Apocalypse Not

The big Y2K news was that there wasn't any. What happened? Was this a catastrophe averted or invented? After several years of sustained computing industry, media and political hype, could anybody could have imagined that there would be no serious Y2K problems at all in the developed and non-developed worlds? That no city in the world turned dark, no bank shut down, no phones were cut off, no planes fell from the sky, no dearth of food or water cropped up anywhere? In fact, as of Monday no human being was known to have died or been injured - or truthfully, even significantly inconvenienced - as the result of any computer-related problem at the end of the century.

"Why did we fall for this hype?" e-mailed one member of a Year 2000 online discussion group. "I feel cheated, betrayed, misused, abused, deceived and everything else!"

It's a good question, and it was being asked all over the Internet, and in much of the world. Were we duped or saved?

There were minor equipment failures at a handful of hospitals and nuclear plants. Financial industry employees around the world completed their second day of testing and said they encountered few, if any problems, and anticipate little trouble when U.S. markets opened today.

This after an incalculable drumbeat of alarm, hysteria and wild speculation. For sure, genuine problems had surfaced, and hats off to the planners, programmers and engineers who spent the past few years fixing them. But the reality was wildly divergent from the hysteria that preceded it. If anything, the Y2K obsession suggested just how central technology has become to much of the world, and just how little even the so-called experts really know about it or how it works.

By this morning, it was no longer clear whether Y2K was a miracle or a disgrace.

Friday afternoon, a wave of e-mail and reporters in Australia and New Zealand signalled the fizzling of one of the biggest stories in the history of technology. By Friday night, bored and bewildered TV reporters were broadcasting live from someplace called the Y2K International Co-Operation Center, but they had no news to report, and by midnight, some federal workers could be seen dozing at their terminals. The FAA Control Center in Virginia had giant screens showing thousands of airborne blips moving peacefully to their planned destinations. There were some heart-monitors down in Swedish hospitals, a U.S. Army cash register malfunctioning in Okinawa, and slot machines in Delaware out for a few hours. A spy satellite went on the fritz for awhile.

Otherwise, in an act of spectacular defiance, even heroism, tens of millions of people all over the earth gathered in urban centers to celebrate the new century. They did not stockpile food and water, as they were advised to by many newspapers, TV stations, government agencies, and local Red Cross chapters. They did not hoard cash. Much more than their pundits or elected leaders, they put their faith in technology.

They celebrated the new century with a defiant global outpouring of optimism and faith. As was the case 100 years ago, technology was a central theme of the century change, from the Millenial Dome in England to the techno-themed ferris wheels rotating along the Champs Elysee in Paris. A curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it's ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration.

The big news may be that people don't really have to rely on bureaucrats and journalists anymore -- a reason, maybe, why they were so calm and happy. More than 6 million people logged onto New Zealand websites to learn for themselves early Friday that the Y2K had arrived without harm or injury. This good news was followed on the Net from East to West all day long.

"Was the threat of technology failure overstated?," asked the New York Times on Sunday, "or did spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix things avert a catastrophe?"

Most engineers and programmers seemed to agree that there were, in fact, real problems associated with Y2K bugs, and that real trouble had been averted by the billions spent globally to upgrade and de-bug.

But it also seems obvious that Y2K problems were wildly exaggerated, online and off.

Modern media are almost continuously irrational when it comes to covering technology. The Internet has given the off-line world a rolling nervous breakdown, from which it has yet to recover. For much of the past year, TV stations, networks and newsmagazines sounded a steady stream of alarms about Y2K - the very term became a household world.

Last week Wired News, irked by all the greatest -hits lists emerging about the 20th century, offered a refreshing look at a "century of spectacular failure" from the Titanic to World Wars I and II, the Challenger launch and Chernobyl. They called their report "A Century of Spectacular Failure," citing one techno-disaster after another.

It was a healthy antidote to all the heavy breathing. This past century, we were assured by journalists and politicians, was also going to end unhappily, in a nightmare of collapsing programs, off-line banks and utility and transportation programs.

Countless individual humans pulled us back from that supposed abyss. There were no spectacular failures. They got the 21st century off to a great start.

But the biggest Y2K question looms even larger this morning than it did on Friday. Was the Y2K scare real? Was it a catastrophe averted or invented? Jump on in:

Comments

i also was working

[CrudPuppy]

I have been working on this problem in one of the largest financial institutions in the nation, and let me tell you that you're kidding yourself if you think y2k was a hoax. yes, the media and some individuals over-rated the event by even talking about the world ending, but this was indeed a very serious problem.

i have seen what happened during the early tests, when systems with production environments were launched ahead into 2000.... most just quit working, quite simply.

