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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#371

Post by marcus_holmes »

giaour wrote: post #365
mbellotti wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's adorable that these answers are all in the past tense. This is still going on. Many of these systems still exist.

To be fair, I've met a lot of young COBOL programmers since starting to work on mainframe systems last year. I think the "elderly COBOL programmer coaxed out of retirement by dumptrucks full of money" dynamic that supposedly dominated the Y2K response is less prevalent these days, and companies that still run mainframe systems just realize they have to hire regular programmers and teach them COBOL and z/OS.

well, I witnessed it, so it's not really a supposition is it?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#372

Post by Diederich »

samstave wrote: post #369
Diederich wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner is the guy but it doesn't give any mention as to why I (and many of my peers) believe that his tenure as Walmart CIO had a strong negative influence on ISDs trajectory. I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis. We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) eve…

Heh, I had the same network back in that time too! 3640s all the way down! I had to recover the password on one when i inherited that network. I will never forget that password: Feet4Monkey. Ill also never forget my ix.netcom.com password that was initially assigned to me....

> ix.netcom.com

Nice, that was a blast from the past. I used netcom.com for a few years in the early 1990s. Good times.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#373

Post by SantalBlush »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #313

- Why did you catch that? + because it was going to fall. - Are you certain? + yes. - but it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen. Minority Report , 2002 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVGQHw9jrsk People worked for years in the late 1990s replacing systems that were not Y2K compliant with new ones that were. It is becoming ever…

Some folks think they're clever by repeating "Economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions," but they don't seem to understand the Fed's purpose.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#374

Post by Springcleaning »

It was real and most important issues got resolved because of the large investments. But there was also a lot of scammy consultancy going on.

I remember visiting a smaller hotel in the UK early 2000 where the check-in terminal had a Y2000 Approved sticker with a serial number. That made sense, but in the room everything with a plug, including the hair dryer had such a sticker.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#375

Post by ZainRiz »

blahblah12 wrote: post #363
ZainRiz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On another note, having listened to James Whittaker talk while at Microsoft, he was a phenomenal storyteller and speaker.

+10000 his talks are amazing to listen to

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#378

Post by swiftgoose »

klenwell wrote: post #335
jshevek wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 workin…

True. The first image that pops into my head when I hear Y2K is a Simpsons joke where airplanes and satellites start falling from the sky and landing in their backyard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0bBYK-7ZiU Oh, and Dick Clark melts.

I was working for Hughes, now Boeing Satellite Systems, for a couple of years doing Y2K remediation. I was writing ground station code that were on VAX/VMS, basically older hardware and software. So that thought did occur to me of satellites falling from the sky. From what I understand, everything worked out ok. There might be only one instance that we know of that was unanticipated when the year roll-over.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#379

Post by giaour »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #371
giaour wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I've met a lot of young COBOL programmers since starting to work on mainframe systems last year. I think the "elderly COBOL programmer coaxed out of retirement by dumptrucks full of money" dynamic that supposedly dominated the Y2K response is less prevalent these days, and companies that still run mainframe systems just realize they have to hire regular programmers and teach them COBOL and z/OS.

well, I witnessed it, so it's not really a supposition is it?

Sorry, didn't mean any slight at you by that. I don't doubt your account, but having no idea how widespread the practice was, its dominance on a large scale is just a supposition on my part.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#380

Post by bridgerj »

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…

What you're saying here is that there was no crisis.

The fact that people worked on date issues for a decade does not mean the public scare campaign in the late 90s was justified.

You could equally claim airplanes would crash if they weren't refuelled, or people would die if garbage wasn't collected. In those cases, the media is educated enough to know the claims are pointless.

In the case of y2k, they had little understanding of how enterprise IT worked, and lots of businesses who were happy to encourage that ignorance.

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