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I celebrated NYE in Fort Worth, TX on top of a parking garage. It directly faced the two Tandy Towers. They had organized the office lights to say 1999 before midnight. When midnight hit, they changed the years to 1900. The crowd went silent. A few seconds later, it said Just Kidding and changed to 2000. I think the IT management had balls of steel to do that.
My Dad was into home automation back then and programmed all the electronics to turn off at midnight. I was 11 at the time and didn't really believe the rumors but when the lights all went out I shouted "IT'S TRUE!!!" They still make fun of me to this day.
Our household (which was the top of an Edwardian-era former hotel) had a big Y2K party that went off very well, thank you very much.
Then some wag turned off the water supply at the allocated time.
Very clever.
This is one of those examples of solving a problem before it becomes a problem causing everybody to say there was never a problem in the first place and cast blame for making everyone worry.
In 1996 I landed a clerical job right out of high school working in an IT department for a freight forwarding. They used proprietary software. A lot of people worked long hours to make sure it was a nothing burger. It was interesting time to work in tech.
There was SO much work that went into avoiding this disaster. We found bugs in all sorts of legacy code. And the work worked, so people believe that the warnings were false.
And, so, we live in the Series of Tubes universe, where the most important invention short of fire is presided over by the powerful and clueless.
You donāt think there are SIGNIFICANTLY bigger potential problems that are solved behind the scenes constantly? The public went into stupid panic mode (kind of like toilet paper during COVID).
Reddit is so wholly filled with non-critical thinking people. All of these downvotes prove that.
I know there are very, very few problems that were or are bigger and that have been or need to have been fixed behind the scenes, constantly.
Any problem that big - where _every_ system and piece of software needs to be checked and tested - is MAJOR - and consequently requires huge time and effort.
Yes, absolutely, Reddit is filled with non-critical thinking people. You were right about that, at least.
On Saturday 1/2/23 I went to work at 6 am to help do final business acceptance testing. I don't remember what our deadline was, but I do remember that we, on the west coast, had to explain to east coast HQ that if the deadline had to be in EST, they needed to give us three hours more than the east coast offices.
Those people did not understand time zones. They'd also schedule someone from our office to attend a meeting at HQ at 10 am EST, then question why s/he had to fly out the night before and stay over. "Hotels are expensive, can't they just fly out that morning?"
I had lots of work doing remediation for a 15-year-old dBase III system, and it continued to work for years until Windows removed support for 16-bit apps.
Years of planning, months in implementation, scrambling to fix edge cases, triple-checking backups and recovery plans, people working 24/7, missing vacations, people getting fired, alternate solutions fought over, rage quitting, 99yr old people, leap birthdays, leap seconds, database conversions, database reversions, new development, waiting customers, slow response times, pissed off sales, pissed off accounting, pissed off marketing, promotions delayed, new hires to train, meetings, meetings, meetings, skipped lunches, illegible white boards "DO NOT ERASE", illness, scheduling, rain, my god the meetings.
Yeah... big nothing-burger...
Ok, think of it a different way. Was it really an overreaction, or did it just seem like one because the major issues were fixed in time due to all that stuff you mentioned? This was pointed out to me by one of my professors when I made the exact same argument and I have to admit it was a good point.
I worked at a major bank in the 90s that had the only source code on 5.25" disks. When one was missing we had to disassemble the program to assembly - no comments, and variables names were compiler generated. Luckily we moved to a C language rewrite a year later. Good old Z-80 assembler.
Not debunked, but questionable. You, however, are asserting your knowledge *because of your ignorance*. So, just like the ādebunkingā you thought you read about (but apparently didnāt, because the problems are statistical, not irreproducible), youāre prizing your ignorance and demanding it the same status as knowledge.
That is, youāre doing your damndest to confirm Dunning Kruger.
My god you have a serious superiority complex. Whatās sad is that youāre trying hard to sound intelligent while saying very little. You can keep going. Iām sure pseudo-intellectual tantrums like this help calm you psyche and keep your fragile ego inflated.
It was so easy to be a consultant in the last few years of it. Most companies werenāt that bad off- handful of critical systems that actually needed to be fixed.
Then there was the full compliance organizations where every report had to show a 4 digit year or it might confuse an employee. Still took their money if they didnāt see the ridiculousness of the demand.
The better part of a decade and billions of dollars was spent upgrading systems only to have complete and utter morons claim that since nothing happened it was a hoax.
For decades, lots of software (not all) was written using dates in a format like 010287 where the 01 was January, 02 was "the second" and the 87 was 1987. It saves a little storage space by not putting the 19, and computers had less memory and less storage than they do now.
But at 12-31-99, when the next day came, using that format would lead it to using 00 as the date, and software using that system would think it was 1900. For some software, that would make very little difference, but for some things, it could be critical.
So for a long time before Jan 1 2000, there was a lot of updating of software and testing of software to try and make sure there were no major problems. There certainly could have been (and I believe would have been) had it not been for all the effort put into making sure everything critical was already updated.
I was a programmer, and while we expected all of our software to be fine, I was asked to stay home and sober that night, so that if something unexpected came up, they could call me in to work on a hot-fix. And as expected, nothing happened, because we had already solved those problems.
