It was real, and we get to deal with it again in 18 years. Without a great deal of thought, I'm wondering why we didn't address both at the same time.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
171–180 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know about now but it wouldn't shock me We'll be up for a few Y2K bugs at the start of every decade because 'year += year https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2020/new-years-b...
There's less cause to use small data sizes for timestamps and date codes now. Storage has grown by orders of magnitude, the idea that a numeric data type would only be large enough to store a 2-digit year or that you would want to save disk space by abbreviating an extra 2 letters is foreign to a lot of new developers. And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing...
>> And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing
There's still COBOL code out there running core business systems that's older than I am, and I'm closer to 60 than I am to 50.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#173To add a little nuance: 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 u…
Couldn't the rollover be simulated ahead of time by simply setting the date forward? Seems crazy that you had to have people on the ground fixing things as the clock struck 0.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#174It was a crisis, but it was actually prepared for and handled, which is why things didn’t go wrong.
The trick yo avoiding predictable crises is to actually doing something before it happens in order to avoid it.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#175Well, there were fallouts, but few disastrous ones.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#176To add a little nuance: 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 u…
Couldn't the rollover be simulated ahead of time by simply setting the date forward? Seems crazy that you had to have people on the ground fixing things as the clock struck 0.
Sure. On systems under your control.
It's the network of interacting systems that prevents this from being so simple.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you could expand on this as I was not involved in Y2K myself. Storing dates with 2 digit years doesn't seem to make much sense as a storage saving mechanism for me. If you want to store only the year, why not store the years since 1900? That way in a single byte you can go all the way up until 2155. If you want to store it bit-aligned rather than byte-aligned why limit yourself to 00-99? 7 bits can store the…
> If you want to store only the year, why not store the years since 1900? That way in a single byte you can go all the way up until 2155. You're making an assumption in that statement that there's a byte and it's eight bits in length. This was not always true. Punch cards didn't really work that way, and fair number of CPU's didn't either. Early machines used various decimal systems and 6-bit characters were widespre…
CDC...if it was like the CDC system I worked on back in the early 80s, the 6-bit chars (64 distinct chars, including control chars) did not include lower case Latin. Our system was munged so that lower case alphabetic chars could be represented by prefixing a backslash. I wrote my dissertation on that system, and fortunately the editor I used displayed a backslashed char as lower case.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#178Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#179To add a little nuance: 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 u…
Couldn't the rollover be simulated ahead of time by simply setting the date forward? Seems crazy that you had to have people on the ground fixing things as the clock struck 0.
All systems in the gigantic clockwork of interconnected legacy would need to be rolled simultaneously- and it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that there are systems in that mix that nobody knew could be affected. To this day I read about systems that come up as a surprise when they start to fail and nobody owns them and the persons responsible have long since lived on.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#180Yes, it was a real crisis. This revisionist history that some are now saying it was no big deal. It was a big deal and many people spent many hours in the 90's assuring that the financial side of every business continued. I am starting to get a bit offended at the discounting of the effort put in by developers around the world. Just because the news didn't understand the actual nature of the crisis (Y2K = primarily f…
This is always such an annoying problem: 1. Shine light on problem and make sure people hear about it 2. People respond and fix it 3. Outcome not as bad as you said it could be /because it was fixed/ 4. Some time later "That wasn't a big deal" No, it wasn't that big of a deal because we worked hard to fix it!
I have a vivid recollection of reading a Scientific American article in late '98 or early '99 that claimed that no matter how much time and $ was put into fixing Y2K before 1 Jan 2000, there was going to be a disaster; it was just a question of having a bigger or smaller disaster, but even with best effort months. I have recently looked for that article, without success. Does anyone recall it/ have a PDF (image) of it?