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 only remember my favorite dragonball Z website (planetnamek.com) read January 1, 192000 at the top.
Other than that, that was the only “impact” I felt.
Looking back, the programmers, engineers, program managers, analysts, etc did a hell of a job keeping us going.
And Peter from Office Space. Thanks Pete.
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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For banking it was a big deal. Maybe wouldn’t crash an airplane but potentially would lead to lots of other difficult to diagnose errors that would cascade forward. Even in 2020 there are still cases where glitches pop up (e.g., the woman who has trouble booking an airline ticket because she’s over 100). Back in the 90s, there would be millions of people affected. E.g., imagine being born around 1920 (you’d be around 70 in the 1990s) and weird things would start breaking. For government workers, 55 was the minimum retirement age and the switch would cause issues.
I got my first job because of the Y2k hiring boom.
Both, it just depends on which specific worry you’re talking about. Some of it was very real, some people were off their gourds.
25 years later it’s all been lumped together for the most part.
At the time I was working in the Y2K team for British Rail. One very significant problem that arose was with the locomotive maintenance system, which was extremely old technology – before Y2K, it worked but was certain to fail afterwards. If nothing had been done to fix it, all locomotives on the rail network would be shown as “maintenance overdue” and wouldn’t have been allowed to run on the tracks, as that system reported to a load of other systems involved in running the railway.
We recently had a very problematic computer outage caused by a brand of security software that sent all the computers running it into a reboot loop due to a faulty update. It grounded many airlines, sent hospitals into chaos, 911 lines stopped working in some cities, etc. Now that was just some companies/organizations using a specific (but popular) brand of security software on Windows. Imagine every computer did that at once. It would be apocalyptic. And the experts knew it ahead of time for Y2K, so they patched all the critical systems in advance and we were good. But if it had somehow not been predicted, it could have been catastrophic.
As a millennial I feel like this was the root of so much anxiety. As an adolescent you start getting excited for the year 2000 and all of these celebrations are getting going but at the same time you’re being told constantly that the whole world may collapse because of an innocent decision that was made by adults decades ago. It’s not a malicious thing, no one is trying to destroy you with nuclear war but all of our society is so fragile that a tiny, insignificant malfunction could cripple the globe and set us back centuries so be prepared for that to happen. Or maybe it won’t, it’s a race against time you can’t contribute to. Oh I guess everything’s okay now, let’s make a bunch of jokes about it and laugh at how we thought one random day could change the course of history in our lifetimes. Then September 11th rolls around and yeah, fun times.
In the big picture of things… I think it was generally justified.
It was a real big issue. So many computer programs were written that did not take it into account. You have to take into account all devices that have computers in them, not just your desktop computer or laptop. Computers are everywhere from cars to airplanes to sensors to robotics…
Sadly, far too many industries would just write software and then forget about it. As long as it kept running, no one cared.
In this sense, the ‘paranoia’ to get people on this problem; to find every device that could be impact, to figure out what the impact could be, to update the software or get new devices, to write new software… was absolutely needed.
The ‘paranoia’ was justified just because no one really knew the full scope of the problem. If you went to any organization and asked ‘are you vulnerable to y2k issues and what would be the impact’ Almost one could say anything with any assurdness. You’d never know if you missed some small part of a program or some device somewhere was missed.
Now just knowing how computers *tend* to work, it’s unlikely planes would fall from the sky or nuclear reactors would blow up or something like that. But the paranoia was justified because it really was a ‘let’s hope we got everything’ fixed in time.
I have a computer programmer friend who was working on Y2K stuff at the time. There was a LOT of work done to prevent computers from crashing. For every computer program, and compiled system that ran something, they had to answer “are we 100% sure it was programmed to not turn off if the date is “00”. “And is it okay if this system turns off?”. And then to find people to learn and reprogram ancient computer languages to fix the systems that the world runs on. Or update and replace them.
The computer people did a good job.
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