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

As for the 2020 message of "everything is overhyped, or at the very least, exaggerated"; yes, I'm guilty of saying this, but I do think the government and the media make a rod for their own back sometimes, by exaggerating danger; which is why I think we need to hear more about things going right, as well as wrong. Yes, bad news sells etc, but I think if we got away from this, people (including myself) would trust the media more.

I think a contestant on the Apprentice commented that the programme shows far more about what they do wrong than right: notice that the losing team gets far more attention from Lord Sugar.

People have just moved on and are now worried about climate change which seems like it cannot be fixed when... here is actual evidence that we havw the power to make change

Also, remember when the rivers weren't polluted in?? 😭

Stuff did happen it just wasn't anything to do with massive systems that would be newsworthy if it failed. Some kids electronic toys failed for example.

The rivers and sea pollution was avoidable until Brexit and we left the safeguard of the EU monitoring. Again, what started as one in the eye for the "experts" Gove so denounced has become a national issue with huge repercussions.

Exactly. I remember we had a spreadsheet at work with children in it whose ages were all calculated as 100 years too high eg 105 not 5 years old child. We all laughed and fixed it. That's the kind of thing that was missed.

There's another, similar, bug heading towards us.

The 2038 problem

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Essentially some systems use Unix time, and if they use it as a 32 bit integer then it won't be able to process dates again

People are working on fixes now.

Hopefully it'll be like the millennium bug and fixed before it's an issue. Unfortunately the idea that the millennium bug was minor is out there and may make people take this threat less seriously

I made enough in overtime to pay for my house deposit in the lead up to the millennium. Lots of my Fortran colleagues did well too

I thought you were saying that i was deliberately insulting people, so apologise for my brusk response.

With the vaccines, people think with their eyes imo

A severely autistic child isn't something that people want to take a chance on. My own dd is 6 and autistic. As we were in the pandemic, her autistic traits showed before she had the vaccine, so I got it.

I am autistic myself so I put it down to genetics. Her autism isnt so severe atm. (Meaning, we are able to leave the home and despite problems she is learning to communicate with me).

But i can understand the logical thinking that we arent always told the truth by governments and so people trust what they see. And severely autistic children who need lifelong care isn't something to take lightly. I get it.

I remember during the pandemic we were told specifically not to use face masks and that it was safe to take the tube, despite every disaster movie proving otherwise.

That advice disappeared and no-one took responsibility for lying.

I get the distrust a bit.

Politicians arent honest which is part of the problem 😬. But we definitely do need experts, despite what Michael Gove says

Hard agree

You seem determined to cast doubt on it actually being a thing.

Most small business/home PCs ran on hardware and software developed after the potential issues had been identified and were able to deal with the date problem.

It was the legacy systems used by large business, financial and infrastructure organisations that had to be fixed.

I wasn’t working in but was teaching Computing/ICT through the Nineties and it was a very useful example for my students.

I remember it well. I had a couple of test projects that I ran through our computer system to make sure that all would work smoothly on 1st January 2000, so I was quietly confident.

It was important for our organisation as our work was linked to the ages of our users.
Well done to all those dedicated people who worked on Y2K projects!

It wasn't overhyped. As others have said people did their job so nothing bad happened.

This! My DH was one of those working on it and it enrages him when people talk about it as if it was a non event. Nothing happened - because a huge amount was done to solve the problem.

We did well from the overtime though - I remind him of that …

Another IT worker here, yes it was real, it wasn’t just hype. Lots of people worked really hard for years on it.

I worked in a software company and all of us were on call on NYE. As a very lowly person I knew they weren’t going to call me in, so I had a great night. A few of our lead developers had a party at the office, just in case. The on call payment and the zero fail bonus we got was £££.

Hopefully by 2038 Linux operating systems and general hardware will be 64-bit but the problem might be with embedded systems such as SCADA, and fpga's

I was a youngster in my first FT salaried role and my employer, like many others, was concerned about the potential impact and wanted 24/7 monitoring of systems over the NY period.

None of the more senior management want to to do it as they all had families and children who they wanted to spend time with. I was young and single so didn’t care. In the end for what was essentially a 48 hour on call shift where literally nothing happened, I was paid enough to fund a 4 week trip to Australia which I embarked on immediately following the NY.

I still look back and laugh at the absurdity of it all 25 years later.

I still have a y2kok sticker which I have transferred to each successive machine since

I wonder what they thought you would be able to do if something did happen??

@mumofoneAloneandwell when you say "With the vaccines, people think with their eyes imo. A severely autistic child isn't something that people want to take a chance on." I don't think people really ARE thinking with their eyes: if they read any of the research on the matter they would note absolutely NO link between vaccines and autism, but a very strong link between taking a measles vaccine and not getting measles.

I am very worried at the moment that humanity is going backwards very fast as people are bombarded with so many lies they are more consistently disbelieving the truths. It won't be long before people will be dying in their thousands from diseases that in the 1980s-90s had been consigned to history.

I worked in telecoms at that time and spent much of 1998 and just about all of 1999 ensuring that the sky didn't fall in in the year 2000.
Unusually for the IT world we were extremely well prepared 🤣

I remember getting back to university in early January 2000, switching on my elderly non-networked computer (a 286 I think) and the date showed as 1984! I have a photo of the screen somewhere. Not sure if it was Y2K related or just a strange quirk...

The problem was not created deliberately. When people wrote programs in the 1970s, they didn’t think for one minute that people would still be using them in 30 years.
Computers in the early 70s had memory measured in kilobytes. Storage had to be cut down on and dates were only stored in 2 digit formats to save storage. Modern mobile phones have storage measured in gigabytes.

The outage at Heathrow this year was caused, in part, by maintenance, allegedly.
There are dozens of security threats every year that never manifest.
I think if people like me knew what went on behind the scenes to keep everything running, our minds would explode.
I also think a lot about how COVID would have been if all the power station and waterworks staff, not to mention BT Openreach, had all fallen ill at the same time.

I did wonder that at the time as any significant IT issue would have been way beyond my capability to resolve.

I think it was more a case of peace of mind for them knowing that if something did go catastrophically wrong the alarm would be raised immediately.

In the end everyone was happy. The IT team claimed success although I doubt anything would have happened if they’d done no preventative checks in the months leading up to the date.

All in all a very strange period of time.

the date as "number of seconds since a certain date", such as 1st January 1901

It's most often 1st January 1970, because that's the Epoch, when Unix time starts.

It was real. A lot of time and money was spent on it. I was on-call and it was a crap night, because I couldn't go out partying, but wasn't one of the ones who was in on site - those people got party bags and had fun in the office. I was at home alone.

In later years, when we occasionally came across a Y2K problem, it sparked quite a bit of interest among the techies.

Programming used to have to be as memory-efficient as possible, hence 2-character years. I think something has been lost in the craft since people didn't have to worry so much about creating neat, efficient code in the same way.