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The Long Shadow of Y2K
Hugh Pickens writes "It seems like it was only yesterday when the entire world was abuzz about the looming catastrophe of Y2K that had us both panicked and prepared. Ten Years ago there were doomsday predictions that planes would fall from the sky and electric grids would go black, forced into obsolescence by the inability of computers to recognize the precise moment that 1999 rolled over to 2000 and for many it was a time to feel anxious about getting money out of bank accounts and fuel out of gas pumps. "Nobody really understood what impact it was going to have, when that clock rolled over and those digits went to zero. There was a lot of speculation they would reset back to 1900," says IT professional. Jake DeWoskin. The Y2K bug may have been IT's moment in the sun, but it also cast a long shadow in its wake as the years and months leading up to it were a hard slog for virtually everyone in IT, from project managers to programmers."
"'People were scared for their jobs and their reputations," says CIO Dick Hudson, Staffers feared that if they were fired for failing to remedy Y2K problems, the stigma would prevent them from ever getting a job in IT again. "Then there was the fear that someone like Computerworld would report it, and it would be on the front page," Hudson adds. Although IT executives across the globe were confident that they had the problem licked, a nagging fear followed them right up until New Year's Eve. While most people were out celebrating the turn of the century, IT executives and their staffs were either monitoring events in the office or standing by at home. Afterwards came the recriminations and backlash as an estimated $100 billion was spent nationwide for problems that turned out to be minimal. Others says the nonevent was evidence the Y2K effort was done right. "It was a no-win situation," says Paul Ingevaldson. "People said, 'You IT guys made this big deal about Y2K, and it was no big deal. You oversold this. You cried wolf.' ""
There are still some bugs which will come up in 2010 in some financial systems. Wait and see in february march for surprises
Second post!, and that's a lot of seconds.
We see exactly the same reaction today about all the issues that face us (whether personal, local, national or world-wide). The considered, thoughtful and measured responses that would (given a chance) produce equitable solutions with a minimum of fuss get washed away by the ignorant but vocal commentators in the media. These people don't care about the problem, or finding a solution. All they want is the cameras pointing in their direction.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Notice how people take things seriously only if something bad does happen.
Example: street lights.
If a street needs lights because its too dark, then people will only allocate enough resources to put in the street lights if there is an accident proved to be caused by darkness.
Same with Y2K. People spent money when there was a valid issue shown. With any system it was abused, but that is human nature. Therefore the money was well spent because the wolf was killed with a minigun and rocket launchers, instead of just a slingshot.
Would you rather spend $x so those "computer nerds" keep your computers running, or pay them $30x after everything (literally, in some cases) crashes?
The point is that, when it's going to be 1970 + 2 billion seconds, a lot of computer will fail because of storing dates in an unsigned int (if I'm not mistaking, PHP has issues with it that I could spot, for example), but the vast majority wont understand it. My guess is that we will get into huge trouble because of that. Maybe THAT will be the moment when planes will start falling, because nobody prepared for that.
In the couple of years leading up to Y2K, I saw my company pour millions into updating any outdated infrastructure. Since were all techies, I'm betting that we all have similar stories. All the negativity aside, is it also possible that we moved ourselves ahead with this non-existent catastrophe? I mean shoot, I know I at least got a new laptop out of the deal ;^)
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
A great many computer systems used two digit dates, and would treat '00' as a date in the past. Changing this fundamental fact would take an awful lot of work; not changing it would mean that all these computer systems break on Jan 1st 2000.
Allot of work was done, and most all important computer systems didn't suffer from any serious problems.
What is being oversold?
I suppose there were 'cowboy' consultants exploiting the problem by offering to come in and look at your recently acquired IT infrastructure, charging huge amounts for a simple thumbs up. That doesn't undermine the severity of the problem though.
"It was a no-win situation," says Paul Ingevaldson. "People said, 'You IT guys made this big deal about Y2K, and it was no big deal. You oversold this. You cried wolf.' ""
That's how I feel about the global warming issue. If we succeed in stopping the effects of climate change, all the nay-sayers will claim it was a waste of money and less effort will be taken to prevent the problem going into the future. If we don't, we could really screw up the planet.
planes fell from the sky and electric grids went black. It just didn't happen how and when we thought it would
The fact that Y2K is looked back upon as being one big joke can be seen as a giant success for all the effort that was put into 'solving' it, "we" managed to avoid disaster.
I think 38 years should be long enough for us to sort things out before Y2K.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
From the article:
"Every programmer and their grandmother was concerned about the possible coming Y2K disaster."
As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist, and C programmer of 20+ years, I find that offensive, agist, and racist.
Why don't all the operating systems start supporting internal data representations that do not impose any upper or lower limit? Something like a null-terminated string equivalent of numbers and various data types?
Forget about n-bit integers or IEEE floating point numbers. Let's just design a logical format that supports ANY number, no matter how big or how small. It may be computational expensive, but at least we have a choice to not being bound by any arbitrary size limits like 2^32 ever again.
I always thought it's silly to have to pick between a short or long integer, or to pre-define the size of a database column, only to find out a year later that it's not big enough.
