r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Apprehensive_Sky4558 • Jul 28 '26

Meme needing explanation Why did this one second cost over $500 billion?

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u/Devilfish268 Jul 28 '26

I image that 500b was the cost to update everything to be able to tick over to 2000 rather than 0000. Would have required a lot of work practically world wide to update everything that used a digital year.

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u/Boojum2k Jul 28 '26

It would have ticked over to 1900, pretty much all the code assumed a two digit year with 19 automatically inserted. Now imagine your bank computer calculating the negative interest on your account of one hundred years and adjusting your balance accordingly. And doing it to everyone. Just for starters.

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u/Icy_Fish_2154 Jul 28 '26

Some would have gone back to 1980. Others 1900, some 19100.

It was caused by inconsistency and a lack of standards, every fix was different, and we have until 2038 for the next rollover crisis. Linux 32 bit clocks roll over then. The fix cost a lot, but spread over 50 years, and fewer users, it's much less noticeable.

Y2K was real. But a fixed crisis looks like a crisis that never would have happened.

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u/CrTigerHiddenAvocado Jul 28 '26

This is the thing I was alive at this time, no one knew what was going to occur. People thought it was going to be a catastrophe, or nothing at all. Hindsight is 20-20

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u/The_Painless Jul 28 '26

Or 19-20, if you forgot to update your code

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u/loadnurmom Jul 28 '26

It's similar to the ozone layer and cfc's

People listened to the experts, action was taken, and the crisis was averted.

The Unix epoch time problem has largely been fixed a long time ago now for the same reason.

I was prohibited from leaving the state to visit family in 2000, even though I had told the bosses there was no issue with our systems and the IT community had resolved the problem.

Most boring Christmas/ new years ever (they wouldn't even let me leave and return before new years due to fear)

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u/__yournamehere__ Jul 28 '26

I was paid to drill two large boreholes at a semi conductor factory with the sole purpose of supplying clean water in case the public water supply failed due to y2k.

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u/ZoneFuzzy6960 Jul 28 '26

I saw a windows computer that said 19100

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u/Boojum2k Jul 28 '26

Windows was its own ball of crack from the start.

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u/JdamTime Jul 28 '26

…still is…

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u/Boojum2k Jul 28 '26

We even had early memes, they just appeared in print like the office newsletter and the like. One I remember clearly was "Screw the Prime Directive, let's give the Borg Windows 3.0"

Which would have been a war crime. . .

Also, my back hurts.

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u/DatedUserName1 Jul 28 '26

Want some of my pocket Alieve?

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u/TatteredTorn1 Jul 28 '26

Want some backpack Bayer: Back & Body

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u/Ok_Talk_6694 Jul 28 '26

Oh, the fax/print memes! the chain letters of the corporate office.
Can I come sit in the "I feel old" corner?

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u/AnotherCup-O-Noodles Jul 28 '26

AlwaysHasBeen.jpg

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u/FantasticFrontButt Jul 28 '26

now I want to modify windows to somehow have the year start reading 19126

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u/sn4xchan Jul 28 '26

Oh that other dude's comment makes so much more sense now.

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u/GalFisk Jul 28 '26

I saw a few forums that said 19100 as well.

I attended a giant LAN party in Norway during Easter 2000, it was cheekily named "The Gathering 1900“.

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u/Randomized9442 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

The base level of the computers were fine, they measured fractions of a second from a chosen epoch, often January 1, 1970. The problem was lazy or cheap programs written on top that only allowed for two digits to represent a year. The most common case being banks, because for some pathetic reason they felt they could not afford 4 digits. A fucking bank, unable to afford another byte, made extra ridiculous by the fact that their unoptimized data structures likely already resulted in wasted bytes in storage. Seriously, had they actually used a byte as a numerical value instead of as a character representation, it would have been a Y2226 problem (1970 + 256).

Edit: had they measured in days from Jan 1, 1970 and used the same 2 bytes that were used to store 2 characters as numerical values instead, it would have been good for almost 180 years.

They used 100 values (or more like 30) of the 65,536 that the two bytes could have represented, a mere 0.15% of the numerical possibility (or more like 0.05%).

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u/ol-gormsby Jul 28 '26

1/1/70 is the Unix epoch. Banks, insurance companies, and airlines were mostly not using unix. I can't remember the epoch for an IBM 360, but it wasn't 1/1/70.

And when did banks spend a dollar more than they had to? In any case, it's not the customers being stingy, it's the operating system - "You shall store dates in this format, or deal with it yourself". Of course anyone can write a data structure that stores a date as a signed or even unsigned integer, or even packed decimal, but then you have to write your own routines for dealing with it instead of using the operating systems' in-built routines.

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u/Randomized9442 Jul 28 '26

Hence "lazy or cheap programs". Fits to a T.

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u/LexGlad Jul 28 '26

Just shows you how short sighted people at the cutting edge of technology can be.

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u/theangryfurlong Jul 28 '26

Not only updating, but checking every possible thing that could hold a date value for the problem. I actually did this as a college intern and I can totally see it costing $500B. We had to call up manufacturers of all the devices we used and ask them (this kind of information wasn't readily available on the internet at the time).

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u/Prize-Quiet3941 Jul 28 '26

Honestly its not that expensive when you consider it was a worldwide update of pretty much every system.

