The Millenium Bug

That's most definitely not what I meant! Also, 9/11 and the moon landing were talked about after the event slightly more than the millennium rectification/bug...

Dont forget Acid Rain! That was a HUGE issue in the 90s, forests in Northern Europe and crops everywhere were being destroyed, and historic limestone buildings in every city were being erroded away by pollution from cars and power stations. If it weren't for catalytic converters, photostatic filters and scrubbers in power stations global environmental disasters would be far worse by now.

I like to teach my teenage pupils about the Millennium Bug - most of them had never heard of it, and it's weird that that was at a time long before any of them were born.

And it is a very important point that many organisations are completely unheard of, except when they go wrong. We need to hear more about what these organisations do right (take note, Starmer.) Lots of the civil service falls under this: some people were probably completely unaware of "children's services" until Sharon Shoesmith was pilloried. In "Porridge", Mr MacKay makes this point: "The public never hears of prison officers, except adversely, when some namby-pamby politician takes up the case of a psychopath, who claims that we've been less than gentle with him".

Related to the Millennium, I remember noticing in 1990 that cheques had a printed "19" in the space where you write the date. I remember asking my parents what will happen in the year 2000. They replied "we won't be using cheques by then". Not quite true, I was using them a fair bit then! They're rare now, but not completely extinct.

I think it's part insulted, but also it just plays into that depressing undertone lately of people treating everything that they have been told and everything the government ever does to be lies: moon landings never happened, 9/11 was an inside job, millennium bug was a hoax etc etc

We did land on the moon.
9/11 was the work of terrorists.
The millennium bug was real, and we fixed it.

I'm tired of the "everything you read is a lie" mantra of the 2020s.

I was 13 so like the OP it also seemed quite funny at the time, and I would have had no concept of people working to avoid it. Don't feel so insulted folks, kids don't understand grown up jobs, and it was never talked about afterwards!

Plenty of the issues were solved well in advance, I worked on some of them.

I also dimly remember a news story about something like corned beef being booked into stock at a supermarket in 1993, and because its Best Before date was 2000 their systems misinterpreted this as 1900 and condemned the whole lot.

The hole in the ozone layer being closed is my favourite underrated success story ever

Absolutely.

Dad was a consultant for the National Computing Centre and travelled all over the country (and the world, really) helping put teams in place to resolve it. He would stay with me and DP when they had clients in the North, so it is a time I look back on fondly.

Intensely irritating to now read it was "overhyped". Lots of people - myself included in a small way - did all sorts of work in the late 1990s to make SURE any problems were headed off.

In my industry (pensions) the sort of thing that would go wrong is - let's say your date of birth is 1 January 1940, so your normal retirement age 60 is 1 January 2000. Because of the millennium bug the admin system might have said "today's date is 1 January 1900, therefore you are -40 years old, therefore you cannot retire yet". But with the bug fixed your retirement is processed OK.

I got triple time and a bottle of champagne to go in on 1 January to test a small client management system I was responsible for (data wise rather than technically). It had been fairly recently developed and the developer had anticipated the issues and the years were all in a four digit format and so on so I had a pretty boring morning running reports with no drama - thankfully.

However, the concerns about the Millennium Bug were a very big deal at the time. I was in Florida earlier in 1999 and picked up a wonderful magazine (which I still have) from a local supermarket. It was for preppers and basically took the most apocalyptical view possible. It was most enjoyable lying on the beach looking at diagrams of how to conceal yourself in a bedside table when hoards of violent looters came for your stocks when society inevitably broke down.

Just quoting this to reiterate the poster’s excellent post!

I think it’s a fascinating time to look back on. I’d love to watch a documentary about it or similar, I can only remember bits

yes, I knew a few rich COBOL programmers at the time, they were very much in demand!!! I was involved in a huge Y2K project and it all went to plan as it was taken very seriously. I can only imagine what would happen if such an issue happened now, it would be conspiracy theory central!

IT systems would have either crashed or miscalculated. Basically a disaster for any business if they didn't upgrade their system. The government had to ensure that everyone was aware of the problem and took action, or it could have been economical disaster across the country.

So, a bit like with covid, you had to scare people a bit to get them to take it seriously and actually do something... cue panic. But in the end everyone did do something, and disaster was very much averted.

And in a way, the Post Office scandal was a computing disaster that actually did happen, albeit on a lesser scale.

I seem to remember Richard Madeley of all people being a major source of panic about this. I think he was a prepper ready for the end of the world on 1 Jan.

