Y2K was a real threat that was wisely diverted thru a great deal of money and effort.
Calling it a scam is like describing the flood risk along the Mississippi as a scam.
Oh I dunno, just because you test some software and it fails doesn’t mean it will fail when the clock really ticks over, does it?
I agree. A lot of coders worked very hard, and worked long, grinding hours to built workarounds or otherwise changed vulnerable coding for essential programs. Since then, they have always been sort of like heroes to me. :o)
“Y2K was a real threat that was wisely diverted thru a great deal of money and effort.
Calling it a scam is like describing the flood risk along the Mississippi as a scam.”
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Kinda like that biblical Jonah and his Nineveh scam huh?/s
In all seriousness, that truly was a disaster averted.
I had the same type of discussion on another thread just tonight.
The thing with people wanting to point to Y2K as an example of why there’s no need to prepare is a misnomer, yes nothing happened, but not because there was no problem. Nothing happened because companies and governments spent millions of dollars and IT people spend thousand of man hours fixing the problem before it could occur.
Taking heed of a problem and preventing a disaster does not prove disasters can not happen.
If a farmer stores bails of sand bags and water pumps in case of flooding and one spring the Weather Service announces a river crest that’s 6” over the levee that protects his farm, and then he and his neighbors work together and raise the levee a foot. And between the sand bags and the water pumps the farm which is below the river’s crest doesn’t flood.
Does that mean the farm was never in any danger of flooding. Was the farmer and his neighbors fools for working so hard to sand bag the levee and keep the pumps running? Hell was it foolish for the farmer to store the sand bags and the pumps to begin with? Was the Weather Service wrong in issuing their Flood Warning?
Pointing to a disaster averted is NO PROOF that disasters can not and will not occur.
I worked on several large/y2k projects, it was real, there were real needs to get those programs updated to ensure things ran without incident.