The Millenium Bug

We had a ZX81! Obviously not in Y2k, we had whatever Windows machine was reasonably current at the time, and, of course, a modem.

I don't remember much panic about the millennium bug. We were assured at work there was nothing to be concerned about, and there wasn't.

I was working in a hospital in South London & we had to have every piece of electronic equipment checked & then stickered with 'Y2K checked' it was a huge task
I was a student at the time & it paid much better than other student jobs.

In the end I think only 3 pieces of equipment in the entire site had problems related to it & none were patient/staff equipment - I think one was a video player in a staff lounge. So all in all a good job done!

I worked for HMRC in 1999/2000 and I was volunteered to go on a training day and be in the office no later than 6am to switch every single terminal on, do something (can't recall what) ready for Y2K

I think I was told to do it as I'm pretty capable and lived a 1 minute (yep) walk from our office block.

I was a member of the Y2K team in a civil service Department at the time. My role was liaison with other similar agencies to make sure we were all up to speed on what shared software had been sorted , and designing and running simulation training events for the various teams that would be manning "mission control" over the new year period. Given the nature of the work carried out by my organisation and its counterparts I was aware of the potential for some really catastrophic outcomes in the UK and globally should the problem not be sorted out. So no, it wasn't a con, nor was it just a way for IT consultancies to make a fast buck. It was a real threat which went away due to the hard work and diligence of a lot of people, and governments around the world taking it very seriously

Yes.

I worked for a small computer company in the the run up to Y2K, and we were indeed in contact with the hardware and software manufacturers and in turn passing on details about recommended upgrades to our end users.

Reading that thread really took me back to the Y2K panic stockpiling candles, worrying planes would fall from the sky, the lot! It’s funny how tech fears come in waves. These days, instead of fearing computers, we rely on them for everyday curiosities. I’ve been using an AI insect search by image tool after finding strange bugs in my garden, and it’s wild how far technology has come since the Millennium Bug days.

Let’s be fair. Quake was about 8MB. 1GB was overkill! In my final year of school I managed to install quake on the year 12 computers, and setup a Quake server on the one in the corner. The school had locked down the floppy drive and usual access but left port 80 open so could FTP the files. Every lunch people would be playing quake and eating lunch. The year head got so exasperated he started fining people $1 each time he caught them, so people would come in and put their dollar on the PC for him to collect.

at the end of the year all the money he had collected was donated to the victims of a starving earthquake charity. I thought it was quite imaginative. Eventually the deputy headmaster threatened to suspend me if I didn’t show them how to stop me installing games…it’s a wonder they had an actual IT consultant they paid good money to run the school network.

I actually had a 16k spectrum. With about 6K of that taken up by the screen, that had a whopping 10K to code games into. There was still some good stuff on it though like asteroids, and the 48K spectrum (which I upgraded to by putting in more memory ICs) had tons of great games.

No doubt someone will be talking about their ZX80 next.

I think like most of these things it was not at the extreme end of the scale, neither a complete con nor potentially a huge disaster that was successfully mitigated. People like to fall on one extreme end in their opinions though.

Somewhere in between those two points. I think a lot of people were massively overpaid for resolving it because of the fear and hype created. That said clearly some issues were prevented by taking pre-emptitive action.

I remember in the company I worked for the software department were doing some stuff on it, but it didn't take a huge amount of effort and when it did finally happen nothing much actually happened.

I think our first home computer (an Acorn?) had 1MB memory!

(or it might even have been 1kb! Tiny anyway!)

I was in my 20s, we had the internet via modem at home and I worked daily with computers - I didn't worry about the Millennium Bug. I didn't expect anything to happen and if it had done, I'd have been more interested than scared.

I remember saving my pocket money with my brother to afford an extra 8MB of RAM so we could play multiplayer duke nukem

Oh yes, requests with full business justification for an extra 1GB storage.

Entirely wrong. The IT guys actually fixed it, the ones cashing-in were, as usual, the consultants.

I worked in an accountancy firm, and we had to ensure all of our clients had updated their various IT systems to ensure the going concern of their businesses. Be assured that if they didn't their systems would have crashed or malfunctioned causing losses, or even tank the business. We would go around installing the software updates for their accounting packages and operating systems (for a small fee). It was a fairly simple thing to do thanks to the software companies working round the clock to fix the bugs.

The guys who were "on the take" were the consultants (there to con & insult you) who made it all sound scary and complicated and charged their clients a fortune to fix their systems (probably paying their IT guys a fraction of the fees). After all, what would you think was reasonable to pay to protect you livelihood/life's work?

I too worked on the preparation for this.

Nothing happened because billions was spent on preventing it, not because there wasn’t anything to be concerned about.

Go on then, explain how companies made a fortune. You’re clearly an expert.

Do you have much knowledge of the industry? Or spelling.

No it wasn't

It was a way for it company’s to make a fortune and it worked.

It is sort of mind blowing how powerful computers are now. I carry in my pocket a processor with more processing power, more storage and more memory, in the region of 100s of times more powerful, than the first computer I built back in the early 90s…it’s staggering. I remember saving my pocket money with my brother to afford an extra 8MB of RAM so we could play multiplayer duke nukem 🤣

I agree @EBearhug, we had to be very inventive back in those days. It’s impossible to convey how expensive storage was and how every byte or bit counted. The maximum file size on our mainframe was 2gb. I worked on at least one system where the date was held as YDDD I.e the last digit of the year and the number of the day (001-365 or 366).
Another example is the use of bit patterns to indicate the meaning of the next field as record lengths were limited.

I think in many cases having someone on hand who could just switch things off in the event of a problem would be better than nothing, even if they couldn't fix the issue.

the date as "number of seconds since a certain date", such as 1st January 1901

It's most often 1st January 1970, because that's the Epoch, when Unix time starts.

It was real. A lot of time and money was spent on it. I was on-call and it was a crap night, because I couldn't go out partying, but wasn't one of the ones who was in on site - those people got party bags and had fun in the office. I was at home alone.

In later years, when we occasionally came across a Y2K problem, it sparked quite a bit of interest among the techies.

Programming used to have to be as memory-efficient as possible, hence 2-character years. I think something has been lost in the craft since people didn't have to worry so much about creating neat, efficient code in the same way.

I did wonder that at the time as any significant IT issue would have been way beyond my capability to resolve.

I think it was more a case of peace of mind for them knowing that if something did go catastrophically wrong the alarm would be raised immediately.

In the end everyone was happy. The IT team claimed success although I doubt anything would have happened if they’d done no preventative checks in the months leading up to the date.

All in all a very strange period of time.

The outage at Heathrow this year was caused, in part, by maintenance, allegedly.
There are dozens of security threats every year that never manifest.
I think if people like me knew what went on behind the scenes to keep everything running, our minds would explode.
I also think a lot about how COVID would have been if all the power station and waterworks staff, not to mention BT Openreach, had all fallen ill at the same time.

The problem was not created deliberately. When people wrote programs in the 1970s, they didn’t think for one minute that people would still be using them in 30 years.
Computers in the early 70s had memory measured in kilobytes. Storage had to be cut down on and dates were only stored in 2 digit formats to save storage. Modern mobile phones have storage measured in gigabytes.