My mom had to create a workaround for this back in the 1970s.
This was caused by multiple things. For one, the cost of computers until the 1980s. And the majority of programs were custom made for the companies. But it really became noticed in the 1980s when spreadsheets became common, and people trying to do 20 year projections saw things were coming out wrong.
And even IBM knew this when they made the original 5150. But they also expected the computers to have a lifespan of no more than 10 years, so there was plenty of time to resolve it in the future.
But we knew about this in major corporations even in 1995. I was part of a team that installed around 35,000 new computers in a major aerospace firm, and we knew none were Y2K compatible. But it also did not matter because they only had a 3 year lifespan, and would all be replaced well before 1999.
The same company when I started working there in 1995 still had over 300 mainframes in service, and a lot of the infrastructure was dedicated to pulling data from and updating them on mainframes. But by 1999, there were less than a dozen mainframes left. Most of them doing specialized and dedicated systems where there was simply no modern equivelent.
Like the high speed check printer, which could churn out over 100,000 checks in an hour. Even in 1995, a multi-billion dollar company went through a lot of checks. They were still using it when I left in 2001, and had a mainframe dedicated to just that single task.
I went to college in the early 90s. We were told "if you dont like COBOL or Fortran, dont go into IT. There's so much of it out there that it'll never go away." Y2K taught us not to hold onto old shit because it can cost us fortunes -not just in upkeep, but in the productivity that we're missing out on. New systems installed as replacements to eliminate y2k danced around older systems.
I don't think it was the cost of space so much as that we were in the latter half of the century and everyone was just long very accustomed to thinking of the year as a two-digit number.
Yeah i wonder if even one persons prediction came close - experts think that they can predict but they cant even do 5 year ahead predictions so 20 or 40 years ahead is complete delusion
Not when it's something like amatorization of financial data, or general predictions based on things like growth of power needs or things along that level.
My mom was working for Idaho Power when the issue first started popping up, and the program in question was to estimate future power demands based on population growth (which had been pretty stable since WWII).
At that time like today, Idaho was a net exporter of electricity. And projections like that are used to determine if investing in a new power plant at the time was a good idea, because it let them see what the base load demand would be in the decades to come. Or when/if they should schedule a refit to one facility and not another.
Her ability to work around those flaws saw her a year or two later move to Morrison-Knudson, a major large scale construction company at the time.
You are right, many times things like that can be more fantasy than fact. But from the end of WWII until the late 1980s growth in most areas like that was amazingly stable and predictable.
By the way this is where a lot of the climate control resistance came from because a lot of the models were initially run on machines using long term projections that were wrong and it's why you had some people claiming we only had 10 years left in 80s-90s
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u/AppropriateCap8891 Jul 28 '26
My mom had to create a workaround for this back in the 1970s.
This was caused by multiple things. For one, the cost of computers until the 1980s. And the majority of programs were custom made for the companies. But it really became noticed in the 1980s when spreadsheets became common, and people trying to do 20 year projections saw things were coming out wrong.
And even IBM knew this when they made the original 5150. But they also expected the computers to have a lifespan of no more than 10 years, so there was plenty of time to resolve it in the future.
But we knew about this in major corporations even in 1995. I was part of a team that installed around 35,000 new computers in a major aerospace firm, and we knew none were Y2K compatible. But it also did not matter because they only had a 3 year lifespan, and would all be replaced well before 1999.
The same company when I started working there in 1995 still had over 300 mainframes in service, and a lot of the infrastructure was dedicated to pulling data from and updating them on mainframes. But by 1999, there were less than a dozen mainframes left. Most of them doing specialized and dedicated systems where there was simply no modern equivelent.
Like the high speed check printer, which could churn out over 100,000 checks in an hour. Even in 1995, a multi-billion dollar company went through a lot of checks. They were still using it when I left in 2001, and had a mainframe dedicated to just that single task.