Y2K is one of those stories we look back on and think what a silly old load of nonsense. Truth is, if it wasn’t for the countless hours of overtime people put in to making those outdated systems support the date change, it really would have been utter carnage. You saw how crazy things got when we started to run low on toilet paper for a few weeks.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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My dad was one of those working overtime, I remember he was so tired that Christmas.
Annoys me nowadays when I see people say stuff like... All that panic and no problems at all!
There were no problems because people worked really hard for no problems, Kevin!
Its the same issue with efficient epidemic policies; they might be restrictive at times, but when they succeed, then there are always some people who say all was overblown and needlesly restrictive and so on.
"If you're doing it right, people won't be sure if you did anything at all"
It was the same as COVID.
People said if we didn't do anything, shit would get bad.
So lots of people did lots of stuff, and it wasn't a big deal.
It's natural human variation for some people to think it's always not a big deal. We evolved for it to vary because that's what helped the overall group survive.
Somebody has to be the first out the cave to see if the wolves are still out there. If we all left at the same time they'd rip everyone to shreds. It helps the group to have a couple idiots around to test if it's safe.
Agree with everything you said except that Covid was still a big deal even with the preparedness
It seems like it was a big deal.
But we didn't see mass deaths except when ERs ran out of beds...
Which thankfully wasn't that often, if we didn't do anything, they'd have been full everywhere I don't think you understand how fast society would have broken down if that was happening for a year.
Like if you get in a plane crash and broke a leg, people wouldn't say they were happy you were ok because broken legs don't suck, they'd mean you survived.
NY had bodies in freezer trucks didn't it? But ya, it was mostly in certain places and sectors.
Wouldn't it be more like SARS back in the day? Before covid was cool. Pretty sure I heard we were on the brink of an epidemic but thanks to smart people and less wilfully proud ignorant douche bags, it didn't.
Sometimes one's purpose is only to serve as a warning for others.
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At a SQL conference, I met a bunch of engineers who were part of the Y2K fix for their companies. They spent 1998 hustling for equipment and setting it up in 1999. Almost all of them were "optimistic" that they'd be fine by September.
But during the rollover, they all said they all did pray to the computer gods.
Yup, covid taught us one thing, when stocking up, prioritize toilet paper first. ;)
And that's how shortages happen
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I was doing tech work back then (still do, but I used to, too!)
It was a lot of low scale doomsday prepping. Making sure you had enough canned goods and water and stuff.
Majority of folks had no clue and did no prep at all. Tiny minority went end times level.
I made sure that I had 6 gallons of water in the fridge and groceries.
My favorite Mitch Hedburg joke. I use it all the time.
You mean you used to use it (you still do, too!).
Low to mid-grade prepping got me through COVID without having to buy Lysol and TP at outrageous prices for like 8 months. :)
My parents loaded up on water and toilet paper.
We lived like fucking kings.
Mostly we partied like it was 1999.
Yup. I was at a concert in the final minutes of the century. A fuse blew just after midnight so all the lights went out which was a tense moment but life went on.
No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.
I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”
most of the concern for Y2K was actually about old systems. keep in mind, the IRS, for example, still runs servers with COBOL on it today, as their main database. it works, and it's reliable. They're far from the only group (read: banks, government agencies, hospitals,) who still do so.
those systems... they had no idea what would happen and had to figure something out. most programs at the time didn't actually acount for the first two digits of the year. 1922 and 2022 would have been indiferentiable to those programs. for then-modern systems, it was a simple patch. For the old equipment.... not so much...
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Nuclear reactor meltdown was high on my list.
I vageuly remember people kept on going on about planes falling out of the sky. "Welp, it's 1900 now, guess I need to ignore all input and nose dive."
Water treatment for me. There was a water treatment plant test where the computer went "No treatment in 100 years? Better dump ALL the chemicals then!" LA had a problem with raw sewage release.
Scared the hell out me. Water was my #1 priority.
