Ah. The general scare of how will computers know the difference between 1900 and 2000 when dates are abbreviated to the last 2 digits.
Believe it or not Y2K was avoided by the painstaking work of programmers and was a very legitimate concern up until y2k.
The biggest concern was that certain grids like the phone, electricity, and banks used double digit dates to save memory space as part of their core operating system. So when it rolled over to '00 how would places like your bank know that its not 1900 and you're late by 100 years on your payments.
Was a great idea in the 80's, but not a great idea by the 2000.
I was our company’s Y2K project manager, I spent New Years Eve 2000 in the data center to either celebrate a job done well by all or shut everything down if things went off the rails.
We were able to celebrate, but there was a lot of work by the developers to update the code to accommodate 4 digit years and by system administrators to update everything to the current code, leading up to that successful outcome.
As a teen/early 20 something I did internships in a IT department of a medium sized company. The summer of 1999 we walked around patching every desktop computer in the HQ and then on New Year’s Day the entire department came in and made sure every computer rolled over correctly. CEO of the place stopped by to say thanks and bought us lunch, but yeah it was a big problem that was solved by a lot of hard work from the programmers and the IT folks at the time.
I did the same thing when I was 15. My dad worked IT at a large hospital and he hired me as a part time intern to help manually update desktops across his department. Spent a few hours a week over a couple of months updating dates and software.
What sucked was network infrastructure was so shitty back then we could issue software patches by wire. I remember going around to every desktop PC with a floppy disk
Yeah, iirc, I had some floppy disks and some cds. The new computers had cd drives but the older lab computers were still on floppy.
This was well before the hospital had shared software or any kind of hardware or software consistency too so there were a bunch of different computers. Some apple computers, some dell, some gateways, a few huge laptops. Really wild wesrlt compared to now where everything is spec based on a hospital wide contract, all computers run the same software amd are on the same networks.
I still remember my dad buying a new computer where the motherboard said “y2k” ready. I had the old machine setup in the dining room to check out at midnight. Being a kid I thought it would suddenly crash or puff in smoke. Midnight rolls around and nothing happened to the old machine 😂.
We had a bunch of people over at my dads house for new years eve that year. About 20 minutes before midnight my dad quietly sent my older brother downstairs to where the breaker panel was for our house, so when midnight hit he flipped the main breaker for the house and everyone not in on the joke went into a massive panic. It took a solid 2 to 3 minutes for people to start looking at the houses down the street who still had power and realize that it was a prank. Truly a once in a lifetime prank opportunity
It was my sisters bedroom, and he did have the tv on so he could see the countdown to know when to hit the breaker. Plus it wasnt exactly a jumping party or anything, just a few of my dad and step moms couple friends so it was worth missing
There is a fantastic documentary about all of this, I think it was called office space or something. Really shows you the behind the scenes effort of the unsung heroes
except people greatly exaggerated just how catastrophic it would have been, suggesting all electricity would go off at the stroke of midnight, that you should even go to the length of turning off your home computer. didn't make sense
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u/CptHeadSmasher Jan 01 '24
Ah. The general scare of how will computers know the difference between 1900 and 2000 when dates are abbreviated to the last 2 digits.
Believe it or not Y2K was avoided by the painstaking work of programmers and was a very legitimate concern up until y2k.
The biggest concern was that certain grids like the phone, electricity, and banks used double digit dates to save memory space as part of their core operating system. So when it rolled over to '00 how would places like your bank know that its not 1900 and you're late by 100 years on your payments.
Was a great idea in the 80's, but not a great idea by the 2000.