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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

Sort of like the hole in the ozone layer, it has been worked on by action taken by authorities and we hear no more about it

I dont think that many people outside of the IT world know much more about it really

A testament to a job well done if nothing else

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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...

Yeah please don't be insulted by my OP, it was a casual post about something that, aged 9, seemed like another myth that was widely spread!!

Super glad it was worked on though, by the sounds of it, a huge bullet was avoided.

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! 😜

I wasnt intending to insult anyone

I don't believe everything i am told

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.

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.