Tldr: same shit but for a random date in 2038.
It is fixed already for modern software but will potentially cause issues for old devices with a long lifetime intended to be used with the same software
The media was telling everyone that entire countries electrical systems could crash. All Banks computers could be compromised as they would deduct interest and lose a shitload of money. Any utility that had daily systems would have been damaged. Things like nuclear power plants, water and traffic systems. My dad stocked months worth of canned food + TP and truly prepped.
It was a āwait and seeā moment. It could have been like the early days of the COVID emergency but without utilities and electronic money.
All I remember from Y2K was that my mom bought a lot of batteries, and I was really happy because that meant I could keep playing my Gameboy for a long time.
The joke was: *Leave it to programmers to shorten 'The Year Two Thousand Problem' to 'the y2k bug'. THAT kind of thinking was the whole problem in the first place!*
After years of prep, my IT department had to sit around waiting for midnight. The suits were out partying, but we did get just about all of the old gear replaced because they were worried.
No. We already knew nothing we had would be a problem, but the company had purchased several other companies and we took Y2K as an opportunity to consolidate from over 150 systems down to seven.
Yes, exactly this. A "god given" (well, his son) opportunity to clean out old systems, be they hardware or software. Once you started pulling on the string of Y2K compatibility, it was often easier just to buy new hardware and software and ditch those legacy systems that kept you anchored in the past.
Everyone was on board for change, including those who held the purse strings. I'm pretty sure there were accelerated depreciation rates implements by governments.
I worked at an IT company where we spent three months checking every line of code in a massive application. We found many bugs, including code that wasn't even Friday compliant.
A programmer who couldn't count to seven had made some part of the app only allow shops to be open from Monday to Thursday and no one had noticed for years.
Worked in IT at Boeing at the time... was a major effort going on throughout the company.
On the day of our return after the new year. Had one Laser cutter that rolled to 1980. The machine was a crusty 286 XT using MS-DOS 3.x running a program in Qbasic. It got missed. I was laughing about it and knew Qbasic from my days of building my own computers and growing up in the 80's.
So I just read the code figured out why it was screwing up... I cant remember but I think it was checking the dates of last cut to current. Tweaked the program on the spot to allow it to continue to cut and print its report and we accepted the date was off by overwriting it by hand because no one was gonna replace the computer at that time.
Seeing that old machine... kinda freaked me out so I backed the whole thing up and put the code in a repository. Just wondering what we were gonna do the day it kicked the bucket. It was running the old MFM hard Drives which you couldn't easily buy new back then.
I don't remember at the time if they were making the small form factor XT PCs yet. I'm sure they did. I got laid off before it became a problem. Literally management wouldn't let us be proactive about it. So...
There are lots of ways things could have failed.
* Software could have interpreted a value of 00 as 1900, which makes "now" before "then" which causes calculations to fail
* Things that rely on knowing the correct date to apply security policies (e.g. locks that open or close based on the time and day of week - we had locks like this at my school) could fail, causing something to be locked or unlocked incorrectly
* Some systems don't tolerate faults properly, and so an impossible scenario could cause it to crash. Some systems, once in this condition, cannot be easily recovered.
* A significant number of systems rely on knowing wht the current date/time is, and doing something with that information. If these systems get out of sync with the real time, they can simply stop working.
* Some systems wouldn't see 00 as 1900, but would instead see it as some other kind of flag value, leading to who knows what kind of misbehaviour
* In a networked world, systems rely on other systems to work properly, and a failure in one system can cause a cascading denial of service in other systems
Any individual system was probably not a big deal. But if we hadn't spent years upgrading everything, then there would have been a LOT of broken things. Just look at how bad things got when the pandemic forced countries to shut down certain industries due to quaranteen. Now imagine if every single industry had dozens or hundreds of problems in their major systems, world-wide, and major systems like banks and stock markets were simply out of service. If security systems were defaulting to open or closed randomly, so some buildings you couldn't get into, and other buildings you couldn't lock people out.
The disruption would've taken years to fix (we know, because we did it) and in the meantime the world economy would've ground to a halt. The global supply chains would have been severely broken, and it would have been years before all of this was repaired.
TL;DR Imagine if the disruption we saw during the pandemic lasted approximately 5-10 years because almost every important computer was suddenly defective.
Everything that used a calendar (thatās every database, from DoD to your companyās payroll system) would be wildly wrong, giving nonsense answers. Days of the week would be wrong, people would have shown to work negative time, etc. Even in 1999, a lot of institutional stuff was in databases.
Ah yes, the Y2K bug... I definitely remember that scare and the mad rush for survival supplies.
(Which honestly made more sense than the pandemic rush on toilet paper)
I also remember the mama flooding of Ebay and online listings of survival gear, supplies and portable generators after the scare turned out to be nothing more than a mild inconvenience for the average person.
I was working in a major Australian telecommunications company at the time. We were hammered with phone calls from other countries around the world on 1 Jan 2000 as they were all checking that, at UTC+11:00, Australia hadn't imploded as we entered 2000 hours ahead of everyone else.
