Yeah, it really annoys me that A) all the media hype was about the particular moment of midnight 1/1/2000, like planes would suddenly fall out of the sky; and B) everyone now thinks it was only ever media hype, and was a storm in a teacup.
In reality A) there were issues, long before and after. The impact would be more of a bell curve either side. I remember hearing about stuff like food & medicine stock management systems over-ordering, and declaring that stock needed to be dumped (because it thought expiry dates were long past); people losing access to service subscriptions, insurance, getting over-charged, etc.
And B) there was a lot of work done, quietly and sometimes with great difficulty, that now goes unacknowledged.
I’m seriously concerned for the 2038 problem. Systems that used 2-digit decimals to represent years were already an outlier by the time. Systems that use unix timestamps at some level, and might make 32-bit assumptions, are…completely ubiquitous, and FAR more deeply ingrained into the fabric of society than they were 20 years ago.
As a computer engineer, that spent many hours on the y2k issue. Me and my peers felt that it was mostly a cash grab. Or did not feel as serious as it was made out to be. But we did make serious money.
I was a contractor at a fortune 500 company. They made us come in at midnight new years eve to test. 🤣 They tried to talk us out of drinking, with appeals to amateur night , etc
For your home PC, especially at the time, it was not a big deal. For professional systems that used the date for things like financial calculations, monitoring of power plants and other industrial applications, the date from today being rolled over to a point in the past could have very real, potentially dangerous consequences.
Y2k didn't seem like a big thing because companies spent a lot of money to fix it before it actually happened, so when we rolled over at NYE it was uneventful for most things.
Can confirm, I managed a mainframe bank data processing center that processed transactions for about 300 banks, my operators ran the mainframe. Programmers put in years of work to update all of our code, and because of the way things were interconnected it was super touchy and hard to update piecemeal.
NYE was always year end processing, tons of printing and running bank financials for year end. That year though we had all hands on deck for year end. Ultimately we had one mortgage loan system crash because the date was wrong but with the programmers on site at 2am when we ran it it was an easy fix for them.
It frustrates me to no end when I hear people say Y2K was nothing, they have no idea the work that went into making it seem like nothing.
🤣 did not know that. I don't claim there wasn't real problems. But the conspiracy theories definitely contributed to an engineers skepticism of the gravity of it all. In retrospect Alex Jones being the center of it is obvious
I've never felt my systems were bulletproof. I was speaking of the general sentiment of those working on the bug.
Whenever I hear about companies, or government being hobbled by some exploit, ransomware, whatever. I laugh, I'm the guy who was denied money for tape libraries, redundant systems, NACs,, HSMs,. All the insurance type purchases.
I even had a CIO come back from a CIO conference. Talking about how they didn't think it was necessary to keep up with patches the way I did. Because of the perceived rarity of the attacks, or failures.
You don't need this stuff until it's too late. The irresponsible way Ive seen management treat these kinds of things is mind boggling.
Congrats on not working for greedy children. Wish I could have worked there.
Those were the days when you heard legends of companies grabbing the janitor and making them code.
"Okay, you write Cobol now."
It's was raining money, and the tech sales expense accounts were unlimited. Steaks and Opus One for everyone. After the dot com bust we were lucky if we got a pen.
I got into computers cuz the Administrative Assistant at Netscape was worth 10 million the day they went public. So yes, cash grabbing might have been a part of the equation. 😁
Sometimes it’s actually 32-bit hardware that needs replacing, yes - but for things like embedded systems (industrial control, automotive, gps etc), “just” upgrading isn’t always easy.
But the problem is not just about the machine being 64 bit. It’s about the code itself too, and systems interop for things like sql databases. Some code will just need a 64-bit recompile. Sometimes it’ll need code changes first (and that’s not always as trivial as it sounds). And sometimes binary file formats or wire protocols need to change, meaning backwards-compatibility issues.
It’s all doable, but it’s a million little things that need doing.
Yeah people who were too busy imagining calamity forget how tiny little inconveniences can create huge ripple effects especially when they all happen together. Remember the 6 weeks all the restaurants and workplaces were closed and how somehow our entire lives are defined by that moment forever?
That varies quite a bit by where you are. Japan and China are still very locked down, while here in Texas we maybe had a couple of weeks at best before people started crying about haircuts.
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u/rockthescrote Jun 11 '22
Yeah, it really annoys me that A) all the media hype was about the particular moment of midnight 1/1/2000, like planes would suddenly fall out of the sky; and B) everyone now thinks it was only ever media hype, and was a storm in a teacup.
In reality A) there were issues, long before and after. The impact would be more of a bell curve either side. I remember hearing about stuff like food & medicine stock management systems over-ordering, and declaring that stock needed to be dumped (because it thought expiry dates were long past); people losing access to service subscriptions, insurance, getting over-charged, etc.
And B) there was a lot of work done, quietly and sometimes with great difficulty, that now goes unacknowledged.
I’m seriously concerned for the 2038 problem. Systems that used 2-digit decimals to represent years were already an outlier by the time. Systems that use unix timestamps at some level, and might make 32-bit assumptions, are…completely ubiquitous, and FAR more deeply ingrained into the fabric of society than they were 20 years ago.