc03]

20. Yep that was ridiculous, the stock market would crash,

planes would fall out of the air, people were
hording food, toilet paper and ammo. Nothing
happened.

[sinkingfeeling]

86. Nothing happened because IT programmers spent the last

5 years of the 1990s fixing the code or writing circumventions to the very real problem.

I worked as a mainframe programmer for IBM and we scanned millions of lines of code to eliminate any chance of failure.

[doc03]

88. I remember President Clinton made it a priority. I worked in a steel mill at the time, they hired extra people

in our electronics and electrical departments that worked on the problem. Fortunately, we didn't have the disaster the MSM
was hoping we would have.

[ToxMarz]

23. My best memory of 1999

[Xavier Breath]

78. We spent 15 years hearing about the concept of partying like it was 1999

and then when it finally got here it wasn't really that great of a party, tbh.

[ampm]

24. Yes I do remember

I'm laughing because of the Y2k My Husband decided to have a computer build and wow it was great, and nothing went down

[Orangepeel]

25. There is little glory in preventing a disaster

[Collimator]

36. I like that.

There is certainly no glory in doing it an hour before hand, or even twenty minutes or fifteen seconds. To get any real credit you need to stop the problem at the 1 second mark.

[kozar]

26. We are, as we did then,

Ignoring g the Naysayers, a d doing the,
Right thing. Now we're just voting.

Koz

[duncang]

27. I loved 1999-2000

We told them none of our electrical equipment had anything that would care what date it was. But I did get some nice overtime staying there.

[et tu]

28. it was all a part of the tech

mystic, much like ai now so
it is always good to be vigilant
(so says my robot) lol

[Jamison59]

30. The Danger WAS REAL!

I was a mainframe software developer in the 80s and 90s. If we had not spent the last 7 or so years of the 90s fixing this problem, you could have gone to the ATM and withdrew all the cash in the world to no avail. Within a week or two, cash would have had little value. The danger was real but we fixed it.

[markpkessinger]

58. Thank you! The OP fails to understand WHY nothing of consequence happened!

I worked in the IT department of an international law firm at the time. We spent the better part of 1999 reviewing code and conducting testing, just to make sure we wouldn't be hit with any surprises on January 1, 2000! And the entire IT department was expected to be on hand in case something did!

Y2K was potentially a real issue. A lot of people did a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure it wasn't!

[paulkienitz]

31. Y2K wasn't a catastrophe because people worked through the issues and fixed them.

When your approach to an impending disaster is to assess the work, portion it out, and get it done, instead of hoarding for yourself and letting everyone else go to hell, then nobody needs to suffer a disaster.

[hoosierspud]

32. The hospital lab I worked at canceled all vacations

At that time. They wanted someone from every department to come in after midnight to make sure all the equipment was still working. I had made plans to leave town and I asked my supervisor if I really needed to check the centrifuges and microscopes. Surprisingly, they gave me the time off.

[Mustellus]

33. The US Space Forces still haven't caught up....

The first satellite was launched in 1957, and Space Force orbit format lists the last two digits of the year. They have till 2056 to figure this out.....

[0rganism]

34. I remember working a lot of overtime so people wouldn't be affected by the problem

The "false alarm" was handled pretty well, because thousands of the right people took responsibility and worked really hard to patch things up. If things go well in 2 weeks, it will be for similar reasons. Don't be fooled when events are progressing smoothly around you, the dangers are real and present, and we're relying on society's better nature to preserve the illusion of normality.

And trust me, we'll all know shortly after things break down hard. Some of us will be glad to have that tub full of water or the extra cash on hand.

[IronLionZion]

35. There were a tremendous amount of people working to update software to prevent that problem

and tons of people working to elect Democrats to prevent a MAGA/fascist takeover.

Mitigating a risk so that it doesn't materialize into an issue is a very good thing.

[0rganism]

37. The success of our Y2K response further highlights the failure of our climate change response

As for our response to rabid vitriolic fascism? That coin's still in the air with a lot of our best people are working on it, I do hope we get something like a Y2K resolution instead of a cat-5 hurricane slamming into democracy.

[IronLionZion]

50. Sure, or the efforts to save the Ozone layer

which was helped with global regulations on harmful chemical aerosols.

I would hope more people would wake up to climate change when hurricanes are flooding inland mountainous areas like Western NC recently, and more wildfires out west. One problem is the perception that it's too late or too big a problem to do much about it.

[LearnedHand]

73. Well said!

[LeftInTX]

83. We are dealing people and voting, not

numbers on a computer. This is much less predictable because human behavior is involved.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

38. Ahem. It wasn't the programmers who didn't think.

It was the managers, and executives, and politicians.

In many cases, requiring extra digits on forms and other systems would require reprinting. Data entry systems would have to be changed. Back then (in 80s and 90s) there were many data entry systems that used punched cards or other old ways with limited space.

Changing that required money. The aforementioned people like to pinch pennies.

