I understand what the general issue was for y2k. Computer systems that only recorded the last two digits of the year would reset to 01 Jan 1900 and cause issues for banks and other important records. My question is how did people fix the problem and test computers to make sure they were good? Was it a lot of manually typing in shell commands or could IT folks implement a patch with a floppy disk or some other removable media? How do you get a computer that was built to work with a certain date format to recognize dates in a new format?
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The affected systems were either patched with a software update or entirely replaced.
Yes Y2K was a problem in a lot of systems, but the scope of how many systems were affected was badly overblown by the media.
>My question is how did people fix the problem and test computers to make sure they were good?
Companies that make the software have demo labs for testing with fake data. They just set the clocks to a few minutes before midnight on Dec 31 1999 and waited to see if anything broke.
>Was it a lot of manually typing in shell commands or could IT folks implement a patch with a floppy disk or some other removable media?
Yes and No
You would use whatever patching process was used for that particular piece of software. Yes sometimes back then it would have been a floppy disk.
The development side of things was more complicated. Thousands of lines of computer code potentially had to be updated to reflect having those extra digits on the year. Now factor in that a lot of that software was by its nature very old and often written in program languages that weren’t really in use anymore and you start to understand why this was a problem.
> How do you get a computer that was built to work with a certain date format to recognize dates in a new format?
You don’t
If it was a hardware problem the hardware likely had to be replaced. Software meanwhile could be updated.
But for equipment that wasn’t Y2K compliant we’re talking about hardware that by this point was probably already 15-20 years old on average by 1999.
Developers had known about this bug for a long time and had fixed it a long time before.
Many IT department just used the panic of Y2K as an excuse to get the budget to replace their aging hardware.
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