I was in high school, and I remember babysitting my brother's kids for new years. I'd invited a friend to hang out with me while I watched them, but her parents were very freaked out about Y2K and insisted she stay home with them. They did do some prepping on water and canned goods, but not quite to the "bunker under their floorboards" level. As for me and my family, we carried on as if life would continue as normal, and thanks to countless people working tirelessly, it did just that.
I worked as a cto in a publicly traded bank in the USA.
In the USA, the regulation was that all banks had to have 10% of all deposits in cash. For example, If you were a billion dollar bank, you had to have 100 million in cash available at all times.
Because of Y2K, there were deep concerns their would be a bank run, so all banks had to have 20% of deposits as cash. Enormous sums of cash.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, my wife and I were taken by federal authorities to a safe house, where we were heavily guarded.
We knew in advance they were taking us, but we didn’t know where and when it happened our cell phones were taken from us.
Around 4 am they said everything was ok, my wife and I opened some champagne and they drove us home.
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People did most of the damage to their own systems with stupid (overdoing) testing in advance of Y2K.
Many regular/timed jobs in the system.
Set the clock forward by a few years.
Jobs running fine.
Set the clock back.
Jobs sitting in boredom, because all is done for the next few years... TADAA! :-)
I knew a family that bought a farm, bought a few years worth of food to start their stockpile, and buried thousands of gallons of fresh water to prepare for Y2K. No one else I knew took Y2K seriously. Look who's laughing now!
I wish I could just up and buy a farm, that sounds like the life to me.
Considering property prices I'd say they're laughing. Real estate purchase in 1999. Damn, makes me jealous.
At the time I ran a large campus network where we spent all of December laying in contingency plans and doing tabletop drills just in case some Y2K bug hit and took us out.
I hosted a party that New Year's Eve, but stayed sober(-ish) so I could assess and deal with any fallout. Midnight approaches, we do the countdown. Clock hits zero and I smooch a couple of the ladies attending. I disappear to my home office upstairs to assess....
2 devices down, same location. 1 more device down, next door. Everything else us up and fine. Odd.
The devices all went down about 20 minutes prior to midnight. Not Y2K. Not critical sites, it can wait til next business day.
I close up shop about 0015 hours 2000-01-01 and go back downstairs to rejoin my party, aiming to catch up with the other drunks. Shenanigans ensue.
Reason For Outage: there was a frat house next door to the two buildings that went down, and they had a house fire that burned the tree out front, which scorched our aerial fiber runs into the next two buildings down. Ridiculous coincides are ridiculous.
So yeah. Y2K was a non-event.
Y2K was a non-event.
It's worth mentioning that it was a non-event thanks to the tireless efforts of millions of programmers reviewing billions of lines of code. The problem was real, and the threat of total financial meltdown was real, and we prevented it because we all agreed that there was a problem that needed fixing.
It's also worth keeping in mind that the problem had been fixed for months, if not years, before the media turned it into a frenzy. Most of the work had been done, and it was only the slim chance that something critical had been overlooked. The panic and fearmongering was massively overblown. It's like being in a plane that lands, and then they announce the engine had fallen off in mid flight. Yes, it could have been bad, and the plane might still present a risk to everyone onboard, but the worst of the danger has passed.
It's worth mentioning that it was a non-event thanks to the tireless efforts of millions of programmers reviewing billions of lines of code.
Oh, I don't mean to downplay the magnitude of the challenge! That it was a non-event is a minor miracle easily a decade in the making thanks entirely to the efforts of people way smarter than me. While I didn't sit in on code reviews myself, there were a couple of Old Programmers who came back from retirement to review some of our own COBOL code, and older. They were happy ro share. It was a formative event for me as a young buck.
The UNIX epoch rollover in 2038 is going to be more of the same. Many systems haven't yet been converted over to 64-bit time, and there are a LOT of embedded systems out there. Hopefully attrition will take them, but we all know the IT lore of that one old NT server sealed up in the wall, and still serving files somehow.....
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Not far off from what I remember. Definitely knew people that went as far as buying land out in the mountains and stockpiled food and water there in a cabin.
