The Millenium Bug

[mumofoneAloneandwell]

Do you remember this?

I am listening to Radio 1 and they've just brought it up and it unlocked a memory 😅

Never panned out but I remember my dm being quite stressed about it (I was about 9)

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-do-computers-get-bugs

Looking at the state of the world, I kind of understand the Y2K fears at times

In a nutshell, when computers were developed their memories were small in comparison to what they are now, so most dates were stored as 2 digits, dropping the 19, so 87, instead of 1987. So when midnight happened dates would’ve snapped back to 00, instead of 2000. This meant formula based on time would stop working, and since nearly every formula has something in it which uses a time calculation it meant it would stop working. Eg satellite technology would’ve been kaput, you can imagine how catastrophic that would’ve been.

It was a massive industry. I was working for a bank at the time and the money that was spent, both by the bank and by business customers on the bank's advice/insistence.

I'd to know to what extent the problem was created deliberately and what exactly would have happened if we'd all done nothing.

Yes, but absolutely nothing did happen and whilst an awful lot of work was done to remedy it, surely it's not possible that nothing at all was missed?

@Clockstops it was a genuine issue. As PP have said it was caused by older programs storing dates with two digits for the year so YY instead of YYYY. This was a totally reasonable decision at the time, it was down to having very limited memory storage in computer systems at the time. It was a reasonable assumption to think that those programs and systems written in the 60s, 70s etc would be replaced/upgraded by 2000.

If no one had fixed the issue, then as soon as those older systems had to deal with dates in the format 01/01/00 meaning 01/01/2000 not 01/01/1900, they would have produced errors and either behaved unexpectedly or stopped working altogether. I can imagine your banker colleagues would have been unimpressed to have to deal with that happening in lots of systems all at the same time at the start of the new millennium! Much more sensible to plan in advance to check all systems, and fix any that had the potential to go wrong.

Things were missed, absolutely they were, but we had people in call all night and issues were sorted quickly. These were small things though, luckily. We had whole offline systems running tests for months before the actual millennium happened, 99.99% of things were already picked up in those simulations. We didn’t just hope we’d noticed everything, things were tested.

I think it is quite possible that nothing of world news worthiness was missed.

Software developers are pretty thorough people, with a policy of code checking each other's work, testing etc. The whole industry was very aware of the problem.

It was a quite 'straightforward' thing to find and check for.

It wasn't overhyped, it was an issue which was identified and which people worked hard to solve

I know what the issue was, but I find it difficult to believe that everyone fixed everything, and yet there were no problems at midnight.

Yes, but only if you tried, and surely there would have been countless people using computers in small businesses etc who did nothing and yet were still able to carry on as usual.

I was due to give birth around that time and I was told to bring blankets and a torch to hospital if I went in on that date. So that was quite scary. I held on till 9 January to be on the safe side 😬

It certainly wasn't created deliberately, the pioneers of computerised systems didn't all get together and decide to write programmes whose date fields couldn't cope with a new century with unknowable impacts on eveything

@Clockstops If you google you will find that there were indeed a lot of things missed. Thankfully most were minor issues like bus tickets with the wrong dates but there were a few more serious ones like nuclear reactors having problems. This is why those of us working in the industry were on call 24/7 so we could fix things there and then.

Not everything was tested though. Only the things that were included in the project. Things like the small electronics used in homes, like PP GM's weren't tested and nothing failed.

@Clockstops like a PP has said, there probably were some minor issues, but nearly all businesses ran projects to check their systems and fix them. So any issues were minimised, and small, not newsworthy. People were also on call to fix any more serious issues quickly.

People using computers weren't the people who needed to fix things. It was the software they ran on. Developers would have been issuing upgrades and stressing the need to install them etc.

Yes, but in those days most of the software was downloaded on the machines, so the engineers could only fix what they were asked to fix.

Why are you arguing with people who actually know what they are talking about 👀

Former colleagues of mine all worked incredibly hard on this so that there were no issues, it was a massive undertaking and the fact that it is now being commented on as ‘something of nothing’ is insulting to the sheer amount of work they put in.

I worked in a bank at the time and we were on edge wondering whether cash machines would still work, would people be able to access their accounts and funds etc? I can only imagine what things were like across other industries. I remember us all breathing a massive sigh of relief that everything went smoothly (thanks to those hardworking software folk)

I know we spent a long time telling customers what a disaster it would be if they didn't employ someone to fix everything. Most did, but those that didn't didn't seem to have any issues.

Computers weren’t changed from using YY to YYYY in 1999, the issue was recognised much earlier than that so most things had been designed to use YYYY well in advance. It was older technology and new technology which was designed with a link to older technology, which needed to be rewritten and tested. Most home electronics were designed with that in mind, and runs independently anyway.

@Clockstops I was someone who fixed programs that needed fixing at the time. It wasn't some kind of scam to get paid work.

Small businesses would have just needed to apply any updates to software that they were using, and that would have resolved nearly all issues for them. Any business with custom software or specialised software would have needed to run a project to check and then fix that software. None of this is made up or a scam.

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.

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.

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.

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.