That it wasn't the programmers was shown that when the actual turnover moment arrived the programs, or almost all, continued and there wasn't mass chaos. It did include a lot of programmers behind the scenes fixing code and data entry systems in the run-up to the turn of century.

One thing the programmers even now would like to see is dates used and rendered in the sortable unambiguous YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss format. You can still say month-day, but please write it and record it and print it unambiguously.

Quick: what is 10-11-12? Is it Nov 10, 2012 or Oct 11, 2012 or Nov 12, 2010. I have seen all three in use!

But pig-headed "American exceptionalism" still insists on MM-DD-YY or is it DD-MM-YY? It is both ways in the US (July 4th / 4th July), predominantly the former which is counter to the older European ways, except Europe has mostly joined the 21st century while the US is still mired in ancient date systems and king's-foot measuring systems.

[da svenster]

57. the issue in the early days was how expensive storage was

when a kb of disk space could cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, and tables could contain tens of thousands - or even millions - of records, the cost to store 2 extra bytes per record (assuming only one date field per record) was cost prohibitive.

i do agree re: date formatting. i'd love to see YYYY-MM-DD become the defacto standard. left to right you can see the most general (year) to the most specific (day of the month).

of the 6 digit year, i do prefer the mm/dd/yy or mm/dd/yyyy format simply because they're the easiest to convert to YYYYMMDD - just move the year from the end to the beginning.

[niyad]

80. Thank you. Your post, and the immediately following response answered

a serious questiion for me.

I write my dates the European way, and yet, every form I have to fill out online has month/day/year. When I was working for gaming in NV, if I couldn't find the information one way on the date, I checked the other way, same with names.

[spike jones]

39. I still have cans of freeze-dried food. I also remember this Seattle WTO late 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests

[Susan Calvin]

40. Please don't forget all the programmers that made that happen.

It didn't happen all by itself. I think there's an analogy there somewhere.

[Mariana]

41. We actually did lose power for most of the day on Jan 1.

[PhilG]

42. Y2K ?

I worked in IT too. 30 years all total and we were all required to be on standby on that New Years Eve in case anything went wrong. Months of preparation and updating kept all systems running, but that wasn't the end of it. Found days and sometimes months later that "fixed" software sometimes had problems with backwards compatibility. Files created before midnight could not be read by the newer software. I remember one backup software that refused to recognize any backup tapes created days or weeks or months ago. Took a lot of convincing to get their technical support to realize their software had a big problem and get it fixed.

And yes, I hope we all feel that relief again on November 6th and that you-know-who just fades into obscurity

[Susan Calvin]

45. I distinctly remember a documentary called The Unsung Heroes of Y2K.

I've been looking for it again for years and have not been able to find it.

[Skittles]

48. it drives me NUTS when people act like nothing happened by fate

WE IT WORKERS WORKED OUR ASSES OF TO ENSURE "NOTHING HAPPENED"

[niyad]

82. Welcome to our DU family.

[Figarosmom]

43. I thought

They were all crazy.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

44. All too well, quite frankly.

And the danger was absurdly overhyped.

I kept on asking why is it the DMV could deal with date of birth prior to 1900 without problems? No, I did not bother with extra cash or any such.

[da svenster]

61. the reason DMV didn't have an issue

...was that they had no choice but to implement systems from the beginning to handle the situation. the day they computerized, they knew they had to be able to handle someone born in 1895.

some bank systems - e.g., mortgages and long term securities - were patched ahead of time (30 year mortgages or 20 year securities had to be ready for when the term would pass 2000-01-01).

but things like ATMs? not a guarantee. it was a lot of "those 2 extra bytes are gonna cost a lot in storage over the thousands or millions of records we have". there was a belief that it was a problem we could kick down the street, and we did until the 90s (kinda reminds me of climate change, but CC doesn't have a date you can point to on the calendar and say "THERE - THAT'S THE DEADLINE DATE&quot .

imagine not being able to get money, not being able to pay for food, put gas in your car because suddenly the expiration date on your credit card was 1900 - some ancient COBOL or RPG code wasn't patched (and COBOL and RPG run a huge portion of the banking, distribution, and manufacturing world even today).

[LearnedHand]

74. That the media are too stupid to have reported this intelligently

doesn’t mean there was no risk. IT departments knew exactly what kind of systems could fail. Again, it was a disaster averted, not a non-disaster. The people who averted it for the world are truly heroes.

[Aristus]

46. I was working as a bank teller on the last workday of 1999.

That was the hardest I’d ever worked until I started working in the medical field.

I was thrashed by the end of the day, counting out tens of thousands of dollars to panicky people who refused to accept public assurances of functionality on 1/1/2000.

I swear the bank branch very nearly ran out of cash.

[da svenster]

62. funny switch...

i was in the medical research field - molecular biology, R&D for bone marrow transplant programs - in the 90s.

when the later 90s swung around, and Y2K furor was ramping up, companies were looking for warm bodies to work on the problem.

i switched from mad scientry to IT in 97. and haven't looked back. well, yeah i do. still loved what i did but unlike a lot of the Y2K cannon fodder i stuck in the field and it's been pretty good to me.