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My dad worked at a bank at the time. I don't know much about his job, it's over my head, something about daily transfers and loans of large amounts of money between banks, dealing with the federal reserve, and making sure bank reserves are stable and where they need to be (he's the person I call whenever I hear of a coming recession or a bank collapse that hits the news, because he gives me the no bullshit or hysteria facts of whether or not I should be concerned and start buckling down or not). I was just a kid for Y2K, but I do remember it's the only time in my life my dad ever worked overtime, he went from being an off work at 5 on the dot to not getting home until after our bedtime every day for months before New Years. I honestly have no idea what he was doing, but he was busy making sure something was good to go.
Some companies made money from some clueless managers and CEOs.
I worked at a big power and light company, some big boss at the headquarters hired a company to certify our pcs where y2k compliant (we already knew they were ok!).
A guy around 50 with suit and two younger technicians, around their twentys. I was behind them when when they sat down at every pc in our office, inserted a floppy disk, and ran a freeware software! A freeware that anyone could download from internet.
Of course the software printed on the screen that those pc where y2k compliant.
That company charged a fee for every certified pc, and we had lots of pcs.
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I just remember my mom buying a lot of batteries, and me being happy, because that meant I could have a lot of time with my Gameboy.
I grew up in Florida and anytime there was a hurricane coming people would flock to the stores and buy all the generators and bottled water.
It was kind of like that, but in December.
Most people I knew personally legit just ignored it. It was just another doomsday hoax like the Mayan calender scare of 2012. Everybody was talking about it, but nobody actually thought it would be an issue.
It wasn't really a hoax. It was a legitimate problem. Lots of software could have broke. It didn't because developers were diligent. There was a long leadtime to New Year's with lots of people working overtime.
Yeah, I understand that it was a legitimate issue for some industries, but at the social level people were saying that all of the world's nuclear weapons would launch simultaneously and we would enter a post-nuclear apocalypse. At some point a legitimate issue was inflated into a doomsday hoax.
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It's not that it wasn't an issue, the problem was it was a big problem for certain industries, and executives in those industries (most executives really) are almost completely helpless, and the only thing they understand is money. So there's a problem that an executive can't see. So how do you get Mr. CEO to spend a bunch of money on something he can't see or understand?
You have to scare the hell out of him. Explain that he will lose ALL the money if he doesn't spend this comparatively small amount.
And as a result, many people were able to come together and install updates to systems to keep them from failing. My brother was even one of them, 15 years old and was told to hit "enter" when a given prompt came up. Because of efforts from people like my father, and thousands of others, we get internet posts 23 years later saying it was no big deal.
Yep, my father too, the family general store's registers all needed to be updated to new software to keep the dates right, this was actually somewhat important in that rural town before digital book keeping had spread there.
It's crazy how many people had a hand in making sure computers kept working after Y2K.
I knew a guy who maxed out all his credit cards and said he was heading to the hills. He didn't say much for the week he stayed at the job after the new year last.
My boss demanded that the whole IT team was at work watching and waiting. I think he bought us a dozen doughnuts.
Of course, nothing critical happened at all. Some websites showed a date of January 1, 19100. That was all.
Nothing happened because a lot of effort was put into changing vulnerable systems.
I am old enough to remember Y2K. The media definitely stirred some people up about it, in my experience most people seemed to not be too worried about it.
But we shouldn't dismiss the hard work that a lot of people did to upgrade or redesign systems that Y2K could have affected.
As a aside, I remember that when the clock struck midnight at the NYE party I was at someone flipped the circuit breaker for the house as a joke, turning out all the lights. I remember a few people gasping and wondering what the hell was going on for a few moments until the lights came back on and the prankster revealed himself. Was pretty funny at the time 🤣
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I was on a school trip for New Year's Eve that year. There had been some parents who didn't think their kids should go because we might not be able to get back if all the airplanes fall out of the sky at midnight.
Obviously, nothing happened. I understand the big affected only older systems, and it's not like admins just heard the news and sat around. They fixed the bug.
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