Y2K was the Perfect Storm, the year Global Ice Age met Global warming.
Yet again all the concern was for naught.
There still should have been massive failures because, people being human, a lot of computers would not have been updated. I don’t think I heard of one instance.
I worked on code and programs for y2k fixes.
There were definitely things that these programs would have gotten wrong, and if they involved databases it couldmhave been a pain. probably fixable but still. real time stuff getting wrong calcs or weird data could be bad, could be unpredictable what the overall results would be.
Its also considering compounded misktakes across glitching programs and sysrems that talk to each other and rely on the others data.
I definitely saw things that required code fixes to ensure and eliminate problems.
Imagine nothing was done until everything started cascading failures due to inter-program and cross-system dependencies.
I remember there was a web site that watched around the world as the clocks passed midnight, watching for any news of problems. As I recall, I quit watching about 3am.
Watched several movies while waiting for the world to end :)
I was thrilled to get 1k for working NYEve......as NOC managers we stood around and stared at each other at midnight.....when nothing happened....
Out of hundreds and hundreds of program testing I found one that needed to be changed.
I remember it well. At the time, the application I was supporting was written in a 4GL that treated all dates as the number of days since 1600 or so. Because of that, most of the “changes” I made were cosmetic, to make sure that my input files and output files used 4 digit years. For our largest input feed, that was not a problem, since we had proactively set the dates to 4 digits a few years before when we were rewriting the interface file.
About the only positive thing that came from Y2K occurred in September, 2001. Our company had about 9 floors of staff in WTC2 (low enough that all but 1 or 2 made it out), and had to relocate to our emergency site in New Jersey. Since Y2K forced us to revisit and revamp our contingency plans company wide, we were up and running in New Jersey by noon on the 11th.
big scare push by Gary North.
Cobol developers - the dinosaurs - were back and we were hungry.
Being a cobol “tester”, my best earning years were 97 thru 99.
Life was good.
I was the head of it at two companies at the time. It was my job to do Y2K remediation. What frightened me was that when I ask the power company to give me proof that they had done a remediation effort to avoid the bug they said they did the best we can but we can’t guarantee anything basically. That got me worried.
Instead we got a somewhat subdued celebration as lots of people decided to hunker down rather than go out and celebrate.
So ironically it was the nerds that saved the world in 2000, but people still didn't trust them enough to go out and celebrate the non-nerdy millennial.
I was badly fooled. I distrust computers so thoroughly, I just assumed there would be minor issues like stuck elevators and broken ATMs. I didn’t want to even be out and about, so I hunkered down on the most exciting New Years Eve in my lifetime. The Turn of the Century. Not one single issue occurred. It was the greatest non-event in world history.
I remember Freeper Dog saying he had 500 rolls of TP in a shed.
I remember celebrating New Years and hardly anyone was drinking.
I worked for a bank and it was not until the next morning that we finished doing the verifications. What a pain in the ass.
For months, our manager kept stressing to us to make sure all our code was Y2K compliant (it was). We were forced to come in to work New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1999 to handle any strangeness come midnight. Well, the only code that failed was our manager’s, so we sat around talking and eating while she fixed her code. Haha.
There was no talking to the Y2K believers.
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.
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.”
My car started the next morning so I knew all was going to be OK...