It wasn't a crisis, but it was a real problem that needed to be, and was, fixed in plenty of time. It didn't surprise anyone in the industry as it was well known throughout the 90's it was coming. The biggest problem was identifying what would break and either fix or replace it. Many companies I dealt with at the time humorously did both: they had big remediation projects and as soon as they finished, decided to dump most of the old stuff for shiny new stuff anyway.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
41–50 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#42Not really. At least not like it was portrayed. The public thought that all computers stored dates like `99` for 1999, so potentially all code that handled dates/times would need to be fixed.
But actually most software uses epoch time or something similar. So the scope of the problem was much smaller than the news implied.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#43From someone who went through it and dealt with code, it was a real problem but I also think it was handled poorly publicly. The issues were known for a long time, but the media hyped it into a frenzy because a few higher profile companies and a lot of government systems had not been updated. In fact, there were still a number of government systems that were monkey patched with date workarounds and not properly fixed…
It a shame that we as engineers can't just say "this maintenance is required to fix this known issue. It's not a huge deal but will cause trouble if it's not dealt with". Instead we have to be all doom and gloom and tell management that the company/world will end.
Colleague was just dealing with a clients of their who was still using TLS1.0. They're running classic ASP on Window Server 2008, and can't (effectively) migrate. Colleague had been raising the alarm for months (since they started on the project) that "this is going to mean all your systems will stop working in early 2020" but no one seemed to care or understand.
They did, last week, put in ... haproxy as an SSL terminator in front of the main server, and will test a switch over this week. This was 8 months of foot-dragging for about 3 hours of setup/config, and a couple more hours of testing. When all your clients are hitting a web server, and their browsers will all stop rejecting your certs, things will get ugly fast - as in "your business will effectively stop functioning". It just sounded like "doom and gloom" but... how do you message this effectively? It requires the receiving parties to actually understand the impact of what you're saying, regardless of terms you use.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#44I was involved in several of the efforts at the time including building the communications systems for the "studio NOC" at AT&T in NYC. I started hearing about vulnerable systems about 5 years before 2000 and we were doing serious work on those systems about 2 years before. I predicted (to friends and family who didn't always care to believe me) that it would be a non-event because disruptions would be localized in smaller systems (we were expecting local banks and credit unions). Even I was blown away by how few of those systems had problems. So know when people say Y2K was no big they fail to recognize the work that went into to ensuring it was a non-event.
There's a very current equivalent - if we're good about social distancing, people may talk about COVID-19 the same way.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#45No. It was not. I was a software developer in a large US Bank at the time. We had already dealt with it years ago for critical systems. All the banks had.
Right, everyone was well aware. But I think there was a bit of "We don't need to worry because we're replacing the mainframe with the new ERP system in 1997", and then whoops the mainframe was still running.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It a shame that we as engineers can't just say "this maintenance is required to fix this known issue. It's not a huge deal but will cause trouble if it's not dealt with". Instead we have to be all doom and gloom and tell management that the company/world will end.
Colleague was just dealing with a clients of their who was still using TLS1.0. They're running classic ASP on Window Server 2008, and can't (effectively) migrate. Colleague had been raising the alarm for months (since they started on the project) that "this is going to mean all your systems will stop working in early 2020" but no one seemed to care or understand. They did, last week, put in ... haproxy as an SSL term…
Similar story, had an older version of MySQL on a 2008r2 server until a few weeks ago.
Advocating for 2 years to migrate off that box.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#47I had some SGI IRIX machines impacted by the Y2K bug: if you ran an unpatched OS, nobody could login after Jan 1, 2000 0:0:0Z.
One of them, was running calculations 24/7 for a research group at the university and fortunately they were able to stop the jobs in time for an OS upgrade.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#48Yes, 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 financial problems) is no excuse to crap on the hard work of others. It is sad that people that got the job done by working years on it get no credit because they actually got the job done.
I see this as a big problem because Y2038 is on the horizon and this "not a big deal" attitude is going to bite us hard. Y2K was pretty much a financial server issue[1], but Y2038 is in your walls. Its control systems for machinery that are going to be the pain point and that is going to be much, much worse. The analysis is going to be a painful and require digging through documentation that might not be familiar (building plans).
1) yes there were other important things, but the majority of work was because of financials.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#49Earlier 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...
More importantly we have figured out algorithms for time that account for timezone, daylight savings time, different calendar systems, and probably something else I'm not aware of. These all work by counting seconds since a fixed date.
Note that the algorithms were known since at least the late 1960s. Storage space even then shouldn't have been enough of a concern. However people still screw it up all the time.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#50From someone who went through it and dealt with code, it was a real problem but I also think it was handled poorly publicly. The issues were known for a long time, but the media hyped it into a frenzy because a few higher profile companies and a lot of government systems had not been updated. In fact, there were still a number of government systems that were monkey patched with date workarounds and not properly fixed…
> 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 was a related story here on HN recently. A system was assuming a 101-year-old was actually only 1 year old, presumably because of 2 digit arithmetic.