Earl decides to make up for #24, "Stole a red 'Take-a-number' machine" from a local Bargain Bag. He brings along Donny Jones and Joy and Darnell to help cross the item off. However, Randy runs into the store and takes the ticket machine from him, not wanting to part with it. Earl remembers back to why Randy did not want to part with it; in Christmas 1999 Earl stole presents from a house while Joy, Donny and Randy distracted the family with carols. They go back to the Crab Shack, where Darnell explains Y2K to them, and says that life will not be able to continue without computers, all of which will break down. They all decided to stock up on supplies, and hide in Donny's sister's basement. As the timer hit midnight, all the lights in the house went out. They all thought that the Y2K myth was happening, but in fact it just happened because Donny's sister had not paid her electric bill, and her electricity ran out on January 1, 2000.
It was real, but hyped. None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
However, we knew that all our systems had to interact correctly for the business to deliver correctly. I was working as a contractor for a major airline, and we knew that lots of our most fundamental systems had been written in the 60's and 70's. They HAD to be checked, and HAD to be tested through the full extent of the workflow.
Moreover, it was always journalist bullshit that it was all going to happen at the stroke of midnight. There were plenty of opportunities for problems to occur at other times. A major food and clothing retailer started rejecting shipments of canned food in September 1999 because the dates on the cans said the Sell-By date was 100 years ago. This really happened.
And yet stuff DID happen at the stroke of midnight - and that news got suppressed because it was embarrassing, and anyway most of the incidents were minor - we had successfully fixed everything major.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
According to a friend of mine who is a manager with a large Indian offshore IT company the biggest impact of Y2K was that it gave offshore IT consultancies a big opportunity to gain some street cred and foothold in the US. The rest is history. (Whether this is good, bad, inevitable, indifferent etc. is a separate matter and largely dependent on viewpoint I guess.)
I had no idea that we, the proud people of Tuvalu, had spent so much to prevent the apocalypse of Y2K.
Why would that be? It's not as if 2010 required an extra digit. A bug in 2010 would only happen if someone started writing years with one digit in 2000.
I'm a procrastinator by nature, there's no way I'm starting to prepare now when I still have 7990 years left to do it.
Y2K was nothing more than a standard Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt(FUD) campaign in a dated wrapper. Sure, some ultra-greedy contracting agencies hyped it up to try and justify $200/hr to drag a FORTRAN programmer out of retirement, but it was all still FUD nonetheless. Trying to paint some weird decade-long gloom and doom over IT because of one particular snapshot in time is a bit false. Our industry isn't exactly dying off out there(cough, newspapers). Perhaps you should look towards those selling domain names(business.com anyone?) for millions, or those "developing" vaporware for anyone willing to sign a check during the whole dot-com era that cast more of a shadow of FUD around IT in general. Sorry, just cutting to the quick here and calling out the true bullshit.
People wanted to fear it.
I was at Wal-Mart getting an oil change (for the record never go there for that) in 1999 while in the waiting area a conversation was struck up between myself and another person waiting on a vehicle. It came out that I worked for an ISP and had done all kinds of other computer/networking work. The person wanted to know my thoughts on Y2K.
I answered "I think there's going to be a few hiccups and glitches. I don't think they're going to be all that big, we've done a pretty good job of preparing, and many things may fail over to a wrong date, but will continue to work anyways. All in all whatever problems come of it a majority will be fixed in the first couple of days and a few may take longer, but I don't think there will be much impact."
The person became visibly annoyed at my answer. We stopped talking very quickly after that. I had many other conversations with people along these lines, a couple of them even sited Art Bell and how his show was talking about the doom and gloom to come. I listened to Art Bell. He must have made a fortune selling crank radios, flash lights, and other survival gear in preparations for Y2K, not to mention his business model relies on crazies and they were coming out of the woodwork for this.
I was working the night shift during the roll over. I wasn't worried about our equipment failing. I went to work armed, I was worried about crazies who might decide our company was going to be the cause of the downfall of civilization.
The only thing I noticed was the IRC chat room had some sort of a reset, 90% of the people connected dropped off at midnight, that was actually the event that caused me to check the clock. Us other 10% stayed connected, I'm guessing it was one of dial up routers dropping everyone.
People were practically begging for the doom and gloom scenario. It gave me insight into the human condition, I'll say that for sure.
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I suppose you meant to write "if (date() < 1980) crash();"
Slashdot has code that makes the "less than" sign disappear magically. And this illustrates something about software bugs, no one expects them.
I remember the Y2K verification tests that our billing system had to meet. It had official year ranges to use in inferring centuries, and posed questions concerning not just the data that was being processed, but also when the system was run - so it was a 2-way testing regime. I was pretty confident we were already in compliance (aside from the aforementioned year ranges). We had long ago re-engineered the system to use time_t and 4-digit years internally, despite the sources & sinks being stuck with 2-digit years.
We actually did end up discovering a few Y2K bugs as a result of all that, so in our case the exercise was worthwhile. We were in compliance 12 months before Y2K and no billing records were harmed.
Was it worthwhile? Yes.
Did the customer's management ever get the sense it was worthwhile? No.
