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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#211

Post by School-Cotton »

joshstrange wrote: post #78
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…

This is always such an annoying problem: 1. Shine light on problem and make sure people hear about it 2. People respond and fix it 3. Outcome not as bad as you said it could be /because it was fixed/ 4. Some time later "That wasn't a big deal" No, it wasn't that big of a deal because we worked hard to fix it!

Mark my words, if the containment measures work and Covid-19 goes away, this is exactly what people will be saying. Drives me crazy.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#212

Post by Diederich »

Roboprog wrote: post #209
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…

I remember having to go into work at 4:00 AM to replace the shift that spent the night in the operations support center. Fortunately, the guys that spent the previous year sweating the details got it right. We had one system that printed year 100 in its log which was only used by humans. Unfortunately, I missed the party and cash the night shift got.

> that printed year 100

Did it print the year "100" or "19100"?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#213

Post by joshstrange »

School-Cotton wrote: post #211
joshstrange wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is always such an annoying problem: 1. Shine light on problem and make sure people hear about it 2. People respond and fix it 3. Outcome not as bad as you said it could be /because it was fixed/ 4. Some time later "That wasn't a big deal" No, it wasn't that big of a deal because we worked hard to fix it!

Mark my words, if the containment measures work and Covid-19 goes away, this is exactly what people will be saying. Drives me crazy.

To be honest I'd choose that timeline in a heartbeat over what I think we are barrelling to... But yes, it will drive me crazy if that happens.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#214

Post by zzo38computer »

Many things worked fine despite that (some software/hardware was already Y2K compliant even in the eighties); many people thought many more things would be problems, even stuff that does not deal with the date at all, but of course that doesn't make sense. Some things did cause minor problems, mainly display errors with the date (sometimes causing columns to not line up properly, but sometimes less severe than that). Some things would cause more problems, but perhaps they were already fixed, or fixed soon afterward; I don't know much about it.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#215

Post by vlan0 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #43
wefarrell wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

That client wouldn’t happen to be a small private college in WNY, would it?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#216

Post by krallja »

mytherin wrote: post #125
krallja wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not store the years since 1900 Most input systems were punch cards, which were designed to be fixed-length textual input directly from a user at a card punch machine. Teaching users how to map from “years since 1900” to the correct keys on the card punch is a lot more confusing and error prone than having the computer automatically convert from "71" to 1971.

That makes a lot more sense, but if it is just input then why not do the conversion of the string "71" to the efficient byte representation of 1971 when it is moved into the storage. If the computer can do a mapping of "71" -> 1971 then why can't it also do a mapping of "10-10-71" -> 26214 (days since 1900-01-01).

The punched card, for a long time, _was_ the storage.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#217

Post by mgkimsal »

vlan0 wrote: post #215
mgkimsal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That client wouldn’t happen to be a small private college in WNY, would it?

No. :)

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#219

Post by s_gourichon »

michaelmrose wrote: post #114
circlefavshape wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!!! I think you might be using an unusual description of "the public"

I think you probably misunderstand the actual size of this public. Between 30% and 40% believe that the earth was created as is between 6k and 10k years ago. 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.

Not quite the same topic, but even popes have been telling that Bible should not be taken literally at least for the past 23 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_and_the_Catholic_C...

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#220

Post by Scuds »

Diederich wrote: post #212
Roboprog wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember having to go into work at 4:00 AM to replace the shift that spent the night in the operations support center. Fortunately, the guys that spent the previous year sweating the details got it right. We had one system that printed year 100 in its log which was only used by humans. Unfortunately, I missed the party and cash the night shift got.

> that printed year 100 Did it print the year "100" or "19100"?

At the Living Computer Museum in Seattle they have an IBM S/360 that prints out we’re in year 19120.
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