Was Y2K a real genuine threat to human existence that was averted by the blood sweat and tears of IT departments across the globe?

So you don’t believe that millions of IT workers worldwide could do a fix of all the systems over a 3 year period before 1999?

It wasn’t a hard fix it was a tedious boring fix on a gazillions systems. Anyway enjoy 2038 when it happens again, thankfully I’ll be long retired! Good luck everyone working on it then.

You have no idea what you’re talking about have you? 🤦‍♀️

They did not. The IT guys must have done a good job! I also recall that one company had an all day "trial run" in the months before the event, and one of the lawyers dressed in military fatigues for it, which seemed a bit of overkill...

It was a different world back then though. Loads of stuff computerised, so compliance required, but no social media. Nothing like today.

I remember it well, I was late 20s in and every other person I knew seemed to be employed in Y2K compliance.
It wasn't a disaster, because of the massive effort by government & companies to make sure they were compliant.

It wasn't "in the nick of time", I was working on Y2K stuff in 1998. But you're just on the wind up, so it doesn't really matter 😊

As someone who spent their whole adult life working in the IT industry I can't begin to tell you how frustrating it is to now hear this dialogue that implies Y2K bug was over-egged.

Genuinely, having worked on systems in the 1980s that had been developed in the 1970s there was every reason to be fearful that they might go tits up. Much of the work involved in preparing would have been going through every bit of code to check for cases where the date was stored in 6-digits . Even if not many were found the check still had to be made.

Nothing major went wrong. Great. As an old boss once said, should we let a few bugs go through instead of stopping them all to convince you we are doing a good job.

And yes, I am glad I am retired well before 19th January 2038.

@OneMentalBastard

"What seems unbelievable is that every IT department in the world independently got it right and saved us from global societal collapse."

No one was seriously predicting global societal collapse. The bug was not complex or complicated. It was very simple to understand and the fix was obvious. Implementing the fix took time because as everyone has said on this thread multiple times, there was a lot of instances of it in a lot of systems and some systems were too old to fix. They needed upgrading rather than patching. I'm sure not everyone got it right, and that some IT systems did fuck up over the millennium but not to the point of triggering global societal collapse.

It is entirely a separate issue that billionaire/millionaire tech bros are hyping up their AI and threatening world doom because of it. There is no simple bug fix to resolve the possible threat of AI. That's more about restrictions and controls, about people being sensible with how and when to use AI, etc etc.

As it happens, I am not that concerned with world ending AI. I think people will get in their first, with people like Trump and other power hungry egomaniacs around to destabilise the world, economically and politically. If we let them.

I did research for the govt with people in IT for infrastructure, travel, utilities.
A rather alarming proportion didn’t have a clue what would happen.
A lot of software was in languages that no one or not enough people they employed were trained or skilled in
Old IT warhorses made fortunes coming out of retirement
So yes a great deal of fingers crossing
Meanwhile this story ran which I thought was great
The foresight and confidence to create a clock in the 18th century that would change to the year 2000

www.independent.co.uk/news/hidden-miracle-of-louis-xv-s-millennium-clock-1080008.html

Many of the fixes will start conking out in 2030s.

People saying it’s all stuff and nonsense while apparently not bothering to spend ten minutes looking up the basics is definitely a similarity. OP do you understand that it wasn’t some esoteric mystery it was a very straightforward known issue that needed thorough checking across systems, including those where continuous smooth running is important, but didn’t need international cooperation by a shadowy cabal?

That’s because a
lot of people worked very hard to make sure they didn’t.

What's unbelievable is that you think any IT department in the world could cause global collapse.

God, your responses are annoying. You keep trivialising the years of work that multiple posters are reporting they were involved in in the leadup. Just because they individually didn't work for aviation companies, etc., didn't mean the work was insignificant or the threat of any number of disasters occuring wasn't real if some company or some IT department or some less resourced country got it slightly wrong.

This. They did it so well that idiots believed it was never a threat in the fist place.

Sound familiar?

Yes it was necessary. I worked in two different firms mid to late 90s and in both, the systems couldn’t cope with 2000. We didn’t have IT departments, they were too small. But the systems were old, both software and hardware. I did a simple simulation on a laptop by trying to enter data dated after 1-1-2000 and also changing the bios system date - neither the software nor hardware worked. Not surprising because the date field was 11-11-11 instead of 11-11-1111 so trying to enter 1-1-2000 was just the same as 1-1-1900 which meant anything entered would be regarded by the computer as older sp fouling up all date dependant routines, reports etc. Not just desktop programs but also operating systems and network software. In both firms we needed a full replacement of computers, linked scanners and printers and modems, network software etc. and we had to transfer data over from the old software to the new. In the second later firm, we kept an old network running with a few computers in the hope of it being a data archive for old data we didn’t transfer to the new systems, but after 1-1-00, it never worked again and the old data was lost - the systems were so old the data wasn’t in transferable formats like pdf, csv, ixbrl etc, it was in obscure formats created by the programmers in the 80s - the same ones who didn’t look forward enough to set date formats to be capable of running after the millennium even though it was only 15 years or so away. It put me off ever having bespoke software written ever again and since then I’ve always used proprietary off the shelf software programs!

There was a bit of “planes falling” stuff, probably tabloids gunning for sales but that line was out there.

I REALLY thought everything was going to switch off!

Were there any area where it did cause an actual issue? I started work in 1998 and remember so much discussion about the work that needed to be/was being done. We were visiting friends In Germany on the night and remember speculating about whether we’d have problems getting home.‘I don’t remember any issues at all being reported after the fact, not even minor, which surprises me.‘For those of you who worked on it, was there a lot of mopping up of things that became apparent into the new year - smaller things I mean as obviously huge things were avoided or we’d have known about them.

Pre 01012000 no one could b be completely sure that the fixes would work and everything would be OK. There were measures in place to restar the National Grid for example.

You realise that there wasn't some superhero Y2K IT emergency service going round fixing things, in a coordinated way, right?

Each individual company looked at each piece of software they owned, had someone check to see if it would still work, and paid/assigned people to get it fixed if it wouldn't.

So Bob in IT, instead of spending 6 months removing blink tags from the website, spent 6 months testing things. If it didn't work, sometimes it would be easy to fix, and sometimes it would be hard, but every time, someone would need to check and work that out.

I worked for a software services company in 2001, and lots of people there had done a lot of related projects in the previous years. In the comments in the code I supported, I could see the updates they had made. It was nothing with catastrophic potential, but if it hadn't been fixed, no one would have been able to enter new records into the software packages I supported.

What newspaper were you reading in 1999? I certainly was not expecting planes to fall from the sky!

The code to fix the bug was fairly simple but every fix had to be coded, tested and documented. There could be thousands of instances of the bug in one computer system, so it all took time.
You seem to be determined to imagine it was all some massive conspiracy despite not knowing what you're talking about, so crack on.

Me too. The problem was predictable and we had plenty of notice but we had to check and fix every single system and it was a ton of work. If we hadn’t done it everything would have fallen over.

I also fixed quite a few Fortran systems in the run up.

In the end it wasn't a big issue but that's because most systems were fixed.

We've already started planning for 2038 issues.