Why? Because we were loathe to advertise bugs in our code, and the customers never asked. They just wanted to know if we were in compliance.
I know the Y2K bug was real for many systems and I believe that catastrophes were provably averted, which it why it is now popularly perceived as a false alarm.
To convince the naysayers we need a few real examples where the maintainers of some important system knew that their system would fail on Y2K with major real-world consequences without recoding. The articles don't mention any.
The news must be slow to report on an event that didn't happen 10 years ago.
The one thing I found annoying about the Y2K coverage was most "journalists" going on about how the whole issues, was not an issue.
Did it ever occur to these news "professionals" that many problems were patched, *quietly* before they could break?
Many of the COBOL computer systems with the Y2K issue belonged to large, established, mainstream organizations.....many of them financial institutions. They probably wouldn't want a story in the new about how they bought a defective system that they are still using 30 years later and way past the point when they should have replaced it.
Just extremely boring and repetative - Just like most Business system programming and testing.
https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6269
I wonder what happened to those kooks who sold their homes, and bought farms or that stocked up with 2 years worth of spegheti-Os, etc.
OK, I know a moment in the sun is one in which you are illuminated, the brightest thing in the room. But let's try another meaning; basking in the sun on a tropical beach. For me, IT's moment in the sun is when everything is working and there's nothing to do but dream up what the future may hold.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Y2K was Software Engineering's moment in the Sun, not IT's.
I remember news stories from fall 1999. People were seriously concerned that gas, electricity and water utilities would fail, planes would crash, cars would stall and Social Security payments would not get made. Some acquaintances didn't like it when I pointed out that from the first time the Social Security Administration began automating, it had to deal with people born in the 19th century and others would not retire until the 21st. Hospitals replaced medical equipment that could not be certified as Y2K-compatible, instead of testing to see whether there would be any problem.
It got so bad that some New York buildings halted their elevators before the fateful midnight, and the U.S. Secretary of Transportation was riding on a commercial flight at midnight on December 31.
Those of us who wrote software for these machines just laughed and repeated the mantra, "Embedded systems programmers don't use COBOL."
I was an analyst for Gartner in the years leading up to Y2K. As usual, the real story is nothing like what is reported in the press.
First of all, the systems failed not because the date itself rolled over to January 1, 2000, but when systems attempted to do a calculation that spanned both centuries and thus did the math wrong. In 1970, 30-year mortgages started having glitches because they calculated into the year 00, and started calculating interest based on 99 years’ worth of time. Called, the “Time Horizon to Failure,” these types of failures increased on a log scale in the 90s as we approached 1/1/2000. Few if any systems based on microcontrollers (say, elevators) care at all about the date, much less that the year is 2 digits.
The bug was very real. There was literally billions of lines of mainframe code written in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s that used two digits for dates. There was actually a 1970 bug, where some systems used only one digit for the date in the 60s. Remember we are talking 80 byte punch cards and memory that was hundreds of dollars per byte. The fixes weren’t hard but there was a LOT of code to slog through, much of which was not documented and in some cases they didn’t even have the source.
Why weren’t there more visible problems? in the early and mid 90s, all the IT departments alerted their managers to the problem, showed where in the code it needed to be fixed, and what the consequences were. But few managers acted, because nobody believed the “hype” and budgets were needed for more pressing initiatives.
Enter the Wall Street Journal, who wrote an article, I think it was in late 1996 or 1997, that said to company executives that their Errors and Omissions insurance would not cover them if their company experienced Y2K failures because the bug was widely publicized and the threat was well known. This means that the executives were personally liable (e.g. they could lose their houses) for Y2K failures that happened in their companies.
The next day, thousands of companies started Y2K projects, and fixed the issues. So, no serious bugs were reported, and those who labeled it hype had all the evidence they needed to support their theory. But it took a legal threat for managers to act.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Planes are *ludicrous* expensive. They get milked out to the max before they are replaced. I imagine there will be a lot of last minute expensive and complex avionics swaps near to 2038, just like a lot of code and so on got fixed real close to Y2K and not before, it had to wait to hit near panic mode first before the suits took it seriously.
Business, like government, tends to be stupidly reactive just as much as pro active, pretty much a good mixed bag there. Witness hurricane Katrina and adequate level levee building. Everyone knew the problem existed, yet they "couldn't afford" to fix it in advance of failure. So then it cost a lot of lives and ten times the cost.
...it is a signed int....it does support dates prior to 1970. Funny thing is you said, 1970 + 2 billion. It would be 1970 + 4 billion if it were unsigned.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
They decided it was a good idea to grow tomatoes on their farms to sell to Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and made their living in a new way?
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In 99, a friend of mine was doing a live migration from a mainframe software that was too expensive to fix for Y2K. This was a critical billing system for the business so they had to keep the mainframe working until the migration to the new software was complete. The complex project was scheduled to be over on Dec 15.
What they did not expect was that the end-of-month calculation routine in the old software used a "clever" trick: add one month, remove one day...
So on Dec 1st the software went down in flames (and my friend did not get his Y2K bonus).
They called it the 12/99 bug.
lucm, indeed.
