It was indeed. Lot of diligent development work, lot of diligent field work checking individual machines and updating software from CD-ROMs. USB storage wasn't a thing, you burned stuff to CD or used floppy disks. You could also use a laptop with a network cable but that was generally more trouble than it was worth if you had to deal with Windows or Mac deployments. On large corporate networks you could update each desk unit from a central server, but that was impractical on many smaller/bespoke network setups. Linux system administration was not as smooth as it is today, but it wasn't so different.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
291–300 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#292I really recommend this video from LGR about the Y2K crisis https://youtu.be/Xm5OiB3CPxg
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#293It was real, and there was very little fallout b/c tens of thousands of IT staff worked for years leading up to 2000 to fix the bugs. The Indian IT outsourcing industry was effectively created by the Y2K bug. Those companies did a large amount of the bug fixing.
More details / sources on the outsourced fixing?
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#294I was the lead console operator during the midnight rollover on NYE for an aging fleet of state-owned mainframes and minicomputers which were affected by the bug. Some of the machines could not be updated with a fix, so we were almost completely uncertain as to how these machines would behave. Testing on many of those machines was a huge investment. A lot of effort went into checking and re-checking job code. It was a lot of work for everyone. As mentioned here by others, it could have been (would have been) worse were it not for the heroic efforts of programmers to bug-proof their job code in the run-up to the rollover. As the lead console op, my responsibility that night and morning was to try and ride any trains that decided to jump the tracks. The skills I developed then still serve me well today, and I will forever be grateful to those grayest of graybeards for the trust I was extended when chosen for that role. Everyone on the payroll was there for the rollover except for the next shift's operators. For my part, it was in the end a lot of preparation which thankfully was not needed. I must admit to having a drink before that shift started. But when the rollover came, all was quiet. And after a few nervous hours, we poured some champagne with the hero programmers who were there in the room watching their jobs run without any issues.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#295I didn't run into any Y2K problems - for UNIX/Linux itself this was mostly a non-issue due to times being stored in at least 32-bit time_t at that point. Individual applications may have had their own Y2K related issues of course, but I didn't run into any.
However, one issue I did run into nearly two years later was when UNIX time_t rolled over to 1 billion seconds. The company I worked with at the time was running WU-IMAP for their email server, plus additional patches for qmail-style maildir support. We came into work on September 10th 2001 and all the email on our IMAP server was sorted in the wrong order.
Turns out there was a bug in the date sorting function in this particular maildir patch (see http://www.davideous.com/imap-maildir/ - "10-digit unix date rollover problem"). I think we were the first to report it to the maintainer due to the timezone we were in. First time for me in identifying and submitting a patch to fix a critical issue in a piece of open source software! My co-worker and I were chuffed.
Of course, we swiftly forgot about it the next day when planes crashed into the NY World Trade Center.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oooh. Do you remember any notable number of systems turning into doorstops in the process? I wonder what the practical mixture of NAND flash vs EEPROMs was. I understand NAND wasn't especially stable back then.
EEPROM. And there has always been a reflash method for bricked firmwares for all AMI and Phoenix BIOS' as well. Insert disk with firmware, Hold a key, power on.
Once upon a time we got somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 dell workstations and not a single one failed the bios upgrade. 10/10 would do again
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
How apropos to current events.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#298Yes, 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…
Y2K has this tragicomic portrayal in the movie Office Space
ahhh i remember as a teenager making sure our board of ed systems were Y2K-compliant. numerous times the principal staff would evacuate the office to take care of some action going on in the halls of the school. leaving me with access to the entire student records db and the VP login and password written on a sticky under the keyboard (not even joking!). in addition this was a laptop so RAS details were conveniently saved in network neighborhood.
this left me at a crossroads. i thought about writing malware that would randomly raise peoples semester grades by 4 points (e.g. C- would became a B+). i thought about mass changing grades. i thought about altering a target group of kids i didn't like. all but the last of the scenarios ended with me getting fingered because I was the smart computer kid. if i didn't touch my grades i would have plausible deniability. i wrote the malware. then i watched office space and decided to think about my actions (and promptly forgot as a horny teenager does). soooo glad i didn't release it because years later i went back into the code and found a leftover debug that would have targeted the only 2 kids in the school who had this letter in their last name.
tl;dr: office space is real
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bug…
That's a fantastic story, I'm impressed the professor didn't try to take the whole settlement.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Wasn’t this originally said by Winston Churchill?