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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In general, the Y2K problem was mostly a software problem and less of a hardware problem. Even a computer system’s main software, the operating system, is loaded from disk. The specialized software that is part of the hardware, which we call firmware, doesn’t use years as much as ordinary software.
So, yes, patches for OSes and applications were shipped out from vendors to customers on CD-roms or floppy disks or more often over the internet. The Internet had already existed for more than 30 years at that point, it was just slower than today. Even in 2000, repetitive IT work was rarely done by typing in individual commands. If your vendor did not provide automated updates, the IT person would write a shell or batch script to perform them. If the new OS was too large to download over a slow internet for each of the machines you needed to update, you would download it once or get it off of a CD-ROM and put it on a local server for machines that needed an update to access over much faster local networks.
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