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
As someone else has said, there were extremes of paranoia involved and those people would have been justified *if* we had collectively done nothing about the Y2K problem. But, we did a *LOT* about solving the problem. It was a massive endeavor that took at least two or more years to sort out for larger corporations and institutions.
I’ll give you examples from my personal experience. I was in charge of a major corporation’s telecommunication systems. This included large phone systems, voicemail, and integrated voice response systems (IVR). When we began the Y2K analysis around 1998, it took a lot of work to test, coordinate with manufacturers, and plan the upgrade or replacement of thousands of systems across the country. In all that analysis we had a range of findings:
A medium sized phone system in about 30 locations that if it were not upgraded or replaced, on January 1st, 2000, nothing would happen. The clock would turn over normally and the system would be fine. That is until that phone system happened to be rebooted or had a loss of power. If that happened you could take that system off the wall and throw it in the dumpster. There was no workaround.
A very popular voicemail system that we used at smaller sites would, on January 1, 2000 would not have the correct date or day of the week. This voicemail system also had the capability of being an autoattendant (the menu you hear when you call a business, “press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, etc.”). So a customer might try and call that office on a Monday morning but the autoattendant thinks it’s Sunday at 5:00 PM and announce “We are closed, our office ours are Monday through Friday…etc.”. This is in addtion to a host of other schedule-based tasks that might be programmed into it.
An IVR system (integrated voice response system: it lets you interact with a computer system using your touchtones like when you call a credit card company), would continuously reboot itself forever on January 1st, 2000. There was no workaround.
Some of the fixes for these were simple: upgrade the system to the next software release. Others were more complex where both hardware and software had to be upgraded. There were a few cases where there was no upgrade patch. You just had to replace the system entirely.
And these were just voice/telecom systems. Think of all the life-safety systems in use at the time. Navigation systems for aircraft and marine applications, healthcare equipment in hospitals, and military weapon systems were all potentially vulnerable to the Y2K problem.
Latest Answers