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 systems with the problem were big, customized, central computer systems so the IT staff would have done whatever was needed for that specific system. The programmers would have updated the programming and delivered a copy to IT by whatever system they were using for that computer. In the 1990s that was probably floppy disks, CDs or internet – that is, if the programming was a separate company. If the programmers were at the same company they might’ve been able to directly access the server and maybe the program was even written directly on the server. Programming discipline was a lot more lax back then.
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