It was not just kooks. The well known author Edward Yourdon ("Decline and Fall of the American Programmer") actually moved to New Mexico from New York City in anticipation of a major catastrophe. Many major religious leaders (Pat Robertson in particular) are predisposed to end-of-the-world scenarios so they readily accepted the idea that the end was almost upon us. I doubt their numerous followers would call them kooks.
Human beings have learned to cope with our imperfect creations quite well. Any Y2K bugs were just a another drop in an ocean of software problems. Windows (and Linux for that matter) are released with literally thousands of bugs. That doesn't stop millions from using these system quite successfully.
There was real panic and an attempt to pay their way out of the perceived threat, but despite the fact that some systems were prone to the problem, most were not. For those that were, many could be upgraded simply. I don't recall any real extra workload.
That experience seems to have been common to many who worked in IT at the time. It was certainly true where I worked and on the sites where our consultants provided support.
I feel sorry for you if you were one of the few whose experience was different.
On Y2K day, the website calendar of the US Naval Observatory (our observational time keeping experts; National Bureau of Standards count them, these guys tell us when they start and stop and need readjusting) read JAN 1, 19001.
See if there's still a screen capture of that around, I know several circulated back then. Then if anyone challenges you, simply show it to them and say "We didn't oversell. We got it right. They didn't."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Ecstasy
The attack of 9/11/2001 took out the WTC and other buildings near ground zero. This was the heart of the financial district and the IT base of many firms.
In the hours following the attack, the offsite backup sites for many of those firms seamlessly took over. Nobody noticed that.
I firmly believe that without Y2K remediations, 911 would have been a big IT disaster too.
Agony
At the successful conclusion of Y2K remediation efforts, the upper and middle level managements treated themselves to celebrations at luxury resorts. Meanwhile, many IT grunts who put in all the extra hours got nothing more than pink slips. In most cases, the companies didn't even offer to buy them a beer as thanks for their long hours.
It was the most ungracious treatment of labor I ever witnessed. Compare it to calling Viet Nam vets baby killers.
Part of the overselling was this idea that the systems would just blow the fuck up when the date rolled over. That was not necessarily the case. In particular I think it was oversold for critical system, like computers that control power plants and the like. I never saw any evidence that these things would go nuts, lock up, set the plant to do something dangerous. Looked more like they'd roll over and nothing much would change since the date was used in terms of "On this date do X," kind of stuff, not a comparative function.
Also in some cases, the date was kept on a computer but was totally irrelevant. One system I helped with around that time was an old Windows 3.1 machine. It ran a proprietary piece of software that controlled an instrument. Well the system did keep a date and was not Y2K compliant. What would have happened when it rolled? Who knows, I didn't bother to find out. Instead, I set the date back 30 years. The date on the system was never used in the control software, and thus was not relevant. Simple cheap fix.
I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of work to be done with regards to the problem. In particular the financial industry needed to do a lot since there stuff IS dependent on comparing dates. However I do not find evidence that it was the world ending problem it was made out to be. If nothing had been done I'm sure there would have been plenty of problems, but I am rather doubtful they would have been catastrophic problems, or things that couldn't then be dealt with.
That's not to say the proper answer wasn't for companies to deal with it beforehand. I'm just saying the doom and gloom paranoia was way overblown.
I just ran across this example in Peter Wegner's "Programming in ADA: an Introduction", published in 1980. This one doesn't even have the excuse that it was storing two-digit years!
The one that was fit for human evolution, not any of those that were fit for long extinct trilobites, or 1m-wide damselflies, or giant tree ferns, or even giant tree fungi. Not too fond of snowball earths either.
There was certainly a range of climates that were just fine for dinosaurs. We don't have those anymore -- both the climates AND the dinos ('cept birds of course).
That you even ask the damn question is maddening. Do you really have such little clue, or are you so blinded by Republican / Fox News propaganda? Do you really hate humanity so much that you want us to go the way of the T-Rex?
In case anyone cares to recall, there was one major Y2K problem: US spy satellites were offline or operating minimally for a couple of months. At first they said hours. Then it became days then weeks. Then finally, they were forced to admit it was a couple of months.
I worked for a telecomms company (one of the biggest) and was involved in Y2K remediation. Most of our software was fixed by 1996 with a few small systems fixed in 1997. Our first Y2K fix was done in 1988! If those systems (and similar from the other big companies) had not been fixed nobody could have made any long distance phone calls after 1/1/2000, but they were fixed. It would have been a big deal but we fixed and double-tested everything and robbed the scare mongering reporters of their disaster headlines, get over it.
I worked for a systems reseller/support provider back then. We had 50 to 100 customers out in the field running a particular OS and associated software products.
Our major vendor was extremely slow at getting updates out. The OS definitely had a problem, as account expiry dates were stored using two digit years, so ever user on every system would get locked out come 2000. They managed to devise a fix to the account security system, but it was well into 1999 before this update appeared. Even then the update was in the form of a complete new release of the latest version of the OS which had some terrible inherent problems not seen in the earlier releases many customers chose to still run.