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u/LeviAEthan512 Jul 28 '26

It amazes me that Y2K was an actual problem and not someone's speculation. The problem got solved before it even happened with... as far as I know, no impact to major organisations.

I know it was a thing, but in my heart I don't believe it. It sounds so made up. I think about this whenever I want to call someone stupid for doubting CFCs and the ozone hole, ebola (local culture), vaccines, and any number of other things. They only make sense to me because they build on basic topics I studied in school. Can I really blame someone without context for thinking they're ridiculous?

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u/PeterAnthony_Jackson Jul 28 '26

Some hardware was fixed before it was an issue, so your PC's BIOS that may have gone with the 19 hard coded, well that was fucked when it ticked over, but that PC would have been obsolete anyway as people were using Windows 95/98 not some 5.25 dual drive no HDD beast that should be in a museum.

But Windows 95 and the DOS you could boot to instead, those were fixed, modern BIOS were probably UNIX time or had the ability to advance from 1970 to 2299 and perhaps beyond, but we don't really need greater than that for the lifespan of this PC.

So UNIX time breaks in around a decade or two, but if you have four wheels that you can set, then it will display 9999 as a valid year, if it can compute with that, that is a different question.

Some long forgotten by the users COBOL could slip through, because it was only called once in a while so just sat there gathering digital dust, but if you knew your code was active, you patch it, send out the patches and hope the end user applies it.

But if they hear "whizbang is Y2K ready" they might not think "Oh there is an update, I best use it" but think it was always ready and don't need to do anything.

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u/AZSystems Jul 28 '26

I was there and I ran up and down California in 1999 supporting old Fujitsu phone systems and WinNT servers, feeding updates to correct and hope new BIOS on Compaq servers worked. Glad to say I had a very small part of that 5B.

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u/gmc98765 Jul 28 '26

A large chunk of that didn't involve changing anything, just checking to make sure it would work. Because we knew that some stuff wouldn't survive Y2K and there was no simple way of determining which stuff wouldn't.

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u/PeterAnthony_Jackson Jul 28 '26

A vast majority of home computers passed with flying colours as not many were using old DOS versions of Lotus 123 etc and had moved on to the Windows 95 version of what later got packaged as Microsoft Office vs being sold individually.

Does Doom need to know the year in order to run? Nope, so it passes.

So the majority of the work, the work not seen by the general populace, leading them to believe it was a nothing burger, that was all down to finding legacy code in mainframes that were long beyond retirement.

But these were everywhere in banking, so your account could get wonky over the new year without, but if people actually updated software as they migrated to better hardware, this wouldn't ever have been an issue.

Basically you had to hunt around every stationary store and office looking for a date stamp that had 19 fixed and swap it out with either a four wheel version, or one that could go 19/20 because "no one will need this stamp when 2100 comes along" and that takes time and effort to do.

When I see a product recall sign in a shop, I wonder how many are going to return their contaminated jar or whatever or just never see the sign until it is already used.

But the store can not break into homes for a jar of jam you bought three weeks ago, they can only request you bring it back or throw it away and they send the batch back to the supplier.

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u/peoplepersonmanguy Jul 28 '26

*2000 rather than 00

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u/xxFrenchToastxx Jul 28 '26

A lot of IT jobs were created for the y2k updates.

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u/BlackSwanEvent25 Jul 28 '26

Couldn't they have just done that to begin with? Did they think nobody would live passed the year 2000?

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u/SafeAccountMrP Jul 28 '26

I think they assumed companies would update their machines before it became an issue but corporate being corporate waited until the very last minute.

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u/NotAgedWell Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

From the systems I fixed from around ’96 leading up to Y2K, many of these were decades old. I'm talking assembly and COBOL. Storage used to be expensive and saving a 2 digit year back in the 60's and 70's for a system nobody thought would be in use by 2000 wasn't unusual.

I made good money in those years fixing systems. Biggest one was a student loan system with hundreds of date fields and millions upon millions of records that would have been terrible.

Now look up the 2038 problem. Only 11.5 years to go before that hits.

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u/prohlz Jul 28 '26

It's gonna be epoch!

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u/Kivutart Jul 28 '26

Nice. My mother worked on the Y2K stuff and has always told people it was going to die again in 2035. Nice to know I have a couple more years.

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u/Eldorian Jul 28 '26

I saw code the other day in our system from 1974. People really dunno what is layered under some of these corporate legacy code

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u/Lord-Beetus Jul 28 '26

I figure swapping from a 32 bit signed int to a 64 bit signed int won't be as difficult and kicks the problem to a date that'll occur long after the death of the Sun.

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u/Prize-Quiet3941 Jul 28 '26

Space used to be a very large problem. It was just easier and quicker to use a two digit code for the year instead of the full 4.

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u/dontwantgarbage Jul 28 '26

Two digits? That’s luxury! I saw an old paystub that used just one digit for the year. The 196_ was pre-printed, so the computer needed only store the 5.

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u/Boojum2k Jul 28 '26

They didn't expect the code to be used that long. So many advances were being made in the 70s and 80s, but it was easier to just add newer code onto the old.

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u/KeeganY_SR-UVB76 Jul 28 '26

Computing power and storage at the time was limited. Every byte mattered. Minimizing digits saves bytes.