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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#301

Post by [deleted] »

ZainRiz wrote: post #284
klenwell wrote: post #257

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#302

Post by altitudinous »

At some point those of us who worked on Y2K will be dead. This question will come up again, and there will be no-one left to prove it or defend it. At that point it will be come a giant conspiracy. I'll be happy to have been part of the legendary mysterious Y2K coverup!!!!

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#303

Post by snvzz »

Meanwhile, Linux didn't move the time_t to 64bit despite.

They're still working on it now, and not fully prepared.

The BSDs fare much better on that, as most of them have done this a long time ago.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#304

Post by tdy721 »

ncmncm wrote: post #289
samstave wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh it mattered to the recruiters, right up until they realized he didn’t fit the template.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#305

Post by thaumasiotes »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #226
Diederich wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It wouldn’t matter because that is a point-of-use detail, eg printf("year: %s%d", rand()%2 ? "19" : "'", year); Where the real problem is the upstream year value.

It looks like it matters. If it prints "100" then it's representing the year 2000 internally as the year 100 when the year 1995 is represented internally as 1995. If it prints "19100" then it's representing 2000 internally as 100 when 1995 is represented as 95. That second scenario doesn't cause any problems -- 2000 is still 5 years later than 1995, etc.

(Or, if the log is expected to print 95 instead of 1995, then 100 is what we expect it to print for 2000, but the difference still matters -- 19100 in that case would show that something was seriously wrong.)

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#306

Post by jshevek »

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…

>treated it after the fact as if it was hype or hysteria

I agree with everything you and the parent said, but there was also hype and hysteria on top of it all - especially among the communities of preppers, back to the landers, and eco-extremist types. I met entire communities of technophobes who declared I was just ignorant or 'a sheep' and refused to believe me when I tried to explain that the industry was working on the problem and had a solid shot at preventing major catastrophe.

Frightening predictions of power plants going offline for days, erratic traffic lights causing mayhem, food and water supplies being interrupted, even reactors melting down were not uncommon.

As always, there is money to be made by exploiting people's fear. This hysteria was considered an irrelevant side show by most educated people, the way I look at the chem trail people or the way I used to view the anti-vaxxers [1], but the unjustified hysteria was real.

[1] Before I learned their numbers were growing and could threaten herd immunity in some areas.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#307

Post by wickerman »

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 had a teacher in college who'd been part of a project to fix the Y2K bug in the bank he worked at the time. He said to us when talking about project management, that the only project he saw actually finish on time was that one.

The pressure was immense. People don't realise what a huge success story the Y2K situation really was.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#308

Post by Razengan »

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…

> from "wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-we" column into the "must-be-done" column

Sounds like some of the benefits from the Coronavirus crisis, like the increase in working from home.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#309

Post by foobar1962 »

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 worked at a University that had a 28 story tower. Around 1998 they set the clock in the lift management system to 1 January 2000 and all the lifts lowered themselves to the bottom of the lift wells because they hadn't been serviced for 50 years (or something).

So yes indeed stuff was broken, but it got fixed before the big date.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#310

Post by marcus_holmes »

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…

COBOL programmers were charging a fortune to be hauled out of retirement to work on this. There was a huge shortage of experienced COBOL devs. And devs who actually understood the specific legacy system involved were even rarer. If the company had customised their system and not kept the documentation up to date or trained new programmers on the system, well, they didn't have a choice. They had to replace it.
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