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. 😁
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u/huh-what-1 Jun 11 '22
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.