Remember Y2K?

[Mr.Unique]

Stuff your clues.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Started off starting up power plants, then got into advanced power generation technology development, later into security, Y2K work, and some demand side management tech development.

[Mr.Unique]

Unbelievable.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

It was a lot of fun.

[tbw2]

Yes. I didn’t expect much more than moderate disruptions. Our purchasing system at work had been confused for months due to dates and continued to be for weeks afterward.
The only major issue at work was a 24 hour period where all the manufacturing consoles weren’t sure what program to use so we set them to defaults or pre-determined settings to get it running again.

[Kickaha]

what is your opinion of the electrical grid? Is a vulnerability to an EMP attack real or overblown? It makes for great post-apocalyptic fiction but truth is hard to find.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Date comparisons. Programs are filled with them. I worked for an insurance company at the time, and some common computations were calculating premium due, whether accidents occurred within coverage dates, age of a vehicle, etc. It was just a fact that not a single policy could be processed with an expiration date past the year 2000, so we couldn’t write a police effective starting January 1999 or later until the thousands of dat problems were fixed in all the programs. Do you think I was imagining the entire thing? I spent months working on it.

[Mr Radical]

I worked the two years beforehand as a contractor fixing software for Y2K. It was tedious work but it certainly paid the bills.
And at the big moment itself I was flying across the Atlantic in an airliner! The aeroplane was almost empty but when one of the other passengers discovered what I did for a living, she very earnestly asked, “We will be alright, won’t we?” “Don’t worry,” I said. “This plane is not about to turn upside down at the stroke of midnight.”

[trebb]

My car started the next morning so I knew all was going to be OK...

[GingisK]

Yes, date comparisons. I also do them all of the time. I never ran into one that would kill people. Whenever date computations were mission critical, they were done correctly. A perpetual calendar is not that difficult to setup and use. I always used 32-bit integers with a recent starting decade. That gave a 138 year reach. Being a Computer Science major rather than a Business Data Processing major, I never used just the last two digits for date entry or display.

I'm arguing that Y2K posed no real danger to life, just nuisance level events.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Yes you’re right, probably 99% of Y2k bugs were just typical production run problems that happen occasionally anyway. The world wasn’t in danger of ending January 2000, as some might have believed through hoaxes or misinformation. But it would have been a nightmare for a lot of companies if nothing had been done about it. Just about all of them rely on automation to some degree.

[GingisK]

It would certainly have been a nightmare to field irate phone calls from all of the people born before 1900. That is a certainty.

[GingisK]

...none of which have EPROMS in them that haven't been back to the shop a time or two. Most were still point-gap ignition systems with no other processor controlled components. Would you care to read an EPROM datasheet from the 1980s? Microprocessors in the 1980-95 time frame did not have FLASH memory simply because it didn't exist. Most were UV erasable EPROMS, even the one-time programmable ones. Would you like to read datasheets regarding microprocessors of that era?

You do know that microcontroller based automobile electronics is a fairly recent technology, don't do?

[GingisK]

Sorry to deflate your ego but I don’t read all your posts,

Ah, the tried and true trick of liberals: When the facts don't suit you, attack the character of the opponent. It is good of you to pitch in to help them.

[TexasGator]

“...none of which have EPROMS in them that haven’t been back to the shop a time or two. “

Of course they have been back to the shop. Most people don’t do their own oil changers!

[GingisK]

I admire your tenacity.

[TexasGator]

“Microprocessors in the 1980-95 time frame did not have FLASH memory simply because it didn’t exist. “

100,000,000 units shipped in 1990.

[William Tell]

"Please list the processors which had dates in their clock system and any realtime process that required dates for the control loop."

I wasn't describing any chips with date problems.

I was describing a custom-designed lithography system which handled every state-of-the-art chip that our organization designed, built, and shipped.

The in-house designers who created the lithography system implemented it in such a way that the mini-computer which controlled the process also handled the record-keeping and process-flow for the chips. It was little different than all other applications which incorrectly handled dates.

The key difference was that the equipment was involved in the handling of every single chip we created and would not have scheduled work correctly due to the error.

We identified the problem early enough to completely solve the problem. That does not change the fact that failing to have done so would have created errors that might have taken many weeks to discover and many more weeks to solve. All during those weeks production would have been severely negatively impacted.

The key fact to keep in mind is that not all companies who created state-of-the-art chips in the year 2000 had the resources of Intel to do so. The volume of chips that we created was an incredibly small fraction of those manufactured by Intel.

[GingisK]

In the 1980s I help design a system for Intel that tracked wafer trays through the memory fab plant. We used Computer Automation mini computers, which were a sorry choice. Kathleen McMullen was the Intel project head and our direct report.

Intel is a remarkable company. We enjoyed that project and came to respect Intel personnel.

Yes, I can understand how records with date dependency could screw up processes like those at Intel. Things were sure to cross that pesky 2000 boundary.