I was working on a Y2K conversion at a big bank in a big city. We got a call one day that another bank across town wasn't gonna make it in time. They then merged with that bank where I was working. That's how they fixed their Y2K problem. The pro sports arena in the city quickly changed names.
That problem for the most part wasn't with PCs. That was mostly promoted to sell survival products to the sheeple.
I was just beginning development that year. We fixed a few bugs and crossed our fingers. All turned out fine.
Yes.
I still have everything from 1999 and earlier backed-up on floppy disks.
I two programs that ceased to function on 1/1/00.
Resetting the clock on win98 allowed me to temporarily use them until I changed the clock back.
Eighteen years later the point is moot.
It was a good thing Time Traveler John Titor warned everyone about this.
Although he said that the fact that we fixed it prevented WW3, and WW3 (in his view) cleansed the country and bought people closer together- and eliminated the big government.
y2k caused billions, perhaps trillions in damage. Most people don’t know that or realize why.
A scandalously corrupt event meant to benefit Clinton and his cronies.
It set off an economic shock wave that was fake and met by Fed action, creating unintended consequences that totally disrupted the production/supply chain.
We may finally be leaving the financial volatility that it created.
"The Year 2038 problem relates to representing time in many digital systems as number of seconds passed since 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit integer. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Just like the Y2K problem, the Year 2038 problem is caused by insufficient capacity of the chosen storage unit. "
Remember? I'm still eating off all the rations I bought!
One of the “Alien Nation” movies (great show, great movies) which was shot a few years before that had a scene in 2000 with everyone going crazy and the cops making TONS of arrests.
No one realized what a nothing burger it ended up being. Especially here in the USA.
The real clock rollover problem hasn’t happened yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
My boss was a dispatcher at the local electrical utility. He thought it was all bologna, but he said he was nervous when the clock went to midnight that night he was on shift. The system didn’t skip a beat. Thankfully!
I was working as an IT contractor at MSNBC on the Microsoft campus. Management had announced that someone had to spend the night monitoring systems and to be available to reboot things if they went sideways. As low man they announced that I got the detail.
So I asked about compensation. If they thought that I would give up New Years with my family for straight time they were crazy. They offered a $200 bonus and I laughed. We finally negotiated a lump-sum of $2000 plus catered dinner plus a hotel room.
When the other guys found out they complained to management and my lead got the job.
So I spent the evening at home with my family after all.
My top pay was only $125 an hour. I got shafted!
COBOL here too. IMS DB/DC and CICS with a little DB2 thrown in.
I was at CA in 93 (I really had to concentrate to type 93 instead of 1993) when Charles Wang announced privately to employees that "It would take at least 10 years to remediate all of our software and that's if we wanted to."
Having fixed my share of bad code, I am sure that charlatans and scammers took advantage of many uninformed and disorganized businesses but for the most part it was a real BIG problem.
I learned to work and pray HARD for humanity and my prayers were answered.
7
I was in the IT business at the time, and I knew it was another Global Warming type of scare. Sure, there were issues, but they were easily handled. I knew the hype was not real, and made a lot of money and enemies that year when in fact, nothing happened.
i do indeed remember ... i was intimately involved in y2k planning at my corporation ... the scare-tactic publicity forced a WHOLE BUNCH of complacent fat-ass corporate IT types up off their fat asses to direct their troops to deal with the problem BEFORE the clock rolled to 2000 ... this is one case where scare tactics helped to prevent the thing it was scaring people about ... it’s completely disingenuous to claim i hindsight that there never was a problem and that the scare tactics were therefore nothing but hollow alarmism ...
I was afraid my car wouldn’t start the morning of Jan 1. Took a few extra cranks which I think overrode the y2k issue and it started.
I was with Motherola near that time and they were pretty serious about getting all systems checked.
Yes. This was a concerted effort by the left to de-emphasize the real meaning of the year 2000: Christ!