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

@nomas the first use of the atom bomb, where it was unpredictable, like AI is now.
Where they didn’t know what the result of the technology was going to be.
Not the later uses where they knowingly chose to kill two cities’ worth of civilians.

Still you are clearly heavily invested claiming to be right. I’ll leave you to it.

There’s a saying, isn’t there? Feel the fear and do it anyway!

It did cause major system issues, e.g one of our systems just stopped running. (Public Library). The coding couldn't accept the date not starting 19xx and it was too embedded to change.

We knew that was going to happen though and our new system effectively went live as the bells chimed.

No one really thought the world would end, that was just the usual suspects in the media, some things never change.

I remember it well. The so-called ‘Y2k bug’ was a massive marketing hype by the IT industry of the day. It successfully created media hysteria amplified by technologically Illiterate journalists. It spooked corporations & governments into spending millions on consultants & new equipment. Countries & organisations which either ignored the hype or didn’t have the resources to throw money at the supposed problem were able to carry on business as usual in January 2020.

In fairness, it was a completely different world back in 1999. We were alll still adapting to the daily use of computers, the internet was in its infancy, so you couldn’t Google anything, books on computers were written in incomprehensible jargon & most of us were just muddling through as best we could. Senior decision makers in their 40s & 50s, in particular, were trying to make sense of a new world which they didn’t group up in & didn’t understand.

I’m not suggesting that today’s AI hype is exactly the same, but it certainly has very familiar echoes of Y2K for those of us with a few grey hairs…

I was a programmer at that time and the millennium bug didn't pose a threat to human existence as far as we knew. The offending code was generally easy to find and easy (if boring!) to fix.
AI is on a completely different scale.I don't pretend to understand it but you just cant compare it's capability to the milennium bug. Ironically, I'm sure if AI had been around back then it could have gone through every computer system's programs and fixed the bug in a couple of hours .

@PrizedPickledPopcorn

Might have turned off the lights at a salad factory.

I made sure the lights didn't turn off in a biscuit factory - does that count? 😄

You’ve clarified that you meant Trinity, so it’s not about being right or wrong, just a miscommunication .

I think they knew what destruction it would bring. Many people died in developing the bomb and there is that Oppenheimer quote ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" on the day of the test.

Yes.

HTH

HAND

(DYOH)

Incidentally, I remember a post

"Remember when Y2K was going to be the end of the world? Planes falling out of the sky and so on? Clearly, 2001 was the real millennium..."

(too soon? IGMC)

That will all have had to have been checked and fixed, if necessary. Everything did - one of my first software jobs after university was learning Fortran and checking code that was used in supporting national infrastructure, not aviation, but adjacent to.

You do know that there could have been some people checking video recorders while some other people were fixing air traffic control, right? And other people checking the SCADA systems running the gas pipelines, and others fixing the hardware and software that ran payroll, and other people making sure that the routers that held the internet together would still work (that was me! Among many others) It wasn't that there was just one person running around fixing everything and so if they fixed a VCR they wouldn't get around to checking the navigation system in an airliner.

Because there were tens of thousands of different hardware platforms, hundreds of thousands of bits of software, and millions of potential interactions between them all that needed to be checked. Each individual check might not have been that difficult, although some of them definitely were. There were a lot of systems that couldn't realistically be fixed and so had to be replaced entirely. The sheer scale of the problem made it harder.

Yes, we did. You're welcome.

No it was a lot of clever it bods realising that they wouldn't get made redundant if they invented a fear for their company and like the best urban myths it spread and everyone (well almost everyone) believed it.

Your posts on this thread certainly sound... like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Which area of IT did you work in in the 90s?

Me too. We worked hard, really long hours. The fact nothing major happened was NOT luck.

@OneMentalBastard few people in IT would have thought that humanity was on the brink of destruction. It was a known issue, it was fixed, there was a time limit for when fixes needed to be done due to the nature of the issue.

The actual bug was very straightforward to understand. The fixes could be more complex depending on the exact systems (hardware, software) used. Some might need completely replacing as they were too old to fix, some could be rewritten which varied from simple to complex. I don't know what about that seems unbelievable? It seems like a very bog standard IT process to me, as an IT professional. The only difference was that it was widespread and not limited to a specific system(s) like many bugs are.