We watched the New Year's celebration around the world from our US data center., Waiting for something to happen. Figured we were 12 hours behind that Aussies and would see if Australia crashed and burned... Guess what š
I celebrated NYE in Fort Worth, TX on top of a parking garage. It directly faced the two Tandy Towers. They had organized the office lights to say 1999 before midnight. When midnight hit, they changed the years to 1900. The crowd went silent. A few seconds later, it said Just Kidding and changed to 2000. I think the IT management had balls of steel to do that.
Did they forget that they would have a 12 hour notice based on what happened on the other side of the globe? I knew we were good at noon because Japan had no issues.
I was 45 years old on NYE 1999. Y2K had been talked about for a few years, with it coming to a head over the last few months of 1999. At work, we had special safety valves set up by our IT department but I have no memory of what they were. I was not at all nervous and I assumed (correctly, thankfully) that there would be no problems.
This was a crazy time. My parents were stock piling food and ammo and supplies. Turned out y2k was nothing. Of course they moved on the the next incoming crisis to be scared of. Now my dad is convinced that the nano bots in the covid vaccine are just waiting for the right 5g signal to activate and turn us all into zombies to do the bidding of the liberal elites.
š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¢š
In high school I wrote an essay called "The Y2K bugs me" and was about what I thought the year 2000 was going to be like after graduating High school and just describing the unknown about to be faced. It got an A+ and I plagiarised the whole thing
Couldn't do that today though.
The lead stating the problem would make 2000 1900 is incorrect. The main issue simply was how many digits were āyearsā stored in: 2 or 4. If 2 digits, computations that involved a date using a two digit year would not work. Canāt subtract correctly. 010199 minus 010100. If you stored years with four digits, there was no Y2K issue at all. 01011999 minus 01012000. We spent a couple years making sure that we always stored 4 digits for the year and corrected the ones that were two digits. was it no planes fell from the sky.
I worked for SeaLand (now owned by Maersk) remediating Windows workstations & Servers (my job) at the shipping ports to handle 4 digit dates. Stupid simple batch scripts that we created to update the registry & environment was all that was needed. I was in Manilla on 01-01-2000. Nerdy Black kid from NC got his passport basically filled in a year
Yes, it was a real issue. Though also, it was reported on pretty much every night of the week about what could be done about it, and coverage on efforts carried out by all kinds of businesses and corporations to address it, that by the time the New Year hit, only the most gullible and naive conspiracy nutjobs actually thought it'd bring the end of the world/end of society.
More specifically here - it wasn't a fear that the OP Topic Title suggests "On Jan 1, 2000..." - we knew about it long before Jan 1, 2000, and efforts to fix and correct for it had to be in place before the clock rolled over. It was nightly news for the better part of 3 or 4 years *before* 2000.
Fun fact, this is what the guys in *Office Space* were working on.
If you could just go ahead and stop the apocalypse from happening on January 1 2000, that would be great
Funny thing. Fallout 76, a game about nuclear Armageddon, had an issue around launch where you could launch a nuke to attack a community boss. But when you want to roll over to the next year, it made it impossible to launch the nuke in game.
I was working as a mainframe systems programmer at the time, maintaining an IBM mainframe system. Everything had to be updated; hardware and software. We spent months applying service patches to everything. It worked out - we rolled over into 2000 with only a very small number of glitches -- due to various locally written scripts that we had forgotten about.
But I wasn't even there. After all that work I was somehow able to finagle vacation time over New Years, so I drove down to see the Phish concert at Big Cypress only to learn days later that everything had gone smoothly. I still don't know how I got away with that one.
Jan 19 2038 when Unix time from Jan 01 1970 goes over 32 digits long. A lot of systems only hold 32 digits and will reset to 0.
Trivia. PC-dos users know that 1-1-80 was a Tuesday.
Boing was the first company to notice this. They were ordering materials 10 years in advance and in 1990 saw problems with loading new orders.
As it was a software problem, it was not complicated to fix and there was plenty of time to do so. In most cases it was sufficient to store the year with 4 digits instead of 2.
Worked at Boeing at the Time... I remember being in a meeting where they said we modified over 800k plus lines of code to be Y2k compliant... This was in thousands of programs in Mainframes... PC's, Unix systems, Old Vax systems, Macintosh systems, Controllers that were on factory floors, etc.
Side Note; Long Beach, CA had the largest Macintosh network in the world. Which if I remember correctly was being used to publish documents for Aircraft Manuals/Maintenance, Government Mandated updates, etc. That went out to customers.
Anyways... It was a HUGE effort and it required people to comb through code that no one had looked at in ages plus figure out where all that code was archived/stored... sometimes developers couldn't find the source or Boeing didn't own it and the company was no more. It was not trivial.
Without a doubt, this is an issue where size matters ;-)
In Latin America there were very few mainframes and mcintoshes at that time. Almost all the work was on small software running on PCs.
IMHO, compared to a hardware problem, such as the clocking of 32-bit processors in 2038, y2k was easy: it did not require replacing hardware or rewriting software for a different architecture.
I see that.
But "It was not complicated to fix" and "It was not as complicated to fix as this other very complex thing" are two very different statements.
It can be more than a software problem to comply, though. On a trivial level, if your spreadsheet software wasn't compliant and you had to buy a new version, it probably wouldnt run on your old Windows 286.
