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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#221

Post by kragen »

criley2 wrote: post #80
mywittyname wrote: post #55

We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public. I doubt we will have such luck addressing the Y2038 problem.

>We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public. As someone who was forced to spend Y2K in a "prepped" cabin on the side of a mountain with two years of supplies buried underneath, I think you might overestimate the quality of the public's response to Y2K. The public did not maturely understand that software needed to be updated and everything was OK. There was some real panic out there. It was a…

I remember someone on Usenet (probably in 1998 or 1999) using the term "programmer denialists" to insult programmers who said the Y2K problem was mostly under control.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#222

Post by JJMcJ »

I know of at least one company that had to replace some computers with out-of-support OS that was not Y2K compliant.

Big companies (banks, insurance, health care) had elaborate contingency plans.

There were some failures, but nothing to disrupt life for 99.9% of the population, unless you call a website that says it's

   January 5, 19100
a failure.

There have been other problems. Day 10,000, but VAX and Unix systems, some programs had problems, once again mostly cause they didn't allow for the longer strings.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#223

Post by mhh__ »

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…

People I've met definitely think it was an Apollo 13 type emerging problem rather than a largely preempted issue.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#224

Post by weej »

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'm having PTSD just thinking about updates of YY to CCYY in mainframe code. Very real and heavy investment across numerous industries from aviation to financial and more. At a macro level, I remember it being pretty well managed risk and mitigation.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#226

Post by ComputerGuru »

Diederich wrote: post #212
Roboprog wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember having to go into work at 4:00 AM to replace the shift that spent the night in the operations support center. Fortunately, the guys that spent the previous year sweating the details got it right. We had one system that printed year 100 in its log which was only used by humans. Unfortunately, I missed the party and cash the night shift got.

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#227

Post by aaron_m04 »

Sparkware wrote: post #155

I worked for Columbia/HCA, now HealthCare of America, at the time and we started gearing up for Y2K in January, 1997. Every system, every piece of hardware - both in the data centers and in the hospitals - had to be certified Y2K compliant in enough time to correct the issue. As I recall, we were trying to target being Y2K ready on January 1, 1999 but that date slipped. A "Mission Control" was created at the Data Cen…

> I remember my first day on the job when I asked my boss what our Y2K policy was. He shrugged and said "If it breaks, we'll fix it when we get back from New Year's".

I'm a little surprised. TDT is in a critical business too (transportation).

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#228

Post by unilynx »

mytherin wrote: post #70
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's less cause to use small data sizes for timestamps and date codes now. Storage has grown by orders of magnitude, the idea that a numeric data type would only be large enough to store a 2-digit year or that you would want to save disk space by abbreviating an extra 2 letters is foreign to a lot of new developers. And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing...

Perhaps you could expand on this as I was not involved in Y2K myself. Storing dates with 2 digit years doesn't seem to make much sense as a storage saving mechanism for me. If you want to store only the year, why not store the years since 1900? That way in a single byte you can go all the way up until 2155. If you want to store it bit-aligned rather than byte-aligned why limit yourself to 00-99? 7 bits can store the…

A whole byte for a year? What a waste in 1995 when you've got just 640KB for DOS, your code and your data.

I looked up my old code. Shave off a bit of the year and:

  struct Date { 
       unsigned day : 5; 
       unsigned month : 4; 
       unsigned year : 7; 
    };
a full date in 16 bits. (well, in borland C++ 5 at least)

and as it was an accounting application, working with the bitfields was so much nicer than ordinal days you would use nowadays.

month and years was all you really cared about anyway when summarising data. in finance all months have 30 days anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#229

Post by marcus_holmes »

I worked for Hyder, the Welsh Water and Gas authority, on their Y2K project, from March 1998 to November 1998.

Their billing and management system was written in COBOL, and contained numerous Y2K bugs. If we did nothing, then the entire billing system would have collapsed. That would mean Welsh people either receiving no bills, or bills for >100 years of gas/water supply, depending on the bug that got triggered. Very quickly (within days) the system would have collapsed, and water/gas would have stopped flowing to Welsh homes.

Each field that had a date in it had to be examined, and every single piece of logic that referenced that field had to be updated to deal with 4 digits instead of 2.

I wasn't dealing with the actual COBOL, I managed an Access-based change management system that catalogued each field and each reference that needed to be changed, and tracked whether it had been changed or not, and whether the change had been tested and deployed. This was vital, and used hourly by the 200+ devs who were actually changing the code.

We finished making all the changes by about December 1998, at which point it was just mopping up and I wasn't needed any more. I bought a house with the money I made from that contract (well, paid the deposit at least).

The cost was staggering. The lowest-paid COBOL devs were on GBP100+ per hour. The highest-paid person I met was on GBP500 per hour, enticed out of retirement. They were paid that much for 6-month contracts, at least. Hyder paid multiple millions of pounds in contract fees to fix Y2K, knowing that the entire business would fail if they didn't.

Still less than the cost to rewrite all that COBOL. The original project was justified by sacking hundreds of accounts clerks, replaced by the COBOL system and hardware. By 1998 the hardware was out of date, and the software was buggy, but the cost-benefit of a rewrite made no sense at all. As far as I'm aware Hyder is still running on that COBOL code.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#230

Post by marcus_holmes »

Diederich wrote: post #85

To 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 went on holiday over actual Y2K, flew to Australia and spent the Big Night on the beach, completely incommunicado. It focused the whole team, we had to be OK for it, because if we weren't we were fucked ;)

We did multiple dry runs, setting server times to 31/12/99 23:55 and waiting 5 mins to see if anything died. Mostly it was OK, most of our systems were OK, but a few were dodgy and needed some changes.

The Big Night rolled around and we were OK. The planning had worked, and nothing fell over. I got the email on Jan 1st - all good.

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