[Skittles]

47. let me tell you something

people spent YEARS fixing shit so "nothing would happen" - I know because I worked on an account for almost two years updating software for a telephone company....."nothing happened" BECAUSE WE WERE PREPARED

[niyad]

49. Ah, yes, the great Y2K hoax. I had a mac at the time, and left it on from

6am on Dec 31 to 12:01 am Jan 2 just for grins, even though I knew, as did many, that the new millenium would begin on 1 Januuary 2001. Sadly, many people were duped, and some scum made millions.

What I loved that was going around at the time was the resurrection of "the great Y1K warning", which was absolutely hilarious. Sadly, I have not been able to find it online for years.

[Ptah]

55. Was your mac running COBOL?

[niyad]

56. I don't remember, although that sounds vaguely familar. Actually, I don't

even know what operating system my current tablet has.

[Ptah]

59. You said, "some scum made millions."

Those 'scum' were fixing COBOL (used by many large organizations) to prevent the crashes.

[niyad]

79. You misunderstand me. I was referring to the charlatans, gurus, snake-oil

huckster types who promised "protection", "safety", or whatever, so long as you gave them large amounts of cash. Like the villain in the video piece this morning, from a 1958 tv episode. "I alone can fix this ". (sound familiar? and the villain's name was, I kid you not, t####!)

[da svenster]

65. iOS (or iPadOS) if you have an iPad, or android if it's just about anything else

unless you have something really old, but i don't think winMobile ever went full on tablet. i do think there was a flavor of 'doze specific for ARM processors for flavors on the surface tablet as well.

[niyad]

81. I do not have an ipad, and I do have that little martian creature whenever

I reboot.

[Skittles]

60. it wasn't a HOAX per se

things COULD HAVE BEEN BAD except for the fact than many people worked many years to ENSURE THE TRANSITION WAS SMOOTH

[da svenster]

67. dates were handled differently...

i don't know the internals of system 7 or 8 of MacOS on how dates were handled so i can't speak to the risk. if they were using a UNIX like representation and since they were 32 bit operating systems, i think dates will run out on those boxes in 2038. so i guess if the world ran on macOS we'd have been fine.

what was more at risk was things like... financials, distribution, energy, manufacturing.

you could be plenty smug that your mac was running...

... until a few minutes after midnight on 2000-01-01 the power went out because some RPG or COBOL code on a system that controls the power grid in your area didn't know how to handle being flung back to 1900. or the chip in your elevator decided 1900 wasn't in the schedule so it hain't gonna work and i guess you're going to have to take the stairs.

how did that happen? a lot of people planned, analyzed, coded where they could, replaced where they couldn't, and worked their asses off to make it not happen.

but it wasn't perfect. the wikipedia article has a snapshot of some of the issues that cropped up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

[markpkessinger]

68. Wow. Talk about taking learning the wrong lesson from history! n/t

[da svenster]

69. as the great sage donald roeser once wrote...

history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.

(roeser is better known as buck dharma of BOC for thems not in the know)

[Srkdqltr]

70. The point i wanted to make was, and many made it here, there was a huge effort going to make sure things went as smoothl

And wonderful for them.

While a lot were running around shouting "the sky is falling " . As now, polls going nuts and a lot saying Harris isn't doing enough or may not win while people are doing their best to see that she wins.
We all don't see most of the real work. Huge thanks and blessings to all doing the real work.
A lot of the talking heads on TV have no clue.

[haele]

71. My dad did his 1997 through 1999 Navy reserve duties

Testing for Navy and Marine Corps communications, integration, and business applications software and firmware fixes associated with Y2K.
His unit validated about a quarter of comms software and firmware the Navy had. While planes wouldn't necessarily be falling out of the sky, the effects of not going through every system before Y2K could have meant digital communications and navigation systems locking up or "hallucinating" while trying to find proper date/time codes, wasted money, and delays of up to a year or more of administrative operations, repairs, logistics, and purchases while the DoD tried to fix after the failure. The commercial sector did the same thing. Digital firmware in communications, especially in aeronautics, UHF radio and SATCOM has been around since the late 50's; there were a lot of small things that could still have gone wrong because frankly, no one thought about Y2k and 2 digit annular codes until the mid/late 80's.
It wasn't a big deal because the government made a big stink and spent the time and money fixing the known problem beforehand instead of reacting to the massive failures afterwards.

Haele

[Sneederbunk]

77. Yes, Art Bell stuff.

[Maeve]

85. Hubby is IT for small companies

He was late getting home for New Years Eve because he was fixing problems. He got a better job for the work he did...until it all went south in 2011.
I do think fears have gotten out of hand, but that's because we're up against Oogy-Boogy and fear is his currency

[usonian]

87. Well, this is bringing out all the programmers and sysadmins.

I worked for an investment bank at the time, and helped the QA folks test out all the code.

I was known as Mr. Tardis, for moving the computer clocks from past to future and back, as needed.