I really wish there was some way to show these people who are calling the event a hoax the parallel universe on 1/3/2000 that did not invest the money in fixing this problem! I'm sure they'd change their tune.

the credibility of this is that it is coming from a techie who is immersed in the systems, and not from some media idiot, or some manager-type who wants to look good...

my fear:

[gnarphlager]

Since the media seems to be hopping on the "stupid geeks, working us up over nothing" bandwagon, despite the fact that they were the ones spilling hype themselves, it only seems natural what will follow next. The next major forseen disaster will go unacknowledged. We'll jump and cry and scramble to get things in working order, but the media will dismiss it as "crying wolf" again, and only the employers with the most vision and foresight will think to fund any emergency efforts.

That's the problem with things being fixed and going well; there doesn't appear to be a problem at all. If Hitler was killed before he rose to power, no one would realize the crisis averted, because millions of people might not have died. Ours is a culture that thrives on villians, not heros. Horror movies get hundreds of sequels, but hero-central films are lucky to get a few. So rather than praising the computer community for taking care of a potentially dangerous issue, we're going to be seen as freaks who overreact.

Almost makes you wish the power HAD gone out ;-)

we use safty belts and bicycle helmets...

[dermond]

while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by
clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it
would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations
just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in
case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the
supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will
be more glitches with application software then with system programs).

well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made
preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts
in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not
need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if
you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10
years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and
the safety belt will safe your life.

the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew (at least the techies amoung us) that major problems where
not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major
problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the
chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow.
still we use safety belts.

plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not
check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is
said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and
what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power
plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not
prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are
not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this
causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino
stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing
much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then
all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..

so really: i don't think it is fair to ridicule the people who made
preparations..

gretings from vienna, austria.

mond.

Opinions and Prognostications

[DonWallace]

Well, the US did not instantly turn into Somalia last night; New World Order "storm troopers" did not foment riots on Time's Square; and Mad Max type survivalists are not yet careening down my street here in the sticks, pillaging houses at random and taking all the fertile women.

OK, so everything's "cool" for now. My opinions ....

- Have been reading commentary in various online papers stating in effect, was Y2K remediation money wasted? My take - "bulls***"! - NO, the fact that everything went smoothly around the world was testament to timely preparation. But this type of second guessing is so similar to corporate life in IT! If there's no crisis when someone does their job well, everyone around them clucks that they 1) wasted their time and someone else's money by "being too careful" and 2) the care taken was unnecessary. Anyone who states that Y2K remediation was unnecessary is either a complete idiot, uninformed, or an ambulance chasing lawyer. I think, JUST THIS ONCE, a united effort to fix a pervasive major problem was successful.

- What of the vast Y2K survivalist preparation cottage industry? Expect MAJOR bargains in freeze dried food in the coming year. Likewise for slightly used generators (as with most excessive Y2K preparation, a generator purchased in anticipation of Y2K power outage is idiocy, like you're going to keep a 200 gal. tank of gasoline in your basement? Yup!)

- Likewise, the dead trees publishing industry has wasted major quantities of wood-pulp on apocalyptic publications which will be destined for "Half Price Books" or your favorite remaindered book reseller. My question: are these books simply trash or could a decent library of Y2K related publications be considered collectible in 10-20 years? I am thinking the latter because most Y2K books, etc will go straight to the trash, as a burr in the side of anyone who paid good money for em. Finding mint copies of these books in 2015 might be as rare as a mint #1 edition of "Mad Magazine" is today.

- Back to Y2K preparation bargains - how about survivalist lots in the sticks? I wonder how many people went into hock and headed for the hills? Wonder what the foreclosures could be like for lots and houses in remote areas purchased with heavy mortgages and small down payments with little thought to paying them off? This might be an *excellent* time to look at rural acreage.

Now, the BIG issues - IT and the general economy... Even though the general economy is not just IT, I think that the general economy *has* been heavily influenced by the 'holding one's breath' aspect of Y2K anticipation, IE, IT and the general economy have probably been synchronized somewhat in terms of anticipation and dread.

The economy, and particularly the stock market, may well *take off like a rocket* at least for the first month of this year. Optimism and relief over no major Y2K problems will drive it. I suspect that, regardless of the current nutty high P/E ratios and valuations, a lot of investors have actually sidelined themselves in cash looking to see what will happen. THEN we may have a MAJOR blowoff.

Some economists have stated that we may get a recession out of Y2K due to delayed effects upon smaller companies. We may have big surprises in store, but I am guessing not - that problems will crop up gradually, be recognized gradually as most operational problems have been diagnosed day to day, and fixed as they happen. So no big deal.

