Y2K: Hoax, Or Averted Disaster?

Allnighterking writes "Y2K -- remember the fear it generated? Cartoons were written about it. The dried food industry saw a boom. Doomsayers abounded. But in the end, no planes fell, no one died and the electric grid stayed up for three more years. Was it all a hoax? Or was it the result of careful and complete planning and upgrading. American RadioWorks has a series of articles talking about the disaster that never happened called Y2K You can either Listen in or read the Transcripts of each of the 3 broadcasts and decide for yourself. The over 100 Billion pumped into the US economy alone may well have fueled the boom and predicated the bust. Could the success at Y2K prevention have made the coming problem in 2038 something people will ignore?"

Comments

Collective fear

[mirko]

I think it had a snowball effect : people inconsciously feared it and their fear grew while they heard even more about it. So it's not only the media, it's also people.

It wasn't a hoax.

[dwalsh]

Certain code would do the wrong thing on date rollovers and needed fixing - I'd seen it myself.

The seriousness of the problem was exaggerated by the following misconceptions:
1. Everything that held a date in it with 2 digit years was going to have a problem.
2. Everything described in point 1 that was not fixed would fail in the most disastrous way - missiles being launched, planes falling from the sky.

In reality there could be no problem, or the problem might only be cosmetic. For example, a system I was testing would show the wrong status colour (meaning you haven't done a diagnostic in so many months) but it would not do anything wrong. Still, it had to be fixed to be Y2K ready.

Nonetheless, I was slightly under whelmed by what went wrong on the day. I knew society was not going to collapse, but I expected a few non-critical SNAFUs. I made sure I took out cash from the ATM before New Years, but I gave the water supplies and the bomb shelter a miss :-) Globally there were one or two, but nothing major.

Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale

[Tony Hoyle]

Elevators sticking? Traffic lights out of sync?

Don't believe the hype. Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things... anyway why does a traffic light care about the year? The day of the week/month maybe.

Similarly, elevators don't give a hoot what year it is.

Contrary to the press your washing machine will *not* think "ooh it's 1900 I haven't been invented yet.. better explode".

Economics 102...

[Goonie]

While you're at it, read the whole Wikipedia article, and the transcript of the radio series. Specifically, read the bit about Keynesian economics, and how stimulating aggregate demand can encourage more productive use of capacity where it is underutilized. This arguably happened with the development of low-cost Indian outsourcing services. Second, the radio feature suggests that the trigger of the Y2K issue caused businesses to think about their IT infrastructure and how to improve it in ways that made them more efficient in the long term, more so than they would have done without that pressure.

Same IT perception problem as always

[obtuse]

I can't believe how many people here just don't get it. Nothing happened because of a huge effort, not because it wasn't a real problem. I'd have thought the ./ crowd would have a clue about this.

This is the same promlem IT always faces. What we do is abstract enough that management can barely believe we do anything at all, but the fact that you are able to use your computer systems at work doesn't mean that you don't need any IT staff. Come on folks, just 'cause it's working doesn't mean we aren't doing something.

Is your car running? Then I guess you don't need gas, much less oil.

I know I averted a lot of problems for a lot of people. I was doing IT & POS Support, and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Y2k issues, and my boss spent more time, including dealing with an unfixed Y2k bug in the most popular retail back-end system. But before the year end and after the bios updates & bug fixes, _our_ systems worked. I was on call that night, but I didn't get called. That certainly didn't convince me my Y2k work had been useless. Oh, and dates matter. Talk to anyone doing Sarbanes-Oxley work, or making sales projections, yadda-yadda.

I expect this kind of nincompoopery from the mainstream media, and that's where much of the panic came from. I didn't tell anyone to buy a generator. I expect better of /. (I just realized how silly that sounds.)