‘Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting’: An Oral History of Y2K

Popular Mechanics ^ | December 27, 2019 | Eric Spitznagel

[GingisK]

God forbid that anyone would have had enough sense to perform transactions on paper. Nobody seems to know that not that many years ago, computers weren't available and that paper did the same work. I have always thought it just plain stupid that companies don't have contingency fall-back plans use the old tried and true methods.

Shucks, I can navigate with a map and compass and make engineering drawings with a t-square and triangles. I find it a bit scary that people of today couldn't run a business for a few days with just candles and pencils.

I also find it outrageous to discover that anyone could think sort errors would cause anything other than inconvenience. I have yet to find anyone who can cite a single case of that old Y2K problem being dangerous.

[George from New England]

I read in the months following y2k that some military missile monitoring system(s) went down for 3 or 4 days after 1/1/2000 turned. Nothing happened but nothing would have been detected either for those days in the dark.

[GingisK]

Those were probably fake reports. I can't think of a thing related to missile monitoring systems that would be affected by the date. The only thing about missiles that would be affected by the date would be navigation. I am pretty sure that navigation software never suffered from Y2K problems.

I have been doing embedded software since 1967; and, I have never had issues with dates. Save navigation, there is almost nothing that would be critically affected by the date rollover.

[Horkster]

That reminds me of one of the most clever marketing campaigns of the era: YKK zippers.

They were ubiquitous, non-descript, yet high-quality, found just about anywhere, didn’t really have a rival in the marketplace, and the company had previously kept a low profile. But in ‘98 or ‘99 or thereabouts, they started a really subtle marketing campaign:

“Are your jeans Y2K compliant? YKK zippers.”

It was glorious. Wish I had thought of it... I’d be comfortably retired by now... :{D>

[pas]

Before the year 2000 some food stuffs were being destroyed because the systems thought they were old and out of date. Those are the type errors that would have happened even more. Not planes falling from the skies and power grids turning off (maybe messed up their billing). There were real issues that were addressed by companies. Not end of the world stuff like the click bait media sites tried to portray or the idiot reporters on tv repeated.

Procurement, banking and billing where dates are critical. This is also why systems like SAP took off. Cheaper to buy a package than rewrite the 20 year old crap they had.

[Leep]