111–120 of 385 posts
YES. It was real.
I was finishing an engineering degree (CSE) in 1992 and several of my peers took consulting jobs to work on Y2K issues. For nearly a decade a huge amount of work was done to review and repair code.
Y2K is the butt of many jokes, but the truth is: it didn't happen because the work was done to fix it. Sort of ironic.
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>> It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s. I think you mean "working ON it". Talking to developers as a broad group from that time wouldn't necessarily produce any useful information. The person you replied to was himself a developer working in the late 90s. During the late 90s, I talked to a lot of developers, but only a small percentage of them were on Y2K jobs.
We were all on Y2K jobs, in the sense that for the decade of the 90s you'd get looked at very weirdly if you tried to produce code and systems using two digit years.
For context, most of the devs I worked with at that time finished their CS degrees within the previous 10 years, and were not legacy systems programmers. Doing 2 digit years was inconceivable to them.
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>We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public. As someone who was forced to spend Y2K in a "prepped" cabin on the side of a mountain with two years of supplies buried underneath, I think you might overestimate the quality of the public's response to Y2K. The public did not maturely understand that software needed to be updated and everything was OK. There was some real panic out there. It was a…
!!! I think you might be using an unusual description of "the public"
https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-creationist...
People who believe that the earth evolved over time due to a completely natural process is mostly gaining ground through losses to "god guided evolution" not young earthers who are going strong.
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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.
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There were a lot of Y2K related tasks in the course of many developers generally activity. Where I worked at the time, there were not developers solely dedicated to Y2K work. The Y2K issue pretty much caused an employment boom for software developers though.
I was fixing Y2K bugs at a company founded in 1997. Unless you never touched date stuff, I can't imagine being oblivious to Y2K issues working in IT in 1999.
So while we were -aware- of the Y2K issue, it didn't impact any of us in a concrete fashion. We would talk about people we knew on Y2K projects, which were mostly mission critical legacy systems.
So it's not inconceivable for devs in the 90s to have only cursory awareness of the -real- issues that the people who worked on Y2K projects were facing and solved.
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.
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…
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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…
When 5MB disk storage system is the size of a small car and costs $50k, you fight for bytes. Or if your data is stored on magnetic tapes and reading in a dataset can be costed by the kilobyte, takes minutes per megabyte, and requires a million dollar's worth of equipment and dedicated staff, you fight for every byte. The phone I carry today is hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the $5,000,000 mainframe…
To 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…
>> This was immediately noticed ..., a fix was ... rolled out in less than an hour. I guess Agile/Scrum etc wasn't a thing then else the hour would be spent in a stand up!!!