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
My parents ran a small service company and our systems “crashed” before 1/1/00 when some of the bookkeeping software started putting dates out there into the new year. They spent tens of thousands on software and outside IT labor to get back on track. It was all resolved and running before the millennium changed but it was definitely a real problem.
It was a real problem that require real work to solve, but also got blown out of proportion by the media. It seemed paranoid in hindsight because they did such a good job of fixing it behind the scenes that almost no normal person noticed anything going wrong.
I worked the morning shift at a hospital back in 2000. When we took report we were told that one older ventilator did do something weird at midnight, but everyone was anticipating something going wrong so there were no adverse effects.
Was it overhyped? Perhaps, but if you had a kid on “Life support” it was nice that people were prepared.
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” — Futurama.
The fact we got through mostly unscathed made some people doubt the seriousness of the risk, but that neglected the truely massive amounts of work that went into making it that way. Most systems would have been fine, but the phone system, many large systems for insurance companies, the government, and public utilities would have had serious problems.
It’s like wondering why they spend so much money on the levy when the town hasn’t flooded in years. Why we work so hard to immunize kids, when they can’t recall an American even getting polio….
Y2K was about as big of a problem as the hole in the ozone layer was: it was a massive, potentially civilization-altering problem, but it had a simple, easy-to-implement (though time-consuming) solution.
I would also compare it to a race car driver getting a flat tire. He absolutely cannot win the race with a flat tire, and it would be disastrous to try to, but he can simply do a pit stop and get a new tire. Big problem, but easy solution.
Y2K was only going to be an issue if we literally did nothing about it. Instead, we knew it was a potential issue decades out, and the solution was some extremely basic programming that literally millions of people could have accomplished.
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.
I remember that most VCRs back in the day had an issue with Y2k affecting the clock used for timer recording. There was a workaround found so many people must changed the clock to a year with a similar layout for days of the week. My repair shop was busy informing people.
One of the jobs I had in 99 was y2k abatement. Was it overblown? That answer only comes with hindsight. At the time, I don’t think it would be called a panic, but there were going to be some complications.
Remember the crowdstrike thing that cause all that shit a couple of months ago? Imagine if that affected 3 times as many systems. Is it a crippled world? Not really but it would cost a lot of money and time.
At the time the easy answer was to upgrade your computers since the pentium processors were y2k free (the 486’s were not). So big companies just upgraded all computer, something they regularly do anyway.
It’s a bit of both.
There was a genuine risk that something important could crash or fail because of the date issue, but it was something that was known about for years beforehand. Loads of work was done in the run-up to make sure that older systems had their date comparisons updated. Pretty much all systems built from 1995 onwards (and probably before then) were all already Y2K compliant.
So that’s the reality of it.
And then you’ve got the media. Oh boy. There’s nothing better than a good panic to sell advertising space, and the media really ran with the worst of all worst consequences which were never going to be a thing, because people who worked with software were onto it and had been for a long, long time.
There were even some systems that never got updated and caused problems later. My daughter was born in CA in 2008. Later I moved to Nebraska for work, and when my son was born (in 2013) we found out that the hospital in NE had my daughter down as a 104 year old woman (her birthday was mistakenly “interpreted” as 1908). This caused all sorts of problems, as my 4 yr old was accidentally auto-enrolled in Medicare – and we had to clear it up on our own time as if a claim had been made, we would have been accused of medical fraud and I could have lost my job!
I jokingly refer to her as “my elderly daughter.” And tell her that, now that she’s 116 she should get her driver’s license….
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