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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It was tough. I had other programmer friends who were doing this.
The date field may have been two digits, say 25. This was done on a very old computer with little memory and storage. Since then the program has been moved to a more modern computer with more memory and storage, but the program was not altered.
So the program reads 25 and assumes 1925. The database storing the data also stores only 25. You have to do three things, change the program to use the date, change the database to store the date, and convert every number to a date.
It was a lot more complicated than this, but basically for all historical numbers we say “For every 25, make it 1925.” That’s easy with a script. But there are always outlier cases to worry about, like this held mortgage due dates so we want those 2025. so deep knowledge of the program and its data was necessary.
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