More annoying with this new update is at the same time many long lasting OS features were discontinued, features which the majority of our customers used. It was as if they simply couldn't be bothered to audit the code, so they simply junked it. These features included WAN connections via serial and leased lines and integration with IBM mainframe architecture - with these features no longer available the OS no longer had an advantage over the then competition.
The knock-on effect was that the majority of our customers simply decided to abandon the OS altogether and migrate to something else, such as NT.
Those articles that mentioned planes and fire and brimstone falling out of the sky should have focused on the positive e.g. guess what, that hardware you bought late this year? The warranty's going to extend itself another 99 years. Heck bring it in even after 12 months, and we'll stick it to The Man.
(And to the OP the reason the damage was minimal was because we DID have people making sure that there wasn't going to *be any damage.)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
You'd think developers learned from Y2K, but:
Spamassassin Bug 6269 - FH_DATE_PAST_20XX scores on all mails dated 2010 or later.
Every mail that has gone through Spamassassin since midnight gets a spam score because "the date is grossly in the future." And what's worse, they "fixed" it five months ago on the trunk (not in any released version)... by changing the cutoff year to 2020.
Y2K was overblown by middle level IT managers who saw it as an excuse to replace all the older equipment and software whose maintenance they hated with brand new toys that would be more fun to work with.
These are the guys that fed the press the bullshit. Naturally the press got parts of it wrong, since most of what they were being given was being spin-doctored to advance a hidden agenda. But these were the available credentialed experts, willing-- nay, often eager-- to be interviewed. With their camera-ready Love Me walls of MSCE certificates in the background.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there was no need for a conspiracy. The majority of persons in mid level IT management from 1997 t0 2000 were the guys who learned all kinds of clever coding tricks back in the day when it was necessary to use tricks to get acceptable performance out of 8088 and 6502 machines. These were not the best programmers of the times; these were the ones who were merely adequate, the ones who could not make the distinction between an elegant solution and one that was only clever and probably a set up for a future failure. These guys realized they could have more fun using their specialized knowledge in clever ways in the politics of mid level management. So the group attitude of these managers was one of disdain for following rules that got in the way of doing the job, and applause for non-obvious solutions that got the job done in an unexpectedly fast and seemingly effective way. They had learned to do quick and dirty programming, and they transferred that skill into management, but as a group they really didn't see anything wrong with being dirty: a little grime was considered a healthy part of the job.
And these guys were the ones who controlled the reports on the potential impact of Y2K, and they saw those reports as an opportunity to modernize their infrastructures. Rather than looking at patches to work around Y2K issues, for only a hundred times more money, just replace the entire computer and all its software, and everything will be better. Who would argue with that? More to the point, who with good credentials would argue with that, when virtually everyone with credentials would see it as a laudable quick and dirty approach to improving the infrastructure?
There was no need for a conspiracy. The selection pressures of 1985 - 1995 assured that the vast majority of mid level IT managers were all practicing quick and dirty office politics. The entire species was going to respond in the same way to the Y2K stimulus.
Will
Yes, I am aware of that and no I don't think it is always done. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The industry has also been having a hard time with sub par counterfeit parts, something they don't like to mention out loud much. Then you have examples like the above mentioned F-22 flight crossing the international date line. These are top of the line "new" extremely expensive and what might *think* really looked at designs..yet that snafu still occurred. And you still see fleet groundings when new unexpected problems show up, unfortunately usually after a crash.
When they *really* want to and they really do the work, and the original design was over built really smart and strong, yep, they can keep planes flying and working a long time, past their original estimated service life, like the buffs, by doing continual upgrades. Like I said though, it is all ludicrously expensive. Ain't a single dang thing cheap and easy on airplanes, and this includes very limited production runs of new model avionics.
So, I will stand by my prediction that just like y2k there will be a lot of last minute upgrades done.
Speaking of which, although I am not an IT guy, I was made aware of the y2k date thing in *85* by a friend of mine, an ex IBM mainframe guy. When it hit 97 and 98 and it surfaced in the popular press, I was certainly amazed that it was still a problem....some shops were still coding with the date bug in, while others were just starting to think about maybe looking at it and doing some remediation. Private business and government did in fact mostly wait until near the last minute to do repairs. I know a ton of computer guys were telling me this back then, even my state's head IT honcho told me this, that even though they as the engineers knew a lot of stuff needed fixing, they didn't get permission/funding until the suits started getting harangued by their spouses and customers and shareholders and the press in general, asking how their y2k repairs were going. "Last minute" more or less repairs took place then, at a higher cost than what was needed (due to what you guys call the mythical man month), precisely because they waited so long to do it. As it was, most stuff got fixed just swell, but it certainly cost them a lot extra to do it by waiting.
The one really good thing to come out of the y2k "last minute" fix scene was a huge surge in just "fuck it, we'll just buy new equipment", which really resulted in a well needed boost to the computer industry as a whole, and a radical dropping of prices across the board for computer-stuff because of a lot more competition and economies of scale efficiencies.
None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight
Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25 2007, @06:35PM
it.slashdot.org
On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii...