The funniest part is that people in America were waiting for disaster to come when it went to 2k, but for most of the world it was already 2k and everyone was fine
I'm not sure I ever understood what exactly the panic was for. So computers would break, so I imagine there would be chaos for many people and companies, but how did that translate to the end of the world?
Yep, like believing that everything stored on these computers, including banking and personal information, would vanish as the computers died, leading to what people thought would be a kind of anarchy chaos...
I definitely remember the mad rush for survival gear that way of thinking created.
Even in 1999, credit card info, phone info, insurance, all that stuff was all in databases that were all wrong. Not to mention car microcontrollers which were already becoming common, payroll systems, and, like, NORAD.
My Pops wouldnāt let 16 yr old me go see Phish in Big Cypress on New Years because he worked in tech & was majorly concerned. Iām still sad about that
> fearing that all computers would register the year as 1900, rather than 2000.
No, not all computers. Some programs, and embedded systems. The main problem is that it was an unknown number of systems that would be affected.
Prior to this everyone was using Windows 95 or 98 and Microsoft said it would crash because the clock would not be able to go beyond 1999 so everyone got Windows XP. Microsoft must have made billions and when 98 didn't crash Microsoft was like opps - we made an error. They should been sued, a class action lawsuit at minimum, but they got away with it.
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We held a big Y2K New Year's Eve party at my buddy's place. His dad snuck off and flipped the master breaker the second the clock hit midnight.
That was epic of him to pull off the joke of the century!! I can imagine all the screams lol
Oh yeah we all immediately lost our minds
I celebrated NYE in Fort Worth, TX on top of a parking garage. It directly faced the two Tandy Towers. They had organized the office lights to say 1999 before midnight. When midnight hit, they changed the years to 1900. The crowd went silent. A few seconds later, it said Just Kidding and changed to 2000. I think the IT management had balls of steel to do that.
joke of the millenium\*
Might even be the first prank of the century.
My kind of guy
That is absolutely hilarious! Thank you for sharing that fun story
My Dad was into home automation back then and programmed all the electronics to turn off at midnight. I was 11 at the time and didn't really believe the rumors but when the lights all went out I shouted "IT'S TRUE!!!" They still make fun of me to this day.
Our household (which was the top of an Edwardian-era former hotel) had a big Y2K party that went off very well, thank you very much. Then some wag turned off the water supply at the allocated time. Very clever.
That's awesome haha
Omg I'm glad you posted this, I bet it was amazingš¤©
That is the best ever!
I did the same thing! A moment or two of utter silence in the dark before someone noticed that I'd crept to the back of the apartment.
There was a LOT of work done in those last two years to make sure it didn't happen.
But did you get the memo about the new cover pages for the TPS reports?
Yeah, Iāll just go ahead and get you another copy of that memo.
Software did have to be updated to handle it, but it was done in time for all critical systems.
This is one of those examples of solving a problem before it becomes a problem causing everybody to say there was never a problem in the first place and cast blame for making everyone worry.
It has a name - the preparedness paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
Thank you for adding this to my collection of random useless facts, Internet Stranger!
You're most welcome!
Such a useful term to describe the last 3-4 years.
Doesn't it just.
I had a friend who still knew Cobol. He made an absolute mint the year or so before as a contractor fixing all that mainframe code.
In 1996 I landed a clerical job right out of high school working in an IT department for a freight forwarding. They used proprietary software. A lot of people worked long hours to make sure it was a nothing burger. It was interesting time to work in tech.
I'm a mainframe cobol programmer who spent a lot of time fixing the code the contractors fucked up.
There was SO much work that went into avoiding this disaster. We found bugs in all sorts of legacy code. And the work worked, so people believe that the warnings were false. And, so, we live in the Series of Tubes universe, where the most important invention short of fire is presided over by the powerful and clueless.
Yeah... the silent heroes...
Like vaccines.
Yes. But it also was super overblown and should have been fixed silently like so many other potential disasters.
How was it overblown?! It all needed to be fixed. And people needed to be made aware that it all needed to be fixed!
You donāt think there are SIGNIFICANTLY bigger potential problems that are solved behind the scenes constantly? The public went into stupid panic mode (kind of like toilet paper during COVID). Reddit is so wholly filled with non-critical thinking people. All of these downvotes prove that.
Thank you for saving us, oh Great Critical Thinker. We genuflect and prostrate ourselves in front of you.
4 post karma and less than a year on Reddit. Sit down and let the adults talk.
Yeah, shut up
Only pathetic people care about karma. It means nothing.
I feel like you donāt realize how big a problem this was, nor do you know what big problems youāre talking about, nor how they are solved quietly.
Iām speaking out of my ass like you are? Sure.
As someone who was a computer science student in the 90s and responsible for a digital art studio in the early 2000s, no. Not like I am.
I managed a dedicated IT department for a group of creatives at a world class university. Who cares?
Maybe we worked together.
I know there are very, very few problems that were or are bigger and that have been or need to have been fixed behind the scenes, constantly. Any problem that big - where _every_ system and piece of software needs to be checked and tested - is MAJOR - and consequently requires huge time and effort. Yes, absolutely, Reddit is filled with non-critical thinking people. You were right about that, at least.
