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As we head into 2015, it's hard to think of any technical skill set less relevant than Y2K - the identification and fixing of computer systems and applications that used two decimal digits rather than four to store the year component of each date. As you may recall, the discovery of the problem (or perhaps, that the deadline to fix it was finally approaching) in the late '90s led to media hysteria and dire warnings about a world full of computers simultaneously losing their bearings, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. An artist has assembled a memorial to the crisis, in the form of a web site presenting photos of dozens of books dealing with Y2K from various perspectives.
This site could be seen as mindless diversion, but also as a digest of reaction likely to repeat itself in a subsequent "crisis", albeit with different media next time (blogging, for one, had yet to be invented).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @02:07PM
I'm not entirely sure that is true because we certainly have our work cut for us when it comes to date related trouble. In 2036 the NTP date will overflow and only 2 years later the UNIX date will do the same. And if you think these things are in the distant future you must take into account that many programs handle future dates so this will be another Y2K case, except these computers handle some actually important stuff. I for one hope these issues will be dealt with in time unlike the sorry scramble for Y2K.
(Score: 1) by Nuke on Sunday January 04 2015, @04:59PM
No doubt banks and corporates did fixes but I'm sure that no ordinary person in my circle bothered, nor did I. There must have been thousands of small businesses that did not bother either, or had no clue what to do.
Yet I heard that the only Y2K failure across the world was that the one-armed bandits at a Nevada race course stopped working. An apocryphal rumour no doubt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @05:38PM
If you google for "list of y2k failures" [google.com] there are a bunch of sites with a bunch of different lists of failures. Just because airplanes didn't fall out of the sky doesn't mean glitches weren't widespread.
(Score: 3, Informative) by black6host on Sunday January 04 2015, @06:41PM
Indeed, most all of our applications were developed in house, in Clipper. I found many points of failures that would trigger if nothing was done.
The biggest challenge was getting the President to understand this stuff had to be fixed. So we did, took a while but no failures once the code was changed. It was a good opportunity to clean the code a bit as the original programmer liked copy/paste and had little concept of re-useable code in the form of functions, etc.
Of course, when the big day came, everything worked like it should have. So everyone was saying, "See, that was no big deal". Well, no, it wasn't. Because we busted our ass to fix things.
I still hear that it was no big deal from time to time. But never by anyone who was responsible for setting things straight before they became a problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @06:47AM
If they updated their Windows they did and if they ran *nix they didn't have to: Y2K was not about personal computers and thus normal people are entirely clueless. Y2K was about ICs, embedded computers, ladder programming, industrial systems, all kinds of infrastructure including financial and military, electrical substations, water management, dams, power generation and redundancy, heavy and dangerous industry like steel plants, chemical plants, oil rigs, refineries etc.. Yes you had the COBOL brigades too.
Replacement components had to be tested both before and after installation to the extent possible before turning on the entire systems. Sometimes there were no alternatives to complete shutdowns but one really wants to avoid shutting down plants that take months to stop and start so a lot of it was figuring out the planning of how to do simple things in very difficult contexts. Sometimes what was supposed to be working replacements still did not work correctly together with other components despite all kinds of certified guarantees and you don't want to discover that after a chemical plant wipes out a small village or city.
We all got a little bit lucky as well: ladder programming could have been a much bigger issue or downright nasty but as far as I know it held up fairly well, same can be said for the higher libraries. There are a lot of people to thank for this over many decades, many of them dead and gone long before Y2K.
Y2K was hairy, one barely got the most critical items done before the date and what wasn't ready had to be shut down. The work continued on at a lower but still high pace for six more months. For even less essential stuff short-term pivoting became the solution; that's what most ordinary companies and government departments ended up doing and maybe some of them still are.
Essential people worked themselves into ill health. I wonder how many died during the latter half of 2000 from the stress they had been under, it would be surprising if no one did. Nearly everyone I know about quit during 2000, a lot of them had postponed retirement or been dragged back out from it, this was their last job.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 04 2015, @02:20PM
I made out like a bandit in 1999. I had programmed a trivial little DOS TSR to fix Y2K, an even more trivial exe that would set the clock to 2000 and check that it reported 1900 or not, and would prompt you to install the TSR if it did, and packaged both in a boot floppy with a red "Y2K emergency kit" label. I sold these floppies $60 a pop to worried CEOs who happened to still have DOS computers around. And let me tell you, I sold a SHITLOAD of them. And I'm not alone...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @04:11PM
The bigger the crisis and the smaller the time available to fix it, the more expensive it becomes.