Before (long before) it came, I was in university (ok about 3 years before). I had a roommate also in CS. Our landlord was studying physical education, and another was in education. They asked us earnestly if there was anything to worry about. We told them no. It was a problem that could affect a few systems (old legacy cobol systems and some old DOS programs, but mostly it was marketing bullshit to sell software and services. It was true that all computers have clocks, but another more technical term is oscillator, and its more like a heartbeat than a wristwatch. It doesn't care about the year one fig. In spite of this, and the practical reality that most systems aren't programmed to care in the slightest what year or day it is, there really isn't anything to worry about. For manufacturers with machines, software and services to sell, NO, what I was saying was sacrilege. In a way, it was. This was their once-in-a-millennium chance to make a killing. Either I didn't understand that, or they would declare that I simply didn't know what they knew. Gosh that was money well spent. The same people buying computers for large companies (those who went to business school, having taken an introduction to computers course in college, and as business folk are prone to do, declared themselves expert), bit hook, line and sinker, and saved trillions of dollars by spending billions of dollars on new equipment declared to be 'safe'. After y2k, the people selling solutions set about selling virus and computer security products.
In a hobby project[1] which I'm involved in, a developer wrote this:
document.cookie = 'defaultnick=' + encodeURIComponent(thenick) + "; expires=" + (new Date(Date.parse("1 Jan 2010")).toUTCString());
I call it the Y2.01k bug ;-p
According to what I heard, the rationale behind it was that he expected the project to be scrapped or rewritten by now...
Took me a few moments to figure out why things weren't working :)
[1] http://www.iwannachat.net/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html So all of you must be wrong.
Apollo was a company that made mini-computers back in the day. The OS was called "Domain" and the system was used in a manufacturing environment, controlling an automated circuit assembly system.
They, too, used unsigned ints for date keeping, but it used an odd epoch date. On October 30th, 1999 I was notified by our supplier that there wasn't a "Y2K" issue. There WAS a November 3rd, 1999 issue, however. At that time, the system would not boot.
Some of the boot code used signed ints, some unsigned. Early in boot, one of the routines waited for a certain time + interval to start. Essentially, waiting for the last process to complete. However, the last process wrapped and the timestamp was something like 6,500 B.C. and the next process used an == to compare, not >=. It would wait for the next few thousand years before completing. "Oh look, I've got time!"
Luckily we had the Sun Solaris-based replacement equipment there...for a year. We had just needed motivation to actually make the transition. 4 days we motivation enough -- the bastards.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This site (full of spam comments) has a y2k bug: http://www.amtor.com/cgi-bin/links/cougalinks.cgi?action=view-links note that the dates are "19109" (or 19110 now), this is beacause perl stores the year as the number of years after 1900, so 1999 is 99, and 2000 is 100, you were supposed to print years by adding the perl year to 1900 and then converting the result to a string and printing that, but many people didn't bother and instead printed "19" and then the perl year, which is why that site is showing "19109" as the year...
After 1999 infrastructure spending of all sorts dried up. We didn't spend for FEMA, we allowed transportation, water gas and military infrastructure to start to fail. Since then infrastructure spending has been reactive than proactive across the economy.
Americans made a choice in 2000 when faced between
* Mr "wishing makes it so" Bush
* Mr "lets proactively deal with problems" Gore
that they liked wishing makes it so. We now have an infrastructure deficit over 2 trillion. I agree with everything in the article, but the collapse in IT spending that we are still in is a result of the move to systematic corruption and grotesque inequality of George Bush. We had a president who ran on Après moi le déluge, why are we shocked that CEOs would be willing to do that?
This guy, and everybody else who thought the threat was only on New Year's Eve, 1999, are sadly misinformed. The problem happens primarily when calculations occur that span the century boundary. The media reports this garbage then when it doesn't come true the credible alarmists are called fools.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Rock over London, rock on Chicago: Wheaties, breakfast of champions!
I'm reminded of a Carlin piece (Carlin on Campus? Live at Carnegie? I forget) where he talks about practicing for rain dancing.
If you don't practice, how do you know you've got it right?
If it doesn't rain when you practice, doesn't that mean you're doing it wrong?
If it does rain when you practice, why have the dance? When you need rain, just hold practice!
OK, I have no idea why I thought of that.
How about this, then: I carry elephant repellent. How do I know it works? Well, do you see any elephants?
Not sure about that one either. I'm here all week, folks!
The fact is that nobody knows if you've staved off disaster because the disaster never happened. And if the disaster does happen, you've failed. What you need is a time rewinder so you can wait for the disaster to happen, say "See? I told you so!" and then go back in time and fix it.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
I guess I'm that group. First computer was a PET and I know 6502 Assembler. My first structured language was Pascal and the second was C, which was all about performance tricks. I was mid level around 2000 and a CIO today.
And let me tell you I still believe in rip out and replace unless there is substantial business intelligence embedded in the apps. Maintaining crap is expensive and demoralizing. And quite often systems can pay for themselves in 3 -5 years. We don't live in a society with 75% interest rates, our tech spending should not reflect those interest rates.
Even assuming these kooks are right, it baffles me that they think the answer is to get hold of cash. Selling your home, for example, would be a pointless exercise. In a serious catastrophe of the proportions the loons expect, currency would become worthless.
