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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#131

Post by Diederich »

hyperpape wrote: post #91
Diederich wrote: post #85

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…

Why the generic description? Are you unable to say which retailer?

Just being cute. It's WalMart Stores, Inc.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#132

Post by Diederich »

onychomys wrote: post #100
hyperpape wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the generic description? Are you unable to say which retailer?

The only global retailer that we've all heard of that owned stores in Germany in 1999 but doesn't now (note the "used to own stores" in the comment) is Walmart: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/jul/28/retail.mone...

That's a bingo. I wasn't particularly trying to obfuscate.

I'm curious how you so quickly figured it out though.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#133

Post by acdha »

Yes. I worked for a COBOL vendor at the time and we had customers and colleagues tell us how many things would not have functioned without the time spent remediating it — not planes falling from the sky but, for example, someone at a household-name credit card company saying they wouldn't have been able to process transactions.

This was victim of its own success: since the work was largely completed in time nobody had the huge counter-example of a disaster to justify the cost. I'm reminded of the ozone hole / CFC scare in the 1980s where a problem was identified, large-scale action happened, and there's been a persistent contingent of grumblers saying it wasn't necessary ever since because the problem didn't get worse.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#134

Post by dezgeg »

mytherin wrote: post #119
davengh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are fighting for bytes then storing dates as "DD-MM-YY" strings is very inefficient, as you are wasting a factor 4X on storage compared to just storing the days since 1900 as a 2-byte integer. I understand that storage used to be expensive, but I don't understand where the two-digit year comes into play as I can't envision an efficient storage mechanism that is limited to exactly the years 1900-1999.

BCD (Binary-coded decimal) comes to mind; which can store values 0-99 in one byte and with native support in older CPUs.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#135

Post by plughs »

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 will be interesting because one wonders how many engineers will be around with the skills to address it. Even now it might be hard to scrape together a team.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#136

Post by wjdp »

We integrate with a lot of third parties with varying levels of legacy conversion required to do so. At least one still stores years as two digit numbers. This is the payments industry.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#137

Post by sharpy »

unilynx wrote: post #27
davismwfl wrote: post #4

From 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...

One system I worked on showed the date as year 3900, because the function for getting current year would return 2 digit for year = 2000. So the code did 1900 + GetYear(). Replaced it with just calling GetFullYear() or something like that.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#138

Post by Japhy_Ryder »

Peter Gibbons: Well see, they wrote all this bank software, and, uh, to save space, they used two digits for the date instead of four. So, like, 98 instead of 1998? So, like, 98 instead of 1998? Uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and, uh... it doesn't really matter.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#139

Post by Loughla »

ColinWright wrote: post #121
computerphage wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately the two events will occur in the order they that they will. Having a reference will help explain the issue.

Except most muggles I know are saying that Y2K was a complete fraud because nothing went wrong, and it was all a scam. I'm seriously thinking of hibernating through the 30 days covering Y2038.

Really? Even in flyover country the people I know tend to understand that it was only not an issue because of hard work on the front-end.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#140

Post by mschaef »

mytherin wrote: post #70
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 widespread also. This explains a bit of why the C language and descendants often have native support for Octal literals and Unix permissions are built around three bit groupings.

On a personal note, even in the very early 90's, I also remember using a CDC machine (a descendant of Seymour Cray's 6600) that supported 60-bit words with 6-bit characters. Pressure to move to 64 bit words with 8-bit bytes resulted in dual mode design that could be booted either way.

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