I was born in 2000. I’ve always heard that Y2K was just dramatics and paranoia, but I’ve also read that it was justified and it was handled by endless hours of fixing the programming. So, which is it? Was it people being paranoid for no reason, or was there some justification for their paranoia? Would the world really have collapsed if they didn’t fix it?
In: Technology
I was involved in some of the Y2K mitigation efforts for a major UK financial institution. The issue was real enough, there were a lot of systems we knew would fail if nothing was done and more that we couldn’t be entirely sure of.
A metric ton of work went into ensuring everything kept running. In this case one thing we did was replace every single desktop PC in the entire company, because there were just too many different models, accumulated via time and mergers, to be sure if their BIOSs and applications could handle 2K. So everyone got a shiny new PC, pre-loaded only with software that had been tested and found compliant. That alone took over 18 months to plan and implement.
Latest Answers