The Millenium Bug

I remember getting back to university in early January 2000, switching on my elderly non-networked computer (a 286 I think) and the date showed as 1984! I have a photo of the screen somewhere. Not sure if it was Y2K related or just a strange quirk...

I worked in telecoms at that time and spent much of 1998 and just about all of 1999 ensuring that the sky didn't fall in in the year 2000.
Unusually for the IT world we were extremely well prepared 🤣

@mumofoneAloneandwell when you say "With the vaccines, people think with their eyes imo. A severely autistic child isn't something that people want to take a chance on." I don't think people really ARE thinking with their eyes: if they read any of the research on the matter they would note absolutely NO link between vaccines and autism, but a very strong link between taking a measles vaccine and not getting measles.

I am very worried at the moment that humanity is going backwards very fast as people are bombarded with so many lies they are more consistently disbelieving the truths. It won't be long before people will be dying in their thousands from diseases that in the 1980s-90s had been consigned to history.

I wonder what they thought you would be able to do if something did happen??

I still have a y2kok sticker which I have transferred to each successive machine since

I was a youngster in my first FT salaried role and my employer, like many others, was concerned about the potential impact and wanted 24/7 monitoring of systems over the NY period.

None of the more senior management want to to do it as they all had families and children who they wanted to spend time with. I was young and single so didn’t care. In the end for what was essentially a 48 hour on call shift where literally nothing happened, I was paid enough to fund a 4 week trip to Australia which I embarked on immediately following the NY.

I still look back and laugh at the absurdity of it all 25 years later.

Hopefully by 2038 Linux operating systems and general hardware will be 64-bit but the problem might be with embedded systems such as SCADA, and fpga's

Another IT worker here, yes it was real, it wasn’t just hype. Lots of people worked really hard for years on it.

I worked in a software company and all of us were on call on NYE. As a very lowly person I knew they weren’t going to call me in, so I had a great night. A few of our lead developers had a party at the office, just in case. The on call payment and the zero fail bonus we got was £££.

We did well from the overtime though - I remind him of that …

This! My DH was one of those working on it and it enrages him when people talk about it as if it was a non event. Nothing happened - because a huge amount was done to solve the problem.

It wasn't overhyped. As others have said people did their job so nothing bad happened.

I remember it well. I had a couple of test projects that I ran through our computer system to make sure that all would work smoothly on 1st January 2000, so I was quietly confident.

It was important for our organisation as our work was linked to the ages of our users.
Well done to all those dedicated people who worked on Y2K projects!

You seem determined to cast doubt on it actually being a thing.

Most small business/home PCs ran on hardware and software developed after the potential issues had been identified and were able to deal with the date problem.

It was the legacy systems used by large business, financial and infrastructure organisations that had to be fixed.

I wasn’t working in but was teaching Computing/ICT through the Nineties and it was a very useful example for my students.

There's another, similar, bug heading towards us.

The 2038 problem

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Essentially some systems use Unix time, and if they use it as a 32 bit integer then it won't be able to process dates again

People are working on fixes now.

Hopefully it'll be like the millennium bug and fixed before it's an issue. Unfortunately the idea that the millennium bug was minor is out there and may make people take this threat less seriously

I made enough in overtime to pay for my house deposit in the lead up to the millennium. Lots of my Fortran colleagues did well too

Exactly. I remember we had a spreadsheet at work with children in it whose ages were all calculated as 100 years too high eg 105 not 5 years old child. We all laughed and fixed it. That's the kind of thing that was missed.

The rivers and sea pollution was avoidable until Brexit and we left the safeguard of the EU monitoring. Again, what started as one in the eye for the "experts" Gove so denounced has become a national issue with huge repercussions.

Stuff did happen it just wasn't anything to do with massive systems that would be newsworthy if it failed. Some kids electronic toys failed for example.

But there is a vast difference between

"I don't believe everything I am told"
and
"Everything I am told is a lie"

You now have people turning down measles vaccines and children becoming ill and even dying all because they have stopped believing the truth.

As for the 2020 message of "everything is overhyped, or at the very least, exaggerated"; yes, I'm guilty of saying this, but I do think the government and the media make a rod for their own back sometimes, by exaggerating danger; which is why I think we need to hear more about things going right, as well as wrong. Yes, bad news sells etc, but I think if we got away from this, people (including myself) would trust the media more.

I think a contestant on the Apprentice commented that the programme shows far more about what they do wrong than right: notice that the losing team gets far more attention from Lord Sugar.

Thank you to everyone who worked on this. It really should be recognised in some way I feel, especially in our new age of AI and the tech investments from US we see coming, rather than the myth that it was bunkum perpetuated.
Another way to silence the science and facts I suspect.

I ran an Y2K Project for a company and the amount of people who told me they could earn more working in their local pub on NYE was a very large volume! They soon came back when they realised that pubs were not in fact offering large sums of money for random people to come and work! 😜