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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: 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.