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 fixed a bunch of bad time related code in the early 90’s. This was before Y2K was a thing. Unfortunately, thousands of the lines of shitty code were mostly written by one guy. I became hugely unpopular when they found out I deleted and rewrote all of his code.
He was an idiot, my boss was an idiot and the time routines were the least of my worries with the broken ass software that we had at the time.
Tl;Dr, yes, it was, but not for the reasons you might think.
Y2K posed an actual risk to major systems glitching out, deleting or corrupting databases, and some system could’ve genuinely collapsed if they rolled back to 1900 instead of 2000.
The reason nothing major happened was roughly 20 years and about half a trillion USD worth of work going into rewriting those systems from scratch, patching ones up that couldn’t be rewritten, and switching out a LOT of computer code in general.
Not everything got patched, and there were some megative consequences. Some hospital systems in the UK misdiagnosed a lot of children with either having or not having Down Syndrome, and so a lot of potentially healthy babies were aborted while a lot of children with Down Syndrome were born because their parents and doctors couldn’t know that the database got corrupted.
There was a legitimate threat, but the paranoia was way off the rails. I remember seeing a show on TV where they had a dramatization of what could happen and people’s toasters and refrigerators where attacking them.
I worked Y2K for a major bank for about 2years.
It was never going to be the end of the world, but it could have really, really sucked. The financial system would have been fucked for at least a week or two, cleaning up for months, and it would have been years before it was *all* sorted out.
As it was, about 100 of us worked the “response center” that NYE, and booked about 5000 tickets. Most were minor – an entire series of voicemail systems rolled over to 12/32/1999, some nonessential software packages segfaulted, but a small percentage still required operational responses. Some card access systems expired all the cards issued or updated in December.
It was a non event because a whole bunch of people worked really, really hard to make sure it was.
The Y2K problem isn’t over yet. Many data shops applied bandaids to their code stating if year < 50 then century = 20 else century = 19. When 2050 hits, this code will blow up with the same math problems.
I worked at a couple of different industrial facilities leading up to 2000. Starting 1997-1998 companies started thinking about it. All through 1999 consultants were going out looking at equipment. The thing that made people think it was overblown were people like me that worked at places that were build in the 50s and 60s and did not have computer systems. Things were run by relays. Before PLCs you would have a drum with bumps on it that would open and close microswitches. It was all electromechanical. Timers were what are called agastats, they had air in them that leaked past a diaphragm to activate when the time ran out. None of it was remotely affected by Y2K but people made a lot of money going around sticking Y2K compliant stickers on everything.
I am a consultant now, and I will see those stickers every once in a while at old plants.
Tom Scott has a funny video dealing with time zones
[https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY?si=NjBfWNKq48hx6PUr](https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY?si=NjBfWNKq48hx6PUr)
Yes and No. I HIGHLY doubt it was going to detonate nuclear weapons, shut down all transportation, and send the world into an apocalyptic scenario. Electronics were not that tightly integrated, ubiquitous, or interdependent.
What was happening was a crescendo of programmers shouting from the rooftops that something needed to be done before it was too late. It was known well beforehand, but just like modern enterprises, if it’s not an immediate threat, it can be fixed later. As Y2K approached, the warnings got as aggressive and amplified as possible, because no one knew the totality of the risk if nothing was done.
Eventually, the tipping point was reached when businesses realized that the world was unlikely to end, but THEIR OWN company may collapse or be held liable for not taking action. They started buying Y2K insurance to cover their liability if their code forced people to get stuck in elevators, or caused door locks to fail to open, or exposed their money to hackers to steal. The businesses figured, “Can’t you just do a search and replace?” No…that was not an option in these old applications, many of which were written by people who were already retired or even dead. Changing code that hadn’t been touched in 15 years was high cost, and high risk.
Hell, even today you have airline reservation systems and FAA flight control being run using old mainframes and COBOL scripts because it’s just too costly to replace.
Back to the original question…was it justified? Yes…before action was taken. When Y2K came, there was little impact, which wasn’t because it was unjustified, but because a lot of money and effort went into addressing the biggest issues. There were failures. There were problems…but the world didn’t end.
TLDR: The world was never going to end, but a lot of bad stuff could have occurred, and many businesses would have taken a major hit that could have bankrupted them, and there would have been major disruptions in unexpected areas. Because businesses finally decided to take it seriously, the impact was low.
As with anything it’s a mix of both,
Yes, there *would* have been catastrophic issues if important tech hadn’t been updated. 99% of these catastrophic issues were solved before Y2K was a public issue.
Yes, there *would* have been a lot of large annoyances if common tech hadn’t been updated, most of it was in time.
It really just represents that the planet as a whole was on the ball in fixing it before anyone needed to worry, really
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