Again, what I am personally expecting - I am no psychic nor do I play one on infomercials :-) - a BIG, and risky short term run-up in most stock indexes due to Y2K relief and euphoria, followed by a major blowoff (bear market). This economic distortion is probably the current single biggest risk. I think this contention is valid because expectation and 'irrational exuberance' and not technical nor value indicators have governed our markets for several years. I know how I felt when my partner and I were toasting New Year's last night as we watched every time zone go by with no problems, no terrorism --- massively relieved! I was expecting MUCH worse at least in terms of terror from the 'fatwah' crowd, and nothing. Multiply that attitude across the entire economy and you will have a MAJOR 'pop'.

Apocalypse Fixed, but the knowledge gap remains...

[The Code Hog]

So the media et al blew Y2K out of proportion? Of course they did, it was inevitable.

What was Y2K? An engineering problem. The only thing unique about Y2K as a engineering problem was the fact that you couldn't move the due date. In every other instance I can think of, you could to someone higher in authority and say "Hey look, we're not going to make it, can we push the end date out 1 month?" (or 1 year, 1 season, etc.). In this case there was no one to appeal to.

The combination of unslippable deadline and a lay person's lack of understand of how technology works combined to create undue worry over what was just another engineering problem.

And it wasn't a *hard* problem either. Not technically. Finding a fix for Y2K-imperiled code tended to be easy; scheduding and managing the upgrade of live systems with no disruption of service was in many cases hard. Coming up with the resources was hard for some companies. But the fixes themselves tended to be pretty obvious.

What really cracks me up is that developers routinely solve much harder problems with no such fanfare. Getting Windows to run at all with all that legacy software, now that took some brainpower (however misdirected). Compilers, major apps like MS/Star Office, and researchy-type apps typically face *hundreds* of more technically challenging hurdles during development.

The legacy of this will be that management/lay people will think there was nothing to Y2K and that IT folks just overstated the case. Not true. Furthermore they will extend this to trivialized daily jobs of software folks.

The core of this is the growing gap between the have's and have-not's in terms of technical understanding. Are we approaching the medical and legal professions for perceived disassociation from "average" citizens?

The public doesn't know real-time from batch

[isdnip]

As I summarize it, computers generally view time in one of three ways:

1) Real-time. Computers run machines without human intervention.
2) Interactive. People sit in front of computers and see them operate. (PCs, etc.)
3) Batch. Computers do work without human intervention, but just pound out paper monthly or so.

Many/most real-time systems don't give a hoot what year it is; they work in seconds or milliseconds. So the nut cases were worried about failures of real-time systems (electric, water, etc.) but those rarely cared much about date. Maybe some paleo-PCs will have reboot problems. Most of these were remediated; this is where the hype and reality were way out of sync.

Interactive systems can have visible clock errors. But humans can work around them. Few Y2K bugs showed up. Big surprise, not.

Batch systems are most likely to use old COBOL code with spotty source decks. Those are the ones that had the most Y2K problems, and those problems won't all turn up for a while. Mostly they're miscaluclated interest, payments, etc. They're not apocalyptic and can be fixed after the fact when somebody sees a billing error. This stuff did cost a fortune to fix and it had to be done, but it's not the stuff of bad TV movies.

More like Y2K Scam, Y2K Fraud, etc...

[richj]

I work for a very large (7 billion/yr) manufacturing company, and against the advice of those of us in the IT department, we were scammed by a consulting company telling tales of widespread system outages, downtime, and lost business if we didn't hire them to fix our machines.

What they did was send a few non technical people around to PCs, and had a floppy which just changed the date format in Win9x from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd/yyyy.

They charged $50 per machine checked for this "service", and took two months to do something a well written memo could have had our users do for free.

In the meantime, they managed to unplug a Cisco 7500 looking for the floppy drive, turned the key off on a production HP K470 machine, had their floppys in three Ultra 10 Workstations before calling IT and asking how to reboot, and other small, but costly disasters.

Basically due to the hype, our management gave them full run of our datacenter, and they caused more harm than a reasonable Y2K crash.

As the icing on the cake, even though that all of our machines were "certified" Y2K compliant by this small scam outfit, they insisted that everything be turned off for the rollover, causing even more downtime.

It just boggles the mind that executives could be scammed like this, I'm finding a new job...

A catastrophe in slow motion...

[seebs]

Is a bunch of mild inconveniences.

If you took everything, from thousands of people without power (last August, NY), to 5% of the British credit card swipers rejecting cards (Dec 27-31), to the 911 system in LA mis-prioritizing calls for about 10 minutes, and all the other little things that will go wrong within the next year or three, and even the ones that failed years ago (first credit cards expiring in '00), and you had *ALL* of this on one day, it would have been the global catastrophe we talk about.