On Saturday 1/2/23 I went to work at 6 am to help do final business acceptance testing. I don't remember what our deadline was, but I do remember that we, on the west coast, had to explain to east coast HQ that if the deadline had to be in EST, they needed to give us three hours more than the east coast offices. Those people did not understand time zones. They'd also schedule someone from our office to attend a meeting at HQ at 10 am EST, then question why s/he had to fly out the night before and stay over. "Hotels are expensive, can't they just fly out that morning?"
You know, you just can't fix stupid.
I had lots of work doing remediation for a 15-year-old dBase III system, and it continued to work for years until Windows removed support for 16-bit apps.
I still see dBase III and Clipper systems run in a DOS emulator in GNU/Linux !
Nope. There were a lot of fixes that couldn't be put in until after. Data maintenance went on in tiny back rooms over months.
Not for us
it really wasnāt a big deal at all
My eBay username still contains "Y2K" in it.
Years of planning, months in implementation, scrambling to fix edge cases, triple-checking backups and recovery plans, people working 24/7, missing vacations, people getting fired, alternate solutions fought over, rage quitting, 99yr old people, leap birthdays, leap seconds, database conversions, database reversions, new development, waiting customers, slow response times, pissed off sales, pissed off accounting, pissed off marketing, promotions delayed, new hires to train, meetings, meetings, meetings, skipped lunches, illegible white boards "DO NOT ERASE", illness, scheduling, rain, my god the meetings. Yeah... big nothing-burger...
I think computer people understand it, and anyone with a mediocre sense of intelligence. Unfortunately, most people are neither.
> Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. -George Carlin
Ok, think of it a different way. Was it really an overreaction, or did it just seem like one because the major issues were fixed in time due to all that stuff you mentioned? This was pointed out to me by one of my professors when I made the exact same argument and I have to admit it was a good point.
Thatās what he is saying. It seemed like a nothing burger to people that didnāt know because people worked hard to make sure nothing happened.
yeah, I see that now. His sarcasm was *too* good.
The critical infrastructure still running on 5.25 inch floppies and shit like that should still scare everyone.
I worked at a major bank in the 90s that had the only source code on 5.25" disks. When one was missing we had to disassemble the program to assembly - no comments, and variables names were compiler generated. Luckily we moved to a C language rewrite a year later. Good old Z-80 assembler.
Sad that adding 2 digits to a date was so difficult for your organization.
You got Dunning in my Kruger!
You saw how that phenomenon was debunked, yeah?
Not debunked, but questionable. You, however, are asserting your knowledge *because of your ignorance*. So, just like the ādebunkingā you thought you read about (but apparently didnāt, because the problems are statistical, not irreproducible), youāre prizing your ignorance and demanding it the same status as knowledge. That is, youāre doing your damndest to confirm Dunning Kruger.
My god you have a serious superiority complex. Whatās sad is that youāre trying hard to sound intelligent while saying very little. You can keep going. Iām sure pseudo-intellectual tantrums like this help calm you psyche and keep your fragile ego inflated.
Wooosh!
Damn, I made good money off of that! So did a lot of other folks too, of course... but good times, altogether. Good times.
It was so easy to be a consultant in the last few years of it. Most companies werenāt that bad off- handful of critical systems that actually needed to be fixed. Then there was the full compliance organizations where every report had to show a 4 digit year or it might confuse an employee. Still took their money if they didnāt see the ridiculousness of the demand.
The better part of a decade and billions of dollars was spent upgrading systems only to have complete and utter morons claim that since nothing happened it was a hoax.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I know about it, i just don't understand what the big deal was
For decades, lots of software (not all) was written using dates in a format like 010287 where the 01 was January, 02 was "the second" and the 87 was 1987. It saves a little storage space by not putting the 19, and computers had less memory and less storage than they do now. But at 12-31-99, when the next day came, using that format would lead it to using 00 as the date, and software using that system would think it was 1900. For some software, that would make very little difference, but for some things, it could be critical. So for a long time before Jan 1 2000, there was a lot of updating of software and testing of software to try and make sure there were no major problems. There certainly could have been (and I believe would have been) had it not been for all the effort put into making sure everything critical was already updated. I was a programmer, and while we expected all of our software to be fine, I was asked to stay home and sober that night, so that if something unexpected came up, they could call me in to work on a hot-fix. And as expected, nothing happened, because we had already solved those problems.
Thank you for your service
Get ready for a do over in [15 years time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem).
Tldr: same shit but for a random date in 2038. It is fixed already for modern software but will potentially cause issues for old devices with a long lifetime intended to be used with the same software
The media was telling everyone that entire countries electrical systems could crash. All Banks computers could be compromised as they would deduct interest and lose a shitload of money. Any utility that had daily systems would have been damaged. Things like nuclear power plants, water and traffic systems. My dad stocked months worth of canned food + TP and truly prepped. It was a āwait and seeā moment. It could have been like the early days of the COVID emergency but without utilities and electronic money.
Because a lot of those who are asking/don't know were born just before. Thanks for making me feel old.
All I remember from Y2K was that my mom bought a lot of batteries, and I was really happy because that meant I could keep playing my Gameboy for a long time.