Good, fast, cheap, pick any two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @07:34AM
(Score: 2) by SuperCharlie on Sunday January 04 2015, @06:12PM
High-Five Jumping belly bump
(Score: 2, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday January 04 2015, @02:49PM
I was warned about the problem when I studied COBOL at Solano Community College, in Fairfield, California, in 1980.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by gznork26 on Sunday January 04 2015, @05:53PM
I warned the company I was contracted to about this in the 70s. It was an insurance company so short-sighted that they stored years as a single digit. They'd hired contract help to solve their problem by switching to a 2-digit year instead.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday January 04 2015, @07:09PM
Computers were expensive back then, so the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District got the bright idea that they could save money by storing only our middle initials.
Eighth grade was annoying in that our class schedules and report cards were hopelessly mixed up, but when we were in high school, the truant officer would call my father whenever Michael Dwayne skipped out of school. He'd have to take time off from his important work as a Naval Civil Service Engineer, drive twenty miles then tell the principal - about once per week - "THIS IS NOT MY SON!"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Monday January 05 2015, @05:04AM
Admiral Hopper warned of the problem even as IBM was shipping their COBOL tools, but by then it was too late.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @02:51PM
Did my Y2K in the early 80's. Changed from Julian system (YYDDD) to date sequencce (DDDDD : 1=1-Jan-1977). Ran a converter over the code and recompiled system... done.
If people are still not doing the right thing (NTP?) then the newest fixes for security bugs should be rejected because the base code cannot handle 2036 or 2038 in regression testing.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 04 2015, @03:06PM
And the stupidity I'm referring to is that of the chicken lickens who said the sky was going to cave in, more than the programmers who had saved a couple of bytes a few decades earlier.
In 1994 I took out a 15-year mortgage on a house. Nothing crashed. "09" was 2009 and not less than "94", at least in that bank. My electricity contract signed in 1999 for a year didn't explode either, so clearly March 00 was later than March 99 also. There was no business that I had dealt with before the turn of 2000 which had not had to cope with the concept of a date after 2000, and everything was coping just fine. It was obvious that at least where I was living the turn of 2000 would be a complete non-event.
It's not just a mindless diversion, it's good to preserve a library of the bogus predictions. Nobody with a brain burns copies of Nostradamus or the Bible, despite their failings.
I glad to see at least 3 of the books in that archive called it like it was (in the perhaps misnamed 'hoax' section).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @04:06PM
> And the stupidity I'm referring to is that of the chicken lickens who said the sky was going to cave in
You've got it completely wrong. Y2K was a situation in which the 'chicken lickens' actually prompted the necessary response. The very fact that there were only minor problems was the direct result of billions of dollars of effort fixing shit. Sure, not 100% of it was necessary, but expecting that level of precision on a problem of that scale would be myopic.
> In 1994 I took out a 15-year mortgage on a house. Nothing crashed. "09" was 2009 and not less than "94", at least in that bank.
Because you were not the first person to take out a mortgage with a term extending past 2000. That rubicon was passed well over a decade before you walked in the door and was discovered and fixed then because it meant all new business ground to a halt. Find the first guy to apply for such a mortgage at that bank and ask them how much of a hassle it was. 10 to 1, they ended up just going to some other bank that had already fixed the problem.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @03:29PM
without a break
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @04:31PM
If these current timestamps overflow in '36 or '38 then some mortgage companies already have a fix for this. Maybe they just switched to 64-bit integers?
(Score: 1) by warcques on Sunday January 04 2015, @07:56PM
celebrated about 16 years of this recently too:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/12/29/0418246/twitter-bug-locks-out-many-users [slashdot.org]
(Score: 1) by PartTimeZombie on Monday January 05 2015, @01:00AM
I had a quick look at the cookbooks section, and laughed at the dude in the Davey Crockett outfit, but the one that really caught my eye was recipes from http://www.y2kkitchen.com/ [y2kkitchen.com]
It still exists albeit with a certificate error and is about as nutty as you might expect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @01:12AM
Y2K .com domain names are available at reasonable prices!
(Score: 1) by terryk30 on Monday January 05 2015, @01:43PM
Have a plan in place. Wait, am I joking?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gidds on Monday January 05 2015, @01:56PM
...just not as much of a problem as all the hype led some people to think.
But some hype was necessary: if no-one had made a fuss, lots of things wouldn't have got fixed in time, and there would have been lots more serious failures.
As I said in a previous comment [soylentnews.org], it was a catch-22 situation.
And there's always room for asking yourself what could go wrong, thinking ahead, and trying to prevent problems before they happen.
[sig redacted]