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and it was pretty embarrassing when I forgot to update this same thing in 2010
Man, I've just remember that I had to fix this kind of bug in 2010 and I am sure I just bumped the number to 20. I guess somebody had to be fixing it lately, I just hope they didn't just replace 2 with 3.
Nobody. None.
Everybody got a good landing in the pilot's sense of a good landing being one you walk away from. Think of your boss, all the people you work with and ever have. And they all suceeded.
So crisis, no. No way everybody pulls it off if it were a real crisis. But damn it made sales easy by consultants to all of the above who spent big. "Planes will drop out of the sky!"
A very powerful way to sell is through fear. We got sold the iraq war on weapons of mass destruction that could kill us in our beds here! And this was used and abused by consulting firms to make sales to managers and boards of directors who have no clue what a computer is and what it does and think hackers can whistle the launch codes etc. That fear based sales job happened on mass and was a vastly bigger phenomenen than y2k. But having said that there were so many people who bought the fear sales job that employed them that they still believe it. Many will post here about it and you can weigh it all up for yourself.
So yeah there were y2k issues, some got dealt with in advance, some didn't but nothing like the hype of 1999. Nothing like it.
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> people literally spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to fix it The sceptic inside me is curious as to how much they actually accomplished in their effort to fix it. I mean, yes, they spent billions to get millions of lines of code read, but how many fixes have been made and what would be the cost (when compared to those billions of dollars spent) if they weren't fixed at all.
A good friend of mine was (and still is) a civil/construction engineer. Other than some introduction courses in college, he had never done any programming before. But after losing his job in 1998, he was hired by a major European consulting company to work on the Y2K problem. With an auditorium full of others who had barely any programming experience, he was given a crash course in Cobol for a month, and then he had…
EDIT (for clarity): that’s what I would say, and I’m pretty sure many people smarter than I had said it - so I’m just curious what objections made business push forward with the “relatively unskilled” human labour intensive practices instead, because that’s the history we have now.
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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"?
We fixed it a few days later, but it didn’t cause much trouble so it was largely forgotten.
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I'm having PTSD just thinking about updates of YY to CCYY in mainframe code. Very real and heavy investment across numerous industries from aviation to financial and more. At a macro level, I remember it being pretty well managed risk and mitigation.
When you start 3+ years before the known threshold date, you're giving yourself the best chances at success. I remember flashing BIOSes for weeks in the computer labs at my university.
I wonder what the practical mixture of NAND flash vs EEPROMs was. I understand NAND wasn't especially stable back then.
Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…
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> 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.
Hmmmm. After thinking about that for a minute I realize that math and aesthetics do not mix and that one single format for years makes a lot of computers not get confused. I rest my case. :(
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I knew a guy that worked at Walmart for years, right out of college. He said that the biggest issue he had with onboarding people was impressing upon them the scope of Walmart's enterprise. You don't just "move fast and break stuff". If your clever hack causes an outage in pharmacy, then you're directly affecting millions of people across the country that need medicine.
Yup. It's funny, because for the first 2/3 of my tenure there, WalMart Information Systems Division did move extremely fast....and yet almost never broke anything. It was an amazing thing to see.
(You're almost certainly already aware of http://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport - but just in case. And hint hint.)
Of course though, because we had spent the previous few months setting clocks forward to see what broke, and fixing it.