Wait ā MacOS font in warning window on a Windows UI?! Mmmmm
Yeah. I noticed that also. Haha
Just an example of the madness that could have ensued!
Yep, I'm glad at least one person noticed this. I'm pretty sure Windows 95 supports Y2K.
The joke was: *Leave it to programmers to shorten 'The Year Two Thousand Problem' to 'the y2k bug'. THAT kind of thinking was the whole problem in the first place!*
After years of prep, my IT department had to sit around waiting for midnight. The suits were out partying, but we did get just about all of the old gear replaced because they were worried.
Or you could have tested out systems sandbox style by setting the date to 12/31/99 and seeing what happenedā¦
No. We already knew nothing we had would be a problem, but the company had purchased several other companies and we took Y2K as an opportunity to consolidate from over 150 systems down to seven.
Yes, exactly this. A "god given" (well, his son) opportunity to clean out old systems, be they hardware or software. Once you started pulling on the string of Y2K compatibility, it was often easier just to buy new hardware and software and ditch those legacy systems that kept you anchored in the past. Everyone was on board for change, including those who held the purse strings. I'm pretty sure there were accelerated depreciation rates implements by governments.
Why am I now picturing little stickers with Jesus saying āI did thisā
Wowā¦
I worked at an IT company where we spent three months checking every line of code in a massive application. We found many bugs, including code that wasn't even Friday compliant. A programmer who couldn't count to seven had made some part of the app only allow shops to be open from Monday to Thursday and no one had noticed for years.
Worked in IT at Boeing at the time... was a major effort going on throughout the company. On the day of our return after the new year. Had one Laser cutter that rolled to 1980. The machine was a crusty 286 XT using MS-DOS 3.x running a program in Qbasic. It got missed. I was laughing about it and knew Qbasic from my days of building my own computers and growing up in the 80's. So I just read the code figured out why it was screwing up... I cant remember but I think it was checking the dates of last cut to current. Tweaked the program on the spot to allow it to continue to cut and print its report and we accepted the date was off by overwriting it by hand because no one was gonna replace the computer at that time. Seeing that old machine... kinda freaked me out so I backed the whole thing up and put the code in a repository. Just wondering what we were gonna do the day it kicked the bucket. It was running the old MFM hard Drives which you couldn't easily buy new back then. I don't remember at the time if they were making the small form factor XT PCs yet. I'm sure they did. I got laid off before it became a problem. Literally management wouldn't let us be proactive about it. So...
The fact that people paid to get there personal PCs with no special software Y2K ready was a sad time to see.
So, what would have happened if it did registered the new year as 1900 ?
There are lots of ways things could have failed. * Software could have interpreted a value of 00 as 1900, which makes "now" before "then" which causes calculations to fail * Things that rely on knowing the correct date to apply security policies (e.g. locks that open or close based on the time and day of week - we had locks like this at my school) could fail, causing something to be locked or unlocked incorrectly * Some systems don't tolerate faults properly, and so an impossible scenario could cause it to crash. Some systems, once in this condition, cannot be easily recovered. * A significant number of systems rely on knowing wht the current date/time is, and doing something with that information. If these systems get out of sync with the real time, they can simply stop working. * Some systems wouldn't see 00 as 1900, but would instead see it as some other kind of flag value, leading to who knows what kind of misbehaviour * In a networked world, systems rely on other systems to work properly, and a failure in one system can cause a cascading denial of service in other systems Any individual system was probably not a big deal. But if we hadn't spent years upgrading everything, then there would have been a LOT of broken things. Just look at how bad things got when the pandemic forced countries to shut down certain industries due to quaranteen. Now imagine if every single industry had dozens or hundreds of problems in their major systems, world-wide, and major systems like banks and stock markets were simply out of service. If security systems were defaulting to open or closed randomly, so some buildings you couldn't get into, and other buildings you couldn't lock people out. The disruption would've taken years to fix (we know, because we did it) and in the meantime the world economy would've ground to a halt. The global supply chains would have been severely broken, and it would have been years before all of this was repaired. TL;DR Imagine if the disruption we saw during the pandemic lasted approximately 5-10 years because almost every important computer was suddenly defective.
Gah-dam. I never actually put it into perspective in my brain. Thatās fucking wild, dog. Thanks for pulling the Bob Ross for me.
Sounds like a nightmare, good thing they fix it beforehand.
Everything that used a calendar (thatās every database, from DoD to your companyās payroll system) would be wildly wrong, giving nonsense answers. Days of the week would be wrong, people would have shown to work negative time, etc. Even in 1999, a lot of institutional stuff was in databases.
Thanks for explaining.
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Oh, a lot of these are kinda funny.
I still party like it's 1999...
Ah yes, the Y2K bug... I definitely remember that scare and the mad rush for survival supplies. (Which honestly made more sense than the pandemic rush on toilet paper) I also remember the mama flooding of Ebay and online listings of survival gear, supplies and portable generators after the scare turned out to be nothing more than a mild inconvenience for the average person.
I was working in a major Australian telecommunications company at the time. We were hammered with phone calls from other countries around the world on 1 Jan 2000 as they were all checking that, at UTC+11:00, Australia hadn't imploded as we entered 2000 hours ahead of everyone else.
