It was absolutely no scam. I was in the utility business and there were countless control system computers, back office computers, telecom gear, and embedded systems that were going to do unpredictable things. The industry spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars getting ready. The remediation projects were huge. The reason nothing happened is industries took it seriously and had professional programs launched by the mid 90s to get things fixed.
I also read months later in 2000 that some military radar global defense interface went down for 5 days into January. Nobody was told, media kept in the dark, and we lived into the 21st century.
AMEN! The reason nothing happen is because business spent thousands of man hours and millions to upgrade. Kind of like towns people spending hours and money and sand bagging a levee, which holds a flood back and keeps the levee from being topped and then complaining that the town didn’t get flooded!
Exactly. It is so easy to get stuck in the conspiracy mindset in this world, solely because there really is an overwhelming amount of collusion between the globalist “capitalist -socialists”, the government, the “democrats and Republicans”, the crony capitalists, etc. Y2K was not a conspiracy, it was a real problem which was averted by real remediation efforts. But how is one to know the difference nowadays? If Western Culture ever manages to return to some semblance of ethical behavior and traditional values, I believe the conspiracy nuts will effectively disappear.
The occasion was a non-event. I have since wondered how bad it would have been had not so much money been spent fixing the bug. Would the grid have crashed, banks lose track of account info, retail stores be unable to sell food, traffic signals go haywire, etc.? In other words, was it overblown all along, or did huge efforts avoid a disaster. I tend towards a middle ground, that some bad things would have happened, but it would not have been as big a disaster as was being portrayed. Sounds like you know whereof you speak.
It was a scam. I have been designing and installing embedded devices since 1972. There never was any "danger". The worst that could happen is people's records would be sorted in the wrong order. Very few embedded devices keep time and date. The worst that could happen to something like an elevator is that it would take up a weekend parking station in the middle of the week.
It was a scam compounded by those who wanted to make some money and others who wanted to exercise power over others.
Agreed
I spent a year leading a team of engineers fixing problems in our chemical complex. I was still nervous as hell on 12-31-99. But, we made through.
While you might be right, I’m a bit skeptical. With millions of programs being revised for Y2K, not a single burp occured. You can say it is because programmers took it seriously. But when has new software EVER been free of bugs? Never. There are always hiccups. That not a single hiccup took place from a single bug in a single fix for Y2K tells me that for the most part, nothing was going to happen. If we were facing serious problems for Y2K with the old 2 digit dates, then the program fixes would have had some bugs and there would have been a few minor failures. Instead we had none. No failures whatsoever. That flawless level of service has never occurred in the history of programming. That can only mean that the buggy fixes were a non-issue, which tells me the whole thing was a non-issue.
The probable result of not fixing anything would have been a bunch of thrown error codes in the error files while everything continued to work as was.
What part of the utility business? Anything technical?
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.