And the people that did all the coding? India! Y2K bug put using remote programmers in India on the map as something that works. And Y2K was perfect for this since the logic changes in 1000s of files was all the same. Very easy bug to fix, but just needed humans who can understand code to do it.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
141–150 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Colleague was just dealing with a clients of their who was still using TLS1.0. They're running classic ASP on Window Server 2008, and can't (effectively) migrate. Colleague had been raising the alarm for months (since they started on the project) that "this is going to mean all your systems will stop working in early 2020" but no one seemed to care or understand. They did, last week, put in ... haproxy as an SSL term…
We've been forced to deal with the TLS issue by our software product's customers. Some of our technically-minded folks have been raising the issue for a while but new features are sexy and sell, and fixing not-yet-broken code doesn't. Amazing/discouraging that only the threat of immediate loss of six figures of income gets any attention.
Yeah... "let's do Fitbit integration!" seems to win out over "let's make sure we can upgrade core systems to make sure they don't break in March".
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Colleague was just dealing with a clients of their who was still using TLS1.0. They're running classic ASP on Window Server 2008, and can't (effectively) migrate. Colleague had been raising the alarm for months (since they started on the project) that "this is going to mean all your systems will stop working in early 2020" but no one seemed to care or understand. They did, last week, put in ... haproxy as an SSL term…
I hope your colleague had a paper trail of the alarms he raised when it came time to point fingers. For executives with limited IT experience I honestly don't know if there is a good solution, other than having them deal with the disaster and having a clear paper trail that points the finger in their direction. They won't make the same mistake twice.
He did/does.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#144I was enlisted in the USAF and was assigned as part of a two-person group to deal with Y2K issue for all unclassified systems on the base. We were outside the normal AF procedures because the base didn't have wartime mission. The two people assigned to the group were myself (E-3 or E-4 at the time) and a very junior (but smart) lieutenant.
We basically inventoried every unclassified computer system on the base. If it was commercial, off-the-shelf software that could be replaced we recommended they replace it. If it could not be replaced with newer version (because it ran software that could not or would not be replaced) we replicated and tested it by changing the computer hw clock. In all cases we recommended shutting down the computer so it wasn't on during the changeover.
Most home-grown systems were replaced with commercial software.
One interesting case was a really old system, I think it had something to do with air traffic control. It was written by a guy who was still employed there and he was still working on it. I got to interview him a bunch of times and found the whole situation fascinating and a little depressing. Yes, he was storing a 2-digit year. He didn't know what would happen when it flipped. He didn't feel like there was a way to run it somewhere else and see what would happen (it's very difficult to remember but I think it was running on a mainframe in the comm squadron building).
The people in charge decided to replace it with commercial software. Maybe the guy was forced to retire?
Overall the base didn't have any issues but only because they formed the "y2k program management group" far enough ahead of time that we were able to inventory and replace most everything before anything could happen.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except most muggles I know are saying that Y2K was a complete fraud because nothing went wrong, and it was all a scam. I'm seriously thinking of hibernating through the 30 days covering Y2038.
Really? Even in flyover country the people I know tend to understand that it was only not an issue because of hard work on the front-end.
"Even in flyover country", ouch, you realize the comments earlier about Walmart's Y2K efforts were all driven out of Arkansas, right?
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#146To add a little nuance: A global retailer you've definitely heard of that used to own stores in Germany spent a lot of time preparing for Y2K. This was a long and painful process, but it got done in time. But problems still slipped through. These problems ended up not being that big and visible because a large percentage of the code base had just been recently vetted, and a useful minority of that had been recently u…
I love these kinds of war stories of incredibly capable people. That was great planning for the unknowns.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#147Yes, it was a real crisis. This revisionist history that some are now saying it was no big deal. It was a big deal and many people spent many hours in the 90's assuring that the financial side of every business continued. I am starting to get a bit offended at the discounting of the effort put in by developers around the world. Just because the news didn't understand the actual nature of the crisis (Y2K = primarily f…
Y2038 will be interesting because one wonders how many engineers will be around with the skills to address it. Even now it might be hard to scrape together a team.
I wonder how many systems still being sold today have 32-bit time stamps? I get the feeling you are dead on right about the skill problems, but I do wonder how many folks are only consumers and not originating any of the programming?
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
>dbase At the time I was managing a dBase / FoxPro medical software package...we were a small staff who had to come up with Y2K mitigation on our own. Our problem is we only had source code for "our" part of the chain...other data was being fed into the system from external systems where we had no vendor support. Thus our only conceivable plan was to do the old: If $year It worked in 99.9% of the cases which was enou…
Wouldn't it be this? date="200$year" Or does foxpro somehow know to zero pad a 1 digit number?
It's been a very long time since I've worked with dBASE/FoxPro, but from what I remember it stores data in a fixed-width format. So for a column to store an integer, it will zero pad the front of it to fit the width of the column.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
>dbase At the time I was managing a dBase / FoxPro medical software package...we were a small staff who had to come up with Y2K mitigation on our own. Our problem is we only had source code for "our" part of the chain...other data was being fed into the system from external systems where we had no vendor support. Thus our only conceivable plan was to do the old: If $year It worked in 99.9% of the cases which was enou…
A much more insidious problem with the Y2K bug was the leap year calculation. As you point out, the 20-digit-year thing was relatively easy to fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Leap_years
I still love the fact that if you only implemented the first rule or had the knowledge to implement all 3 rules, it would totally work, but if you implemented 2 of the 3 rules you were wrong.
It taught me a great lesson about results not proving correctness as how you got there could bite you later.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#150As a home user, I had software on my old computer (80286 XT from end of 80s) which ended up saying we were in the year 00. Don't remember if time/date was otherwise correct.
I do realize it could've been a lot worse if it were not thanks to the many efforts of people in the tech industry.
And in case you wonder: I would bet the same is going to happen with regards to 32-bit and 2038.