Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#281

Post by ZainRiz » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #271

dwheeler wrote: post #30

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…

From what I've heard, a number of IT departments used it as justification to dump legacy systems. For example, at a former employer of mine, a big justification for getting rid of the IBM-compatible mainframe and a lot of legacy systems which ran on it (various in-house apps written in COBOL and FORTRAN) was Y2K. In reality, they probably could have updated the mainframe systems to be Y2K-compliant. But, they didn't…

As they say in DC, never let a good crisis go to waste

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#282

Post by kentbrew » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

Spent that night in the NOC, for absolutely nothing. The only thing that broke was our guestbook, which came from Matt's Script Archive and thought the year was 19100 on New Year's Day.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#283

Post by ZainRiz » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

f2000 wrote: post #280

Was employed by a large bank in their web division. We fixed many Y2K bugs that would have been triggered. Was on duty New Year's eve and there were a few Y2K bugs that surfaced but nothing show stopping. My anecdotal opinion is that the panic to fix these bugs likely prevented some larger cascading effect/catastrophe. Remember, this was 1999 when testing/QA practices were not always de rigueur. For some shops, Y2K m…

Fun story related to this:

During the Y2K panic Sun Microsystems (IIRC) announced that they would pay a bounty of ~$1,000 per Y2K bug that anyone found in their software. As you noted, there was very little automated testing at the time so these problems were really hard to discover.

James Whittaker (a college professor at the time) worked with his students to create a program that would parse Sun's binaries and discover many types of Y2K bugs. They wrote the code, hit run, and waited.

And waited. And waited.

One week later the code printed out it's findings: It found tens of thousands of bugs.

James Whittaker went to Sun Microsystems with his lawyer. They saw the results and then brought in their own lawyers. Eventually there was some settlement.

One of James' students bought a car with his share.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#284

Post by ZainRiz » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #257

dwheeler wrote: post #30

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…

I remember hearing a story on NPR years ago years after Y2K with someone knowledgeable on the subject that addressed this question. He gave basically the same answer you did: a lot of effort went into avoiding disaster and a lot of people treated it after the fact as if it was hype or hysteria. I recall the interview because it changed my significantly thinking on the subject. (I wasn't in the industry at the time of…

It was also really difficult to detect bugs since no good testing paradigms had been established yet.

This created an exploitable opportunity for the few who knew how to write automated tests.

During the Y2K panic Sun Microsystems (IIRC) announced that they would pay a bounty of ~$1,000 per Y2K bug that anyone found in their software (due to the lack of automated tests, they didn't even know how to find their Y2K bugs)

James Whittaker (a college professor at the time) worked with his students to create a program that would parse Sun's binaries and discover many types of Y2K bugs. They wrote the code, hit run, and waited.

And waited. And waited.

One week later the code printed out it's findings: It found tens of thousands of bugs.

James Whittaker went to Sun Microsystems with his lawyer. They saw the results and then brought in their own lawyers. Eventually there was some settlement.

One of James' students bought a car with his share.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#285

Post by hinkley » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

dwheeler wrote: post #30

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…

And the dotcom bust came when it did in part because the Y2K spending was lifting all boats. A bunch of companies shifted from buying too much to buying not much.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#286

Post by zhoujianfu » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

At the time I predicted it would all work out okay... just because every day millions of computer systems broke because of unknown bugs and we were okay. This bug we knew about 40 years in advance. My company actually ended up having two pretty major y2k bugs we hadn’t fixed. Come January 2nd we fixed them like we had to fix dozens of other bugs every day.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#287

Post by rconti » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

Not a programmer, but an Ops guy 6 months into my career.

All I know is, I plan to retire by age ~57 (before the 2038 bug hits :) )

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#288

Post by wp381640 » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #271

dwheeler wrote: post #30

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…

From what I've heard, a number of IT departments used it as justification to dump legacy systems. For example, at a former employer of mine, a big justification for getting rid of the IBM-compatible mainframe and a lot of legacy systems which ran on it (various in-house apps written in COBOL and FORTRAN) was Y2K. In reality, they probably could have updated the mainframe systems to be Y2K-compliant. But, they didn't…

Worked in a project to migrate a huge and critical .gov database from an AS400 nobody understood anymore to Microsoft SQL Server. We had to guess some of the values in some bitwise fields through trial and error. Made it with a few weeks to spare - nobody noticed.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#289

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 6:04 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #242

dwheeler wrote: post #30

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…

Dear god, reviving the ghosts of IT departments past!!! Yes, updating JDEdwards AS/400 systems and many a PC was a big project, but i dont recall doing it at that time as being super difficult... frack ist so long ago i cant really recall many of the details other than reporting daily on the number of systems updated. Also, fuck you google - this was when you were nascent a i converted the entire company to your “min…

It happened to all of us. But be glad you are not there now.

None of those people contacting you, or phone screening, were Google employees. They were, or worked for, contractors. It didn't matter to them or to Google whether anybody they contacted was hired.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#290

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #197

cjohnson318 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Story I heard from someone who was at Walmart recently was that the surest way to get in trouble was to finish in a week what they had planned to take three months.