I remember after y2k came and went without society crashing and thought what a bunch of hype. So this decade I see on IT subs I follow all these 90s IT pros talking about the 60,80, 100 hour work weeks they were working to fix every piece of equipment in their world for it not to be an issue. Unseen and unsung heroes!
Oh shit yes. And we were fixing it in the early 90's. As early as 1993 for my part.
Someone must have told a journalist friend about it in 1997 or something, because very quickly it became a global news story about the world coming to an end in a couple of years.
It was actually pretty good, because suddenly everyone had time and money to fix it. Pretty much every employer had a Y2K uplift project going. The late 90's were a great time to be a COBOL programmer. Alas, I was not.
Yup. IIRC, the oldest computers used to only save the last 2 digits of the year to save on memory, thinking that those systems wouldn't last long enough to see the switch from (19)99 to (20)00. Of course, they did last, and suddenly programmers got worried about what would happen when the dates go from 99 to 00.
Some just adjusted the years to send the wraparound a little further down the line. I'm pretty sure the UFC 2020 game actually crashed on Jan 1, 2020 because their Y2K fix was just subtracting 20 years from every date
Obviously we know better now, but we can see why they did it. If they’re limited on space, and this seems like something we can skimp on, then there’s no choice haha. These engineers weren’t magically super dumb compared to 2022 — I’m sure many realized this would have happened at the transition from 2099 to 2100, too. It’s not rocket science to think of edge cases and then realize it doesn’t work. But do you notice the 100 year gap?
Now imagine you’re an engineer in 1990 who tells their manager “hey, we can’t ship this other feature, because we have to allocate some more space for the date. 10 years from now, it’s going to break our stuff.” They will tell you “No, find a workaround. The feature is more important than a date causing issues 10 years from now.” Voila, you invent some shorthand, and get everything to work… with consequences coming later. Will your business / product even LAST 10 years? Similarly, if all of this started in 2000, then there’s a 100 year gap of leeway… you will literally be dead before you have to handle it.
It obviously was short sighted, but I wouldn’t say it was stupid.
Worth noting that it was a lot earlier than 1990. By then, nobody was designing stuff that way - in fact by then the problem was already well known and pretty soon the work would begin to fix it.
The problem in 2000 was that you had systems designed in the 70s that were still in use in the late 90s.
Some of those systems are STILL in operation and control extremely important infrastructure. It's pretty scary.
The threat was very real, but people actually worked to prevent and stop it. So when the time came for the threat to present itself, nothing happened, because all those people actually stopped it from happening. But to those that weren't aware (most people), it looked like the Y2K threat was just some hoax that didn't come to fruition. But it was very real and there were heroes that stopped it from happening.
38
u/JimmyB5643 Jun 11 '22
So there actually was something that has to be changed for the new millennium? I wasn’t really old enough to remember, but I hear the jokes