No it was not a crisis. There were plenty of bugs in legacy systems that needed to be fixed, but legacy systems have bugs all the time, for example when the dates for daylight savings time changed. The general public was not well informed and also generally didn't have a software background to understand the problem.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
11–20 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#12I was working at a telecommunications startup in 1999. They were founded in 1997. A big part of what I was doing was fixing Y2K bugs. That said, none of the bugs would have been critical to the operations of the services. Everything was in the billing systems and I think if unfixed it would have been more of a reputation hit than anything. Also, "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. https://en.wik…
From the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked:
> In modern vernacular usage, however, begging the question is often used to mean "raising the question" or "suggesting the question".
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#13I've also found myself musing on a similar question, but one where you may have a different temporal perspective at this particular moment: In six months, are we going to collectively believe that the Coronavirus was nothing and we massively overreacted to it? Because if we do react strongly, and it does largely contain the virus, that will also be "proof" (quote-unquote) that it wasn't anything we needed to be so proactive about in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, humans are not good at accounting for black swan events, and even less so for averted ones.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#14There 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.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#15Watch it happen...
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#16Imagine that 1% of all software had an issue, across all of the economic tissue of the developed world. Now imagine that this software would start failing, all on January 1st 2000, everywhere around the world. Or better still, not failing, just silently corrupting data.
Just like the crisis we are currently facing in our health systems, it seems unlikely that we would have had enough IT resources to deal with the issues in real-time.
This is one of the cases of a "self-denying-prophecy", much like acid rain. There was an issue, we collectively dealt with it (better yet, we actually anticipated!), and now people are saying that in the end there was no issue.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190823-can-lessons-from...
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#17I was working at a telecommunications startup in 1999. They were founded in 1997. A big part of what I was doing was fixing Y2K bugs. That said, none of the bugs would have been critical to the operations of the services. Everything was in the billing systems and I think if unfixed it would have been more of a reputation hit than anything. Also, "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. https://en.wik…
Don't even get me started on "epicenter"
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#18[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#19I was working at a telecommunications startup in 1999. They were founded in 1997. A big part of what I was doing was fixing Y2K bugs. That said, none of the bugs would have been critical to the operations of the services. Everything was in the billing systems and I think if unfixed it would have been more of a reputation hit than anything. Also, "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. https://en.wik…
Personally, I've given up on begging the question. It just means "raises" now. The descriptivists always win in the end.
Look at it another way: a centuries-old mistranslation is finally being fixed. (-:
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#20Even if not - it was a pretty great payout event for older devs that are pretty much in their 70s now.