Let's see...
Yeah, I am fine dismissing these people as kooks.
I worked at local telco and we had automated wakeup service: You call to a service number and dial in the time you want a wakeup call. Very popular service, impressive to watch during morning rush hours (07:00 etc) when it was doing its' thing. Tested the backup system simply setting the date to 2000 something. All help break loose: Don't remember if it was just software freezing up or starting to behave irrationally. Seeing that got me worried, perhaps the doomsday types were right after all. I changed to another company before Y2K, so I don't know how the problem was solved in the previous company. Perhaps they just ditched the system.
In 1973, as a newly hired systems analyst, I suggested in a design meeting that a new major system we were designing use four-character year fields instead of two to prevent future problems. It drew a laugh. Of course virtually all the laughers were long since retired by the time the company spent tens of millions of dollars retrofitting all those systems with four-digit fields or 60/40 assumption logic (which, by the way, just postponed the "Y2K" problem for another few decades). But we could have saved a LOT of grief by doing it right in the first place.
those that refuse to see...
Some software lasts decades and has big side effects. Techniology management is ephemeral, with life-spans measured in months, rarely years.
Managers knowingly mandate stupid decisions, because there is no personal downside and a short term budget upside.
Y2K was because large organizations (or the incumbent management) repeatedly ignored technical advice to allow for 4 digit years, because it saved a few bytes storage for each date (which was significant back then) and they could argue "that problems still 15 years away, we will replace it", "that's still 10 years away, we may replace it", "that's still 5 years away, maybe we can fix it later", "that's still 2 years away, we are asking for a Y2K budget"...
Y2K? Oh Sh*t Fix that now..., then blame the developers!
Technology "management" typically refuses to see or respond to anything with an effect longer than their own Mayfly existence. At the same time mangers (as a group) are hypocritical and unethical enough to blame others, when the fertilizer hits the windmill... Couple that asshattery with a wilfully ignorant and fear mongering media, and you have the recipe for shifting the blame from chronic management incompetence to "the techies did it..." which is completely bogus.
There are few, if any, real technical issues remaining unsolved for most business purposes, and none that go completely unpredicted by systems analysts.
There are an enormous number of fundamentally incompetent CIO's and (worse) "Project managers", who should not be permitted the long term indirect technical influence they possess.
Their myopic decisions can cause potentially dangerous and expensive impacts on society, such as Y2K.
The negative influence, spin, and misleading media, continues; for example, the poor design of security in most commercial applications is directly attributable to short term "not my problem" management thinking.
Fortunately, we have better controls on building bridges than we have software, but the impact of some types of software is now much more serious and far reaching than mere mechanical and civil engineering.
Technology management needs a better professional accreditation and system of ethics, see acm.org for in depth discussions.
In particular, the ludicrous notion that you can manage construction of something you don't understand, (and don't attempt to understand) )by setting arbitrary dates and budgets, is commonplace in IT.
When the time comes to fix the next disaster, our failure to fix chronic management incompetence, will be the root cause.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
The one that was fit for human evolution, not any of those that were fit for long extinct trilobites, or 1m-wide damselflies, or giant tree ferns, or even giant tree fungi. Not too fond of snowball earths either.
So which one of the past five hundred million years is the one that is "fit for human evolution"? And it's also worth noting that once Earth gained its oxygen atmosphere there have always been regional climates which varied in their fitness for human evolution. Perhaps you have a particular comfortable, regional climate in mind (like the Mediterranean) that we could implement globally?
Or perhaps you think we should live on a Trantor where effectively the entire area of the world has been converted to habitable urban environment? This would be the best fit for humans.
Or perhaps human evolution is better served by adverse climate conditions, in which case, the more extreme and harsh the environment is, the better for human evolution. We might even deliberately stoke disasters and plagues in order to improve human evolution even more.
That you even ask the damn question is maddening. Do you really have such little clue, or are you so blinded by Republican / Fox News propaganda? Do you really hate humanity so much that you want us to go the way of the T-Rex?
That you fail to answer the question concisely is enlightening. Do you really hate humanity so much that fixing Earth at one particular climate is more important to you than the well being of humanity?
They're not Y2K compliants? Wow.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And do you still believe in gaming the reports so an issue similar in scope to the Y2K issue will appear to be a mission critical threat to high level management?
Oh wait... you now are high level management. Let's put this in your current perspective.
When somebody reporting to you pulls the wool over your eyes and you buy into their fictions and alter the budget to their benefit, what do you do when you discover that they've led you down the primrose path? Do you promote them to higher levels of responsibility?
Will
No I likely have to fire them, or ice them or cut them out... if they were successful. But I also realize I have a deep structural problem. Why do they think they need to lie to me to get their job done? If the Directors and VPs are acting Somalian warlords the problem is really with me not them. I consider getting middle management to genuinely buy into the program important. I don't want yes men, if I don't get accurate feedback then I have no clue what's really happening.
