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.' ""

Comments

Re:What about epoch + 2G?

[Sebilrazen]

http://xkcd.com/607/

I was there...

[CaptainOfSpray]

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.

Re:What about epoch + 2G?

[TheLink]

See this:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217

When F22 fighter planes have stupid bugs that cause problems on crossing the international date line, I can't really have that much confidence that planes won't be falling out of sky on 2038 ;).

The 12/99 bug

[lucm]

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.

Re:My findings on Y2K hype.

[dasqua]

The so called Y2Kaboom... the reason it was a non-event was that many people had worked to resolve as much of the problem as they could. We had started in around March 1998 so for us this was old news. By the time our management had started freaking out we had already completed a preliminary audit.

I had some people predict all sorts of gloom and doom... they bought extra food and waited for the apocalypse. A lot of magazines were filled with doomsday predictions etc.

For what its worth... if we hadn't fixed these:
security system - doors wouldn't have been able to be opened/closed using swipe cards
lighting/airconditioning wouldn't have turned on - (Summer in Australia with no AC)
some Microsoft access databases wouldn't have tracked contracts correctly
some Microsoft Excel spreadsheets used in reporting system gave faulty results
some clunky old accounting systems that would have truncated data on input (retired these instead of fixing)
a few telemetry systems wouldn't have turned two sites' pumps on/off

we would have had an "interesting" January 2000.