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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Software companies were very good about issuing patches. As a University IT support, I spent the last three months of the year making sure all of our software was up to date. We were closed for winter break, but I went in on January 1st to test our department server and workstations and didn’t have any problems.
While to many people it looked like the issue was overblown, in reality there was a lot of work behind the scenes to prevent major problems.
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