Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I work for an international bank and we fixed 2-300 Y2K bugs. I know; I tested the changes & found more doing the testing. Obviously, some were more critical than others. We also upgraded release levels of system software. I also know that some were missed. The thing is, they were attributed to something else when they occurred. Noone would admit that they had missed a Y2K bug after all the $$$ thrown at the problem. I'm sure my situation is not unique.
Working for a facility management company, contracted to a large client in Switzerland, three months prior to the Y2k bitflip. Checked dozens of devices, big and small: embedded controllers for climate control, UPS's, fire alarms, you name it. Found one item: a Compaq PC used for the lighting system had a non-Y2k-compliant BIOS. The result of doing nothing would have been that the weekend lighting profiles for all (several hundred) offices, meeting rooms, and so on would have been active during the week (you know - wrong offset when attempting to calculate whether "today" is a weekend).
/. is the right place for anecdotal evidence, right?)
Replaced computer, had no problems.
Moral of the story: this was a lighting system. Big deal. The client invested several tens of thousands in the project to check three large office buildings in my location, and avoided a minor pain in return. However: everything was checked, and it might have been anything. If it had been the UPS's or the fire alarms for instance, the result of not doing anything could have been a major pain. Point is - we found something, so it wasn't just a waste of time.
(
yes, we have no bananas
I'm sure anyone who helps support small businesses and their use of IT to run them knows this WAS an averted disaster. Most small companies, in 1999, were using accounting systems (and running them on platforms) that absolutely, positively, would have failed. There were untold thousands of businesses handling shipping, payroll, payables - core stay-in-business stuff - on older versions of FoxPro, or creaky older copies of Unix-based accounting software running on prehistoric Altos machines, and so on.
These would all, everyone of them, puked big time without serious remediation. In many cases it was line-by-line code work, or the building of elaborate insulating layers between modules. In many cases, the cleanest and most rational fix really was a system upgrade. But I can tell you (from having simulated calendar rollovers on such systems), that on 1/1/2000, a lot of my customers (minus the serious work), would have been unable to buy, sell, pay their people, etc., for weeks into 2000 - at which point many would have been mortally wounded. This was no hoax, and the most important work I did at that time was educating the business owners who kept hearing the words "hoax" or "exagerated" on the news.
I wasn't worrying myself about planes falling out of the sky, but I was worried about calamitous damage to a huge chunk of the economy: the $2-15M/year business. Of course, I like to hunt, so no harm buying a little extra freeze-dried food anyway, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Don't believe the hype. Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things
Twice in my life I've seen traffic lights stuck on green in both directions. I don't know how it can happen, because I don't know how traffic lights are switched. Nevertheless.
Good God! Are you still with that vendor? We chose to stay open on 12/31 (it was a FRB business day) because we are an ag bank and usually do a tremendous amount of business on 12/31.
I think that at one point I figured that the amount of paperwork I had to do to "prove" that we were in good shape doubled the amount of work involved in preparations.
I ran our core system's "test bank" in updates past 1/1/2001. For each "critical date" I calculated interest accruals and compared them to what the system calculated. I ran transactions and made sure that they posted properly.
The people I really felt sorry for during the process was our Board of DIrectors. They had to listen to me for 1 or 2 hours at each meeting talk about Y2K preparedness.
As a side note, I was home before midnight that night - and I was the last one out of the bank.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Think about all the web pages and applications that were displaying the odd five digit year. 11000 I think it was. So I wouldn't say it was a hoax as a whole. There were a lot of opportunistic assholes who saw it as a chance to charge people for upgrades that weren't necessary either though. Not to mention the fear mongers who relied on the natural human tendency to fear the unknown (dried food sales as an example). I will point out that I had a program written in 1993 from the Norton Desktop for Windows 3.1. It was the Norton Dayplanner. I stuck it on a floppy when I got it and carried it with me as a "PDA". I had batch files that I used to sync it with my desktops at home and work. It worked well. Just a few weeks ago I found one of my archival copies of it on CD and ran it under W.I.N.E. Still works, and the dates are correct as well as the year. Interestingly enough, when I ran it in Windows 95, it would skewer the dates past the year 2000. So the app is fine, it was the OS that had the problem. I think in many cases, this was true and it's where a lot of people got taken. They paid for upgrades to apps that relied on the OS for proper date calculation. The main problem is... how do you know this without hindsight? That is how people got taken.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
However, if we had not done any of that, critical systems would have gone down and we would have lost serious money (millions) on bad trades, fines for failure to settle properly, loss of business from negative publicity, etc.
Yeah, right.