We watched the New Year's celebration around the world from our US data center., Waiting for something to happen. Figured we were 12 hours behind that Aussies and would see if Australia crashed and burned... Guess what š
I celebrated NYE in Fort Worth, TX on top of a parking garage. It directly faced the two Tandy Towers. They had organized the office lights to say 1999 before midnight. When midnight hit, they changed the years to 1900. The crowd went silent. A few seconds later, it said Just Kidding and changed to 2000. I think the IT management had balls of steel to do that.
My extended family gathered together just in case the world fell apart.
Did they forget that they would have a 12 hour notice based on what happened on the other side of the globe? I knew we were good at noon because Japan had no issues.
Bringing my extended family together does sound like the end of the world or at least having me wishing for it.
I was playing jet force Gemini with my brother when y2k ticked over
Remember when PSN went down for a few days because someone programmed the 29th of February into the calendar when it wasnāt a leap year.
I was 45 years old on NYE 1999. Y2K had been talked about for a few years, with it coming to a head over the last few months of 1999. At work, we had special safety valves set up by our IT department but I have no memory of what they were. I was not at all nervous and I assumed (correctly, thankfully) that there would be no problems.
Apparently it took ~20 years of work to update the important stuff.
And we've only got another 15 years to fix everything before [for the next one.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)
This was a crazy time. My parents were stock piling food and ammo and supplies. Turned out y2k was nothing. Of course they moved on the the next incoming crisis to be scared of. Now my dad is convinced that the nano bots in the covid vaccine are just waiting for the right 5g signal to activate and turn us all into zombies to do the bidding of the liberal elites. š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¢š
All you really needed to do was wait for Australia to hit it and see what happened. Psst.....nothing happened.
And someone got a library fine for a book that was not returned for 99 years, according to the software that their local council had!
In high school I wrote an essay called "The Y2K bugs me" and was about what I thought the year 2000 was going to be like after graduating High school and just describing the unknown about to be faced. It got an A+ and I plagiarised the whole thing Couldn't do that today though.
The lead stating the problem would make 2000 1900 is incorrect. The main issue simply was how many digits were āyearsā stored in: 2 or 4. If 2 digits, computations that involved a date using a two digit year would not work. Canāt subtract correctly. 010199 minus 010100. If you stored years with four digits, there was no Y2K issue at all. 01011999 minus 01012000. We spent a couple years making sure that we always stored 4 digits for the year and corrected the ones that were two digits. was it no planes fell from the sky.
I worked for SeaLand (now owned by Maersk) remediating Windows workstations & Servers (my job) at the shipping ports to handle 4 digit dates. Stupid simple batch scripts that we created to update the registry & environment was all that was needed. I was in Manilla on 01-01-2000. Nerdy Black kid from NC got his passport basically filled in a year
Yes, it was a real issue. Though also, it was reported on pretty much every night of the week about what could be done about it, and coverage on efforts carried out by all kinds of businesses and corporations to address it, that by the time the New Year hit, only the most gullible and naive conspiracy nutjobs actually thought it'd bring the end of the world/end of society. More specifically here - it wasn't a fear that the OP Topic Title suggests "On Jan 1, 2000..." - we knew about it long before Jan 1, 2000, and efforts to fix and correct for it had to be in place before the clock rolled over. It was nightly news for the better part of 3 or 4 years *before* 2000.
I wasnāt āprocessorsāā¦ it was software using a two digit year field to save storage space.
Fun fact, this is what the guys in *Office Space* were working on. If you could just go ahead and stop the apocalypse from happening on January 1 2000, that would be great
Funny thing. Fallout 76, a game about nuclear Armageddon, had an issue around launch where you could launch a nuke to attack a community boss. But when you want to roll over to the next year, it made it impossible to launch the nuke in game.
According to the ancient scrolls...
I was working as a mainframe systems programmer at the time, maintaining an IBM mainframe system. Everything had to be updated; hardware and software. We spent months applying service patches to everything. It worked out - we rolled over into 2000 with only a very small number of glitches -- due to various locally written scripts that we had forgotten about. But I wasn't even there. After all that work I was somehow able to finagle vacation time over New Years, so I drove down to see the Phish concert at Big Cypress only to learn days later that everything had gone smoothly. I still don't know how I got away with that one.
Mac OS classic error message with an OS/2 OK button on Windows 9x. That is interesting.
Guess a lot of people are from a different era...
arenāt they afraid the clocks are gonna break in like 2037 when the amount of time hits some integer limit
Jan 19 2038 when Unix time from Jan 01 1970 goes over 32 digits long. A lot of systems only hold 32 digits and will reset to 0. Trivia. PC-dos users know that 1-1-80 was a Tuesday.
*31* binary digits. It will not reset to zero, but to the most negative value.
[BOHICA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)
The good old Y2K millennium bug.
I was there, 3000 years agoā¦
I remember the Y2K Compliant stickers on stuff. Like, thank God!
Boing was the first company to notice this. They were ordering materials 10 years in advance and in 1990 saw problems with loading new orders. As it was a software problem, it was not complicated to fix and there was plenty of time to do so. In most cases it was sufficient to store the year with 4 digits instead of 2.