It makes me wonder how a similar situation would be handled by governments and the media today. Back then we had Blair, Clinton and Yeltsin, they were all pretty chummy, it was just the tabloid media that was out of control (and only affected those who read that gutter crap). I can't begin to imagine the shit-show Trump and Putin would make, and instead of the tabloid media we now have political tv channels and SM full of bots and algorithms.
We already know! Look at 2020, and how the media weaponised fear, aided and abetted by the government. People might have been saying "Stay the fuck at home, anyone who goes out on Millennium Midnight is a selfish arsehole, just in case planes fall out of the sky on your head: and don't you dare burden the NHS by partying on New Year's Eve, in case you get hurt, and operating theatres go dark, because of the Millennium Bug". And in 2020, the "chummy" Boris had to put on his serious face to stay "stay at home", while his body language made it clear that he didn't believe the script that he was being made to recite at all.

Yes, I'm exaggerating, but the precedent for "extreme media panic" hadn't yet been set to the extent that it was in 2020.

Our IT people had no Christmas break effectively and everyone else had to close down their computers at 12 noon on 24 December and not restart until at least 2 January.

I remember it clearly because I was struggling to deal with a couple of last minute money issues. (
multiple millions worth) before all the systems were taken offline. And I had a colleague who brought both her DCs to the office (as was normal on 24th) and was getting cross that I wouldn’t let one of them “play” on my pc because I “couldn’t be doing any real work still”….

The IT people had been prepping and changing systems for at least 9 months publicly (probably started well before that quietly in the IT dept).

It wasn’t a bug like the type of cyber hacks we get nowadays - it was how everything was coded in 2 digit years since computers had been developed and now had to be totally redone to 4 digit years. In every system. Checking every line. Detailed grunt work that, because it was all done properly, meant the “meltdown” didn’t happen and everything just switched on as normal in January.

It came to nothing because people worked behind the scenes for years beforehand to prevent it being an issue.

However, it was completely over-hyped by the media and it created panic. I remember a lot of people I knew being really anxious about it.
There wasn't balanced reporting about what was being done to fix it, it was all about planes falling out of the skies and people's computers not working etc.

I was flying that night. I remember packing 6L of water as I was worried the water would be cut off. I was going to Thailand.

I was working at a firm of accountants at the time, we just had to go around all our clients and ensure their accounts packages and operating systems were updated to the correct versions (for a small fee, of course). But that was it, really.

The government was really factual about it, you just had to make sure your business systems were upgraded, which is exactly what happened. But the made-up hype in the media was unreal. People who listened to that nonsense were literally preparing to live off-grid, and stockpiling food.

It makes me wonder how a similar situation would be handled by governments and the media today. Back then we had Blair, Clinton and Yeltsin, they were all pretty chummy, it was just the tabloid media that was out of control (and only affected those who read that gutter crap). I can't begin to imagine the shit-show Trump and Putin would make, and instead of the tabloid media we now have political tv channels and SM full of bots and algorithms.

To me, it was one of the first indications of how the media can massively hype something up, and cause big panic, or big sensation, and I have been sceptical of anything "big" in the media ever since, and started to notice how they deliberately cause a stir. Indeed, the "Millennium" itself was a load of hype: Millennium this, Millennium that, and that utterly wasteful Millennium Dome. My parents also explained to me about spin doctors, and for an example, they said: let us suppose that there was some massive terrorist plot due to happen on 1st January 2000, while the police were busy, which was successfully stopped, but the government didn't want to the public to know about: they would have made the headlines said "Queen drops toffee paper in Dome" or something.

I expect there was indeed lots of work behind the scenes to put it right, which was barely reported on, as things going right usually doesn't make the news. But at the time, Tony Blair was talking about how he was going to organise an army to fix it. My parents encouraged me to write to his office, to say I wanted to be part of it. The ambiguous reply I received implied that there was no such government scheme at all, or maybe I was too late for it.

From what I remember reading at the time, some of the problems started a few years before, when credit cards started having expiry dates of 00. I've also heard that there might be other, less foreseeable problems down the line: many systems store the date as "number of seconds since a certain date", such as 1st January 1901, and this number might become too big for the computer. There's also a calendar curiosity that although 2000 was a leap year, years ending in "00" are only leap years if they are divisible by 400, so 1800, 1900 and 2100 are not leap years. Some computer systems got round this by only allowing dates between 1901 and 2099. Not that many of us will be alive in 2100, but it could matter to somebody.

It also makes me smile that calendar problems are centuries old, such as when the Julian calendar was considered not accurate enough, and people rioted about their lives being shortened by eleven days when the change was made.

In the film "Entrapment", the Millennium Bug is exploited by thieves who steal a lot of money from International Clearance Bank when it is shut down for thirty seconds at midnight, because of the Millennium Bug.

More recent software wouldn't have had the issue anyway. Most domestic electronic items would have been developed after processing power and storage increased and there was no need for 2 digit year data. Those things were never, ever going to be the issue but many big company finance and stock systems were originally written decades previously and had been updated for new tasks over the years but with the date data remaining the same. The company I worked for was using finance and stock systems originally installed in 1972. Very different issue.