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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: 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.