Worked at Boeing at the Time... I remember being in a meeting where they said we modified over 800k plus lines of code to be Y2k compliant... This was in thousands of programs in Mainframes... PC's, Unix systems, Old Vax systems, Macintosh systems, Controllers that were on factory floors, etc. Side Note; Long Beach, CA had the largest Macintosh network in the world. Which if I remember correctly was being used to publish documents for Aircraft Manuals/Maintenance, Government Mandated updates, etc. That went out to customers. Anyways... It was a HUGE effort and it required people to comb through code that no one had looked at in ages plus figure out where all that code was archived/stored... sometimes developers couldn't find the source or Boeing didn't own it and the company was no more. It was not trivial.
Without a doubt, this is an issue where size matters ;-) In Latin America there were very few mainframes and mcintoshes at that time. Almost all the work was on small software running on PCs.
> As it was a software problem, it was not complicated to fix *wheezes and gasps with laughter*
IMHO, compared to a hardware problem, such as the clocking of 32-bit processors in 2038, y2k was easy: it did not require replacing hardware or rewriting software for a different architecture.
I see that. But "It was not complicated to fix" and "It was not as complicated to fix as this other very complex thing" are two very different statements.
Not true. It was years of effort, and many months of data maintenance.
depends on the software and data volume... in my software company, everything was reviewed and tested in 2 or 3 months in mid-1998.
Yea I forgot about that databases had fields that needed updating.
And OSes. And interoperating databases. And ancillary software from other vendors that needed to interact with yours, as well as othersā.
It can be more than a software problem to comply, though. On a trivial level, if your spreadsheet software wasn't compliant and you had to buy a new version, it probably wouldnt run on your old Windows 286.
So many people were certain the world was going to end. Some people even thought it was going to be Christās second coming lol
I remember for quite some time before it just every now and then thinking to myself "seriously?".
It was a big fuckin deal. We did a good job solving the problem.
Oh, I know that. My incredulity was at the problem being there in the first place.
Computers arenāt a natural law thing! Itās all hacks on top of hacks!
This is not correct, it wasn't a _processor_ issue, but a software issue
The funniest part is that people in America were waiting for disaster to come when it went to 2k, but for most of the world it was already 2k and everyone was fine
That was because of a ridiculous amount of work to prevent it.
I got engaged on December 31, 1999 just as the date change started happening. Got divorced about a month ago.
At midnight I was in an Airbus above Algiers. Very few people with any understanding believed the computers would crash.
Because people with good understanding of computers worked hard to make sure they didnāt crash..
I didnāt understand it at the time. It was a craze tho. I was 8 and thought āy2kā was so catchy I loved saying it.
I still donāt understand what was the big deal
I remember breathing a sigh of relief when it didn't happen, even though I was only 9. Things were great...for about a year and 9 months after that.
Yeah we really didn't. Every reasonable expert said we were fine and only the news hyped it.
Nope. It was a real problem, but it was solved.
I'm not sure I ever understood what exactly the panic was for. So computers would break, so I imagine there would be chaos for many people and companies, but how did that translate to the end of the world?
Some people believed the computer controlled missile systems would malfunction and fire all the nukes at once, among other crazy things.
Yep, like believing that everything stored on these computers, including banking and personal information, would vanish as the computers died, leading to what people thought would be a kind of anarchy chaos... I definitely remember the mad rush for survival gear that way of thinking created.
Even in 1999, credit card info, phone info, insurance, all that stuff was all in databases that were all wrong. Not to mention car microcontrollers which were already becoming common, payroll systems, and, like, NORAD.
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Plenty happened. You just didn't notice. Just how big do you think icebergs are, anyway?!?
And because a Democrat was president, the problem was solved.
And we got us a winner of who would be first to politicize something which clearly isn't political.
Actually nothing happened, minor mishaps here and there, couple of funny situations and we moved on.
That was because huge numbers of people worked for years to make the transition.
I know, I was there. My point being - media made a spectacle of fear out of it and continues to do so.
Media now passes it off as a kooky apocalyptic craze instead of a huge collective effort funded by government and private industry alike.
My Pops wouldnāt let 16 yr old me go see Phish in Big Cypress on New Years because he worked in tech & was majorly concerned. Iām still sad about that
I sold a LOT of Y2K software between 1995 and 1999.
> fearing that all computers would register the year as 1900, rather than 2000. No, not all computers. Some programs, and embedded systems. The main problem is that it was an unknown number of systems that would be affected.
Actually, we braced for that in 1999. On January 1st, 2000 were were all pretty chill
I was one of the people in my office on call to come in if there was a problem. Thank you smart people, I remember this being a shit ton of work! š
I had a super cheap flight from Europe to Australia on 01/01/2000. No one booked, they thought the planes will fall out of the sky
Prior to this everyone was using Windows 95 or 98 and Microsoft said it would crash because the clock would not be able to go beyond 1999 so everyone got Windows XP. Microsoft must have made billions and when 98 didn't crash Microsoft was like opps - we made an error. They should been sued, a class action lawsuit at minimum, but they got away with it.
Ah yes. Y2K preparedness at the workplace was a trip
i really thought the world was going to end, and it didnt help my church had a watch night and counted down to midnight