Catastrophes are fast. If they aren't fast, we deal with them as they're happening, instead of trying to react to aftermath. Imagine how dangerous a mudslide would be if it were just one ton of mud per day for a long time. It would be a *joke*.

Same thing.

Last minute completion

[rjh3]

The "hoax" was the result of combined ignorance, fear, cynicism, and venality.

Ignorance - The reporters cannot distinguish between an annoying computer failure and a catastrophic computer failure.

Fear - Most fear computers. They are a genuine job threat to many in the news business and to many people that they know. Most of their friends and colleagues are in the older, dying industries that are threatened by computers.

Cynicism - They know that they cannot trust the government or corporate spokesmen to tell the truth. So they did not believe the initial warnings. Then once they learned enough to understand that there was a real problem, they did not believe all the reports as the real problems were fixed. Early Y2K tests found genuine problems, this was reported in the technical channels, and the later tests found the problems to be fixed and this was reported in the technical channels. The media did not understand and did not trust the government and corporate reports.

Venality - The news media, especially the electronic media, sell a product. Emotion sells much more easily than reason. Whether on CNN or slashdot, the emotional response is the easy response and the universal response. The easy Y2K emotion is fear. Fear sells. Fear maintains ratings. Fear is universal. Reason requires lots of boring detail and lacks punch. So the reports all emphasized fear.

The best example of what really happened is from school. We all know people who don't start studying until the night before finals. They cram and pass. They don't start the term paper until the day before it is due. They pull an all-nighter and pass. This may even be the most efficient use of their resources (given their priorities). And a lot of people from the top to the bottom of corporations and government have not changed. They let Y2K slide until the last minute, then they crammed, pulled all-nighters, and passed.

The bugs were real

[bhurt]

But the real problems were with the wetware. The reason this thirty-year-old code is still being used is a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. Enough noise needed to be made for the money (and programmer time) to be spent fixing the problem.

Unfortunately, the level of noise needed to make the CEOs and CIOs put the bug on their priority lists were enough to trigger the doomsayers and (even worse) those who figured they could make money on the problem. Technical necessity brought the problem to light, greed blew it out of proportion. Consider for the moment the fact that there is now a stock index for companies based around Y2K.

In a strange sort of way, I do kind of wish some planes fell from the sky, and some people died. Already a Y2K-backlash is begining. Obviously, since the bug was fixed in time, it was all a hoax from the begining. The next time there is a fundamental problem in our technological infrastructure, the response is more likely to be "Y2K was a hoax- this new problem is as well. In addition to not panicing about it, I'm also not going to fix it." Cold as it may sound, some deaths this time around might have saved more lives next time around. Unless, of course, you beleive that there are no more fundamental bugs in our technological infrastructure...

One final comment on Y2K: Don't assume people "suddenly got smart" ten years ago. I've heard a number of people complain about the dumb programmers of yesteryear saving "a measly two bytes". After all, memory is cheap today- obviously, it was cheap back then as well. Go ask someone who was around back then about "a buck a bit"- yes, Virginia, there was a time when memory was $8 a byte, and this was considered _cheap_. Hint: it was about the time a lot of this code was being written. So the "measly two bytes" they saved paid for a decent dinner out.

Who gets cheered?

[Shotgun]

At my company there are two teams. Both receive a project of approximate equal complexity.

Team A: Develops a realistic plan and conscientiously follows it. All team members put in small amounts of overtime when needed to meet intermediate goals. There are no suprises and a stable program is delivered several days ahead of schedule with concise, well-documented code.

Team B: Maintains a moto of "We've got time!". All intermediate deadlines are missed by a mile. Everyone nearly always goes home early, the exception being days when the intermediate deadlines are due. On these days, everyone pulls an all-nighter so that the deliverables can be presented the next morning. The final deliverable, due on Friday, is delivered Monday morning. To anyone who's taken Comp101, the code is obviously a poorly architected, cut-n-pasted, undocumented peice of a bad knock-off of a poor hack.

Now, who gets the credit for "putting in the effort to go the extra mile"? Who is the "real team players"? Who gets the rewards and their pictures in the company newsletter?

Clue to people new to the industry. NEVER deliver on time. The pressed tee shirts don't know what your job entails, and if you deliver early they think your job was too easy. Complain about tight deadlines and lack of man power. Go home, login, and run a script to keep data moving. Next morning, tell your boss that you pulled an all-nighter. The weekend after the final due date, get your team together for a weekend party, have everyone log in and then pass the bottle. Monday morning (red-eyed and dreary looking) make up grand and heroic tales of how much effort was put forth to pull off your amazing feat to get the project finished by Monday morning. This is the time for the team leader to recommend raises to honor the valiant efforts of all the 'team players'.

Of course, this is all unnecessary if your companies management has a clue.