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
It was a big problem. I have worked in Industrial automation and we had to update systems. Some of them quite old. Those systems are not connected to Internet and the production facility they are automating is not changing, so sometimes you can see quite old control systems still in use. Some of my coworkers even had to be at work on New Years eave, but there was no emergency. We have done our homework well and the systems were ready to roll over.
It is no small thing when something goes wrong with an automation system for production of steel and you have many tons of molten steel that is cooling down and you need to restart the production line or conticaster or whatever system. One coil from a hot rolling mill sells for 50k Euro and they are produced every 90 seconds. How much money is lost when there is 90 minutes un-planned outage?
I have also helped a small company to overhaul their information system for collection of production data to a year 2000. The system was designed well, with 4 digits for year, but somebody very clever at the company thought many years before 2000 that they will save a bit of time when they start entering year in two digits – 89 instead of 1989. So when 2000 rolled over, the records for new production were at the bottom of the list, well below dates beginning with 8x and 9x. You can’t simply replace dates in all tables at once to the correct value, because tables in a database are in “relations” so the database will not allow you to, for example, delete a client when there are jobs associated with his ID, because those records would be “orphaned”. So it was a complicated process that had to . Even if it was basically just replacing 99 with 1999, 98 with 1998 … . You have to backup everything first, so they do not lose more than a decade of production records when you screw something up.
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