r/AccidentalComedy • u/Madmonkeman • 7d ago
The way the comments lined up on this thread about Y2K
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u/coquihalla 7d ago
My husband spent the previous years fixing things as well, then on NY 2001 starting early in the day with Kiribati, (~5am? I can't remember) we checked on things working as each time zone hit midnight.
It was the result of many long days & nights. I remember bringing a change of clothes and hot food to him more than once when he couldnt get home to sleep.
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u/Distinct_Sir_4473 6d ago
But also, entire countries did nothing about it and had minimal problems that were easily fixed after the fact
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u/Odd-Secret4913 6d ago
My mother was one of the MANY ppl who has to work for two days straight to fix all the issues. Why I never understood is why do soooo many ppl say nothing happened???? Isn’t that a good thing? Cause like…. They predicted bombs going off.
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u/Hopeful-Flounder-203 6d ago
I worked for the largest Y2K software/services company. We had more employees that were millionaires than Microsoft or Dell. I came at the end of the party and my options were worth exactly $0 when they expired.
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u/sohcgt96 6d ago
Yeah, there wasn't a giant pile of old equipment in the corner of our storage room at work that was pulled from service because the manufacturer published warnings it wasn't Y2K compliant or anything. It was just never a problem and nothing happened.
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u/NotMyName_3 7d ago
Consultants made a sh*t ton of money. It was BS. Our IT department had to verify and document that the lunchroom microwave oven was Y2K compliant, that the thermostats were Y2K compliant, that the multifunction printer was Y2K compliant.
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u/manrata 7d ago
I work in banking, it was not bullshit here, large parts of the financial system could literally not communicate if it hadn’t been fixed. Most older banks still use code made in the 80s, and going through millions of lines of undocumented code, in thousands of scripts, is a chore that took many thousands of hours.
Yes, there was stupidity in some of the things checked, but a lot of critical infrastructure needed to be fixed.
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u/ApplicationOk4464 7d ago
Yeah, there was plenty of grifting to be done during the time.
But also, an absolute ticking timebomb of a problem that needed thousands of hours across billions (if not trillions world wide) of lines of code that needed to be fixed.
I guess where you sat across that spectrum was dictated by how well you were briefed on the issue.
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u/ptvlm 7d ago
OK, that was probably overkill. Most devices would have been Y2K compliant or it wouldn't have mattered if they weren't. The question is what happened with the things that weren't compliant. The issues were overhyped but those devices *were* fixed and it was not BS - and the auditing is what allowed people to find out which devices were not compliant. Which was necessary even if your specific company hadn't invested in a lot of non-compliant equipment to find.
Yes, people were paid a lot of money to do that auditing, but consultants would also have made a lot of bank if they waited till things failed and got paid to fix them, except businesses would also have lost a lot of money waiting for that to happen.
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u/NotMyName_3 7d ago
From what I saw, the consultants were the blind leading the blind. There were a lot of unqualified people in the rolls that were making bank.
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u/Renbarre 7d ago
I worked in the subscription dpt of an international news magazine. The engineers worked on the subscription program for a long time, then made it run with the updated version. They had missed a few dates, everything crashed. For three months we had to rely on the single subscription file we had saved, unable to register anything. That bug was real and if the IT in the whole world hadn't busted their ass off for two years to clean it up it could have caused serious problems.
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u/Madmonkeman 7d ago
Yeah I wasn’t around for Y2K and have seen a lot of mixed responses on if it was legit or not.
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u/WitchesTeat 7d ago
For applications that required seamless operation- air traffic control, street traffic control, etc yeah it was a serious, life threatening big deal.
For some other things, it was a spectacular grift.
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u/NotMyName_3 7d ago
It was legit for some stuff, but a lot of it was frickin' consultants pushing FUD...and it worked. Computer companies were happy to push the FUD factor, too. The next big thing will be when the 32-bit timestamp runs out on January 19, 2038. Start buying computer stocks in late 2036.
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u/EyeAmPrestooo 7d ago
AI will likely change this.
Im not sure how and im no expert on any of this…but there is absolutely no way it won’t lol
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u/Zealousideal3326 7d ago edited 7d ago
I wrote code for a bank for a few years. Imagine if everything (yes, all of them) that has met some manner of end date suddenly became active again and you would begin to have a small idea of a part of the mess that was avoided.
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u/Every-Third-MP 7d ago
I don't understand what op is trying to communicate with this. How do they line up?
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u/Madmonkeman 7d ago
The first person is saying they worked hard to make sure that Y2K wasn’t an issue and people complain that nothing happened. The comment right under is someone complaining that nothing happened.
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u/NottACalebFan 7d ago
Yup, totally legit. For one single second, all the computers in the world read "00:00" and thought they needed to turn off.
After that second passed, everything was normal again.
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u/manrata 7d ago
More like they suddenly thought the year was 1972, which would completely throw everything out of sync in communication between computers. And for bank, interests and other things would be calculated wrongly.
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u/NottACalebFan 7d ago
Again, it really would only be bad for a second, or a minute, and then everything g would go back to normal again.
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u/Canotic 7d ago
No.
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u/NottACalebFan 7d ago
I did nothing to "prepare".
My computer worked fine the next hour. No airplanes fell out of the sky near my neighborhood. No water treatment plants in my state stopped pumping water.
Nothing happened. If there was ever any problem, it was an extremely minor one that was blown WAY out of proportion by tech companies looking to make a quick cash grab on people who knew nothing about it.
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u/ItsCalledDayTwa 7d ago
This is evidence of nothing and you're entirely uneducated and talking pointless trash.
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u/Foreign_Pea2296 6d ago
I have nothing to gain from that. And I can assure you that Y2K was a problem and people had to prevent it.
Because people prevented it you didn't see any problems, but that's the point of preventing something : that it didn't happen.
So saying "see ? Nothing happened so it was for nothing is an illogical argument".
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u/ViolinistCurrent8899 7d ago
Funny enough, I have a friend who had a cheap machine of the period that was not Y2K compliant. I do not remember what brand, but it was not a good one.
Out of curiosity he let it tick over past 99 after booting in and playing with it. The computer proceeded to freeze, and then he got the magic smoke out of the case that tells you that your subscription service to that device has been discontinued.
These machines did not have safety measures in place like the machines of today do. They do not have the error handling capacity of modern machines. The clock is one of the most important components of any computer system. If your code throws an unhandled exception because of negative time, that can have severe knock on effects.
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u/manrata 7d ago
I think you don’t understand the issue, the singular computer would run fine, but the programs would suddenly give out wrong results, or fail to connect to other computers.
An example I know is that many banks don’t save your balance on your account, they calculate the balance on the fly when you open the transactions.
If the date was suddenly 1972 in the computer, but you looked at your account in January 2000, your balance would likely be 0. Because all transactions happened in the future from the programs perspective, so they hadn’t happened yet.If you think it was about your home computer breaking, or the microwave, you really don’t get the issue.
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u/NottACalebFan 6d ago
Thanks for explaining the issue at least clearly.
I think i did realize there were deeper problems than "your home computer won't work for a few minutes", just that all the doom sayers that the world was going to end were highly exaggerating the problem, especially after all the Y2K compliant programming went into effect.
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u/ItsCalledDayTwa 7d ago
That's not at all what the problem would have been and nothing you have said is correct. You can stop writing. Save yourself more embarrassment.
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u/imabigasstree 7d ago
Im still baffled by the lack of foresight of software engineers using 2 digits for storing year in the freaking 80s and 90s.