My guess is stuff skips generations. I'm not making the mistakes of the guys who were in charge in the late 1990s, when I was on my way up. Maybe I'm mistakes of the guys who were in charge in the late 1970s when the senior management of the 1990s were on their way up? I just don't know what those were since I was a kid then. :-)
Back then, my first gig in the UK was dealing with Y2K issues.
We had a substantial group of people in an isolated environment moving dates to 1/1/2000 and beyond and finding what was breaking.
I was witness of Perl scripts that failed to calculate dates correctly and SunOS and Solaris widespread patching due to specific Y2K issues.
Whoever says that Y2K was a hoax or myth does not know what he is talking about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You really are completely clueless about the history of this planet. There were no humans 500 million years ago, no mammals, no dinosaurs either yet, no flowering plants, not much of anything you'd recognize today without a microscope.
And here's a hint: Trantor is a fictional place. It's not true. Duh. For all we know, such a place would have insurmountable problems except with the help of super duper fictional technology we don't possess.
Y2K computer bug is just another bug
I worked with a team offering Y2K services for customers of a large computer company. We fixed alot of code and it would have been a much bigger problem than it was if it hadn't been taken seriously.
One tiny example, which showed up before 1/1/2000 was with a large nationwide toy chain. If you used a credit card with an expiration date after 1/1/2000 every register in that store hung. We found alot of issues that would have had news-making consequences if nothing had been done.
The fact that it was a non-event was because alot was done to fix the code before hand.
One interesting side note is that we hired a bunch of retired Cobol programmers because alot of the code we fixed was in Cobol. Although I hadn't done alot of Cobol programming myself, it became very clear to me that Cobol was at that point and probably still is the most effective Business programming language. Pretty amazing considering its age.
I never really faced a problem with the Y2K bug, but now I remember it just about any time I sit down at my desk... A couple years ago at a thrift store, my mother found a Y2K snowglobe. Yes. I'm not kidding.
The base says '01-01-00' and 'It's coming...'. And in the globe, there's a computer with '01-01-00' on the screen, and a bunch of components and stuff bursting out of the top of the monitor. And the snow? Little plastic 1s and 0s. BEST. GIFT. EVER.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
A lot of consultants made some money by fixing the problem.
Fixed that for you. Working on pensions systems for people who were born in the 30's and later, who could still be alive well after 2000, we started fixing Y2K bugs in 1990. We didn't alll get paid shedloads of cash, either.
Just because you never saw any of the hard work being done, didn't mean it wasn't happening.
I discovered a bug in a 3rd-party calendar control which was particularly interesting: If the year of the date was set to 1999 (or less) and you added a value to it to give a date greater than 2000, it actually incorrectly made it 1000 more, ie 1999 + 1 = 3000. Not so obvious!
In the run-up to 2000, I was consulting for a large international pharma company. My area of concern was in making sure that the software that monitored the maintenance schedules of all the expensive (and in-expensive-but-dangerous) plant didn't suffer from date-difference errors. For example, when does that 500 gallon pressure vessel next need a scheduled maintenance cycle? One-hundred years ago? WHAT? QUICK... EMERGENCY! Shutdown the production line of that drug, the FDA will castrate management for un-auditable maintenance logs!!
So, as others have said, the problems were real, but it was the idiot journalists who couldn't understand the real problem. Afterall, if they were real experts, why the hell are they writing for a newspaper instead of doing it for real?
thank you http://prowest.ua/
It seems like we agree that sending FUD up the corporate ladder is inappropriate, even though those constructing the FUD may have good intentions; are doing it "for the good of the Order". I can see that this is a separate issue from decisions to replace equipment that are based on long term cost comparisons.
In the VA in 1997 - 2000, there was a lot of FUD directed up the corporate ladder that involved both
IT ended up patting itself on the back while clinicians had to delay implementation of some programs and were unable to deliver expectations on other programs for lack of the needed IT support during these years. At that time, upper management did not have enough computer savvy to connect the dots and recognize that the problems in meeting these patient care goals were due to a failure of IT to provide the needed support. After all, the IT staff was interacting daily with the clinicians, replacing their computers, showing them how to work the upgraded software, isolating and fixing the bugs... The IT staff never seemed to figure out why nobody else was happy with them when they had done such a Good Thing. But at the time nobody else really understood why they had this gut feeling that IT had somehow screwed them over. Maybe all the shiny new computers were too much of a distraction.
Will
was the pretty much complete retirement of Windows 3.1 during 1999.
Personally I see this as a good thing.
AG
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
At my company we've had a weekend fire drill thanks to Y2K. I'm not talking about 10 years ago. I'm talking about yesterday. Ten plus years ago some genius "fixed" the Y2K issue by checking to see if the first of the two digits in the year was a zero. If it was prepend "20", otherwise...
time subscription. (Sorry hit a character lime in the subject.) He got a notice that his subscription to his ham radio magazine was expiring. Since it was a lifetime subscription, he called them up and asked if they knew something that he and his doctor needed to be aware of. Lifetime subscriptions were given an expiration year of '99'.
We were a service/hardware provider and we made a killing that year that was completely erased by the doldrums in years following, Everyone had pushed forward their buying cycle into late 1999 so 2001-2003 were unnaturally lean years.
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?