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
The sort of hysteria we saw in the media – like planes falling out of the sky and nuclear power stations blowing up? No.
However, it was a real, serious problem that we spent a lot of time and money fixing ahead of time. This was not an unforeseen issue. We knew it was coming well ahead of time. By the time the real hysteria kicked in, the problem had been mostly taken care of.
Very large companies, like banks, don’t like to risk touching working fundamental code that runs their business. The risk of accidentally breaking the functioning business critical software is too high. They spent a lot of time and a lot of money changing a lot of code to address the problem ahead of time. That indicates that they ran tests and saw major issues.
Anomalies with dates can cause weird, unexpected issues in software. Heck, even a while back when they changed when daylight savings time started the company I worked for discovered in tests that it would break our stuff. It was a fairly simple fix, but that silly, seemingly insignificant thing broke software that could help locate people when they call 911.
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