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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#321

Post by C1sc0cat »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #310
skissane wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard, a number of IT departments used it as justification to dump legacy systems. For example, at a former employer of mine, a big justification for getting rid of the IBM-compatible mainframe and a lot of legacy systems which ran on it (various in-house apps written in COBOL and FORTRAN) was Y2K. In reality, they probably could have updated the mainframe systems to be Y2K-compliant. But, they didn't…

COBOL programmers were charging a fortune to be hauled out of retirement to work on this. There was a huge shortage of experienced COBOL devs. And devs who actually understood the specific legacy system involved were even rarer. If the company had customised their system and not kept the documentation up to date or trained new programmers on the system, well, they didn't have a choice. They had to replace it.

My Boss at BT took Voluntary redundancy and went COBOL contracting he made Bank!

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#322

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

dragonwriter wrote: post #318
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #313

- Why did you catch that? + 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…

> It is only in the last few years that it has become common to question the veracity of disaster averted through effort. No, it isn't. Questioning whether Y2K was overhyped started before Jan. 1, 2000 and accelerated on Jan 1, 2000 when there weren't major breakdowns. If you are too good at mitigating a problem before it manifests, there's a good chance lots of people will doubt there was a problem to mitigate. On t…

My apologies. I have edited the comment after that, because I didn't feel that "It is only in the last few years" was entirely correct.

However, I feel that this tendency is getting worse. A denial of the role of expertise. The question "was Y2K real?" is a political issue now, and it's not because of Y2K specifically, it's as a comparison to more recent events.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#323

Post by sgt »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #105
kitteh wrote: post #14

There were parts of our telecom infrastructure that weren't ready but got fixed before y2k. A certain mobile phone switching vendor (think cell towers, etc.) ran tests a year before to see what happened when it rolled over and the whole mobile network shut down (got in a wedged state where calls would fail, no new calls, signalling died). They fixed it and got customers upgraded in time.

I dont think I even had a mobile phone in 1999. Probably not a critical system back then.

I got my first cell phone in 1996. It worked really well (GSM network) and SMS's were available. So I can easily imagine that if you relied on it, it seemed like a critical system to you personally or as a business.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#324

Post by keiru »

protomyth wrote: post #48

Yes, 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…

>Y2038 is in your walls

Fuck me, as this is true

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#325

Post by bjourne »

fanf2 wrote: post #128
bjourne wrote: post #37

What does the science say? I have seen exactly zero studies which claim that the y2k bug would have led to disastrous consequences if action had not been taken. 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…

Try looking for y2k articles here https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/decade/1990

Which of those articles provide evidence for that the y2k bug could have been a major disaster?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#326

Post by jason_slack »

My first real job out of college was for a company doing only Y2K prep. That is the reason why I was hired specifically.

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 :-)

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#327

Post by C1sc0cat »

unilynx wrote: post #228
mytherin wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

A whole byte for a year? What a waste in 1995 when you've got just 640KB for DOS, your code and your data. I looked up my old code. Shave off a bit of the year and: struct Date { unsigned day : 5; unsigned month : 4; unsigned year : 7; }; a full date in 16 bits. (well, in borland C++ 5 at least) and as it was an accounting application, working with the bitfields was so much nicer than ordinal days you would use nowad…

the problem came from the 60's when memory was really expensive on mainframes and you had things like drum storage

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#328

Post by Tor3 »

abiogenesis wrote: post #235
dwheeler wrote: post #30

Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…

> people literally spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to fix it The sceptic inside me is curious as to how much they actually accomplished in their effort to fix it. I mean, yes, they spent billions to get millions of lines of code read, but how many fixes have been made and what would be the cost (when compared to those billions of dollars spent) if they weren't fixed at all.

>..and what would be the cost (when compared to those billions of dollars spent) if they weren't fixed at all.

I worked on fixing Y2K bugs at the time. It was very methodically and planned, and tested on-site at a space agency. If we hadn't fixed those Y2K issues at the time then weather forecasts would have suffered greatly. The cost of that happening? Hard to calculate I think.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#329

Post by cesarb »

snvzz wrote: post #303

Meanwhile, Linux didn't move the time_t to 64bit despite. 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.

That's the curse of backwards compatibility. AFAIK, on BSDs not only are the kernel and the C library developed together (so neither needs to stay compatible with older versions of the other), but also programs are expected to be recompiled for every major release of the operating system (so there's no need to stay compatible with binary-only software from the 90s).

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#330

Post by airstrike »

ZainRiz wrote: post #284
klenwell wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember hearing a story on NPR years ago years after Y2K with someone knowledgeable on the subject that addressed this question. He gave basically the same answer you did: a lot of effort went into avoiding disaster and a lot of people treated it after the fact as if it was hype or hysteria. I recall the interview because it changed my significantly thinking on the subject. (I wasn't in the industry at the time of…

It was also really difficult to detect bugs since no good testing paradigms had been established yet. This created an exploitable opportunity for the few who knew how to write automated tests. During the Y2K panic Sun Microsystems (IIRC) announced that they would pay a bounty of ~$1,000 per Y2K bug that anyone found in their software (due to the lack of automated tests, they didn't even know how to find their Y2K bug…

Thanks for sharing. This is why I love HN
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