Never Forget

[DailyDi]

The apocalypse that almost was.

[Babygeebee]

LOL. I had to work that New Year's Eve. Basically we had cleaned everything up with no issues at all. Told us we could go home early. 

[Alyeskabird]

Skys I was laughing over that one for years and years before it even hit then.  Watching people panic of stupid was just so amusing. Sorta like that city that baned dihidrogenmonoxide

[Babygeebee]

@Alyeskabird This is a complement to me. Yes there was some silliness associated with Y2K, but there was real work involved too.  We spent months before to clean up/replace old systems with stupid code for dates like 99/99/99 and calculations based on 2-digit years that would fail in 2000. It was a non-event because of a bunch of hard work from IT folks. 

[AbabeBill]

I just hope we don’t have to go through this again soon,  ? ?‍♂️, lol! 

[Babygeebee]

You can bet in 3000 they will still be looking for COBOL programmers. ?

[Crinklz Kat]

6 hours ago, Babygeebee said:

LOL. I had to work that New Year's Eve. Basically we had cleaned everything up with no issues at all. Told us we could go home early. 

I had to work it too - but I'm an IT guy and the feds were all panicky that something was going to crash big time.  What a waste of time.   But I still have the MAGlite gift I got for having to work that night!

5 hours ago, AbabeBill said:

I just hope we don’t have to go through this again soon,  ? ?‍♂️, lol! 

Um..... quite possible.

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

[Babygeebee]

5 minutes ago, Crinklz Kat said:

 But I still have the MAGlite gift I got for having to work that night!

I got something similar though I can't remember what it was now. The MAGlight would have been handy if all the lights had gone out. ? We spent most of our time eating at a buffet and watching movies (The Matrix) waiting for the apocalypse which never came. 

[Alyeskabird]

@BabygeebeeTrue enough, a lot of the legacy systems did need programing work, and a lot of the programs where hacked up messes with little real documentation, eather do to coperate stupidicy or just cause the info got lost over the years. Most of what I delt with was the idiots with there pcs thinking that the world was going to literaly blow up when the clock ticked over. It was so sad and funny because people where being increadably stupid about the whole thing.  There was people I personaly knew that beleaved 100 percent that there personal pc, that was 3 months old, was going to cause the end of the world. 

You should know the sort of person I am thinking about, the ones that plug the power strip into the power strip and freak out yelling and screaming why there shits not turning on. I delt with a lot of people like that back then,and it was just very anoying.

Gotta give props to all the folks that camped out in data centers and such to ensure that there was no problems, never mind all the programers that had to go through all that legacy code to fix the date.  Skys, then all the data records that had to be gone through to fix the data to except the larger date number. Rather astonishing that thoes systems where still running, in some cases, 40-50 years after they where built and programed. Heck, some of them are still running!

[Babygeebee]

@AlyeskabirdI can imagine your frustration. Dealing with end users can be very difficult. They were a source of chuckles when we talked with the help center folks. Hats off to you for having to deal with that. I was a database administrator and worked with the analysts fixing the systems. That said end user managers were another source of "joy". 

[bottlestop]

Growing up, blue collar in the country, I often wondered / day dreamed where, or how, my life would be when the new century started.   Never could I have imagined being  some 1000 miles from where I grew up, alone in a data center,  powering down the servers and then bringing them back up.

[zzyzx]

6 hours ago, Crinklz Kat said:

Um..... quite possible.

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

@Crinklz Kat: I was waiting for some one to mention the Unix Epoch issue....  <GRIN>

[WetDad]

I was part of the Y2K "Strike Farce" put together by a large company in the US to deal with any related issues that came up. I was on call for that week, ready to fly anywhere in the world to investigate problems that never arose. Never got any extra pay for it either.

[Crinklz Kat]

15 hours ago, zzyzx said:

@Crinklz Kat: I was waiting for some one to mention the Unix Epoch issue....  <GRIN>

I love the nickname given to it ....Epochalypse!

 

[rusty pins]

Thats like saying the world stops when you turn out your bedroom light each night.

[ValentinesStuff]

5 hours ago, WetDad said:

I was part of the Y2K "Strike Farce" put together by a large company in the US to deal with any related issues that came up. I was on call for that week, ready to fly anywhere in the world to investigate problems that never arose. Never got any extra pay for it either.

Assuming that there was a computer apocalypse, how did they expect you to fly? Hot air balloon?

[babykeiff]

3 hours ago, rusty pins said:

Thats like saying the world stops when you turn out your bedroom light each night.

.... does the fridge turn off when you close the door ?

I lost count of how many companies replaced their entire computer hardware due to their percieved issue with Y2K. Today about 30% of large corporate financial software was deployed prior to 2000 and is still running today without problems.

[tuffy]

I was running the network for a small ISP in the late 90s. All our servers ran BSD Unix. Every time we talked to a bank about financing more equipment, they wanted to know about Y2K. We kept telling them we didn't have to worry until 2038.

[Cute_Kitten]

Ah memories of the Y2K panic. I got a good laught out of that! 

[WetDad]

On 3/21/2023 at 5:48 PM, ValentinesStuff said:

Assuming that there was a computer apocalypse, how did they expect you to fly? Hot air balloon?

They had a number of small jets on the ready.

[DailyDi]

30 minutes ago, WetDad said:

They had a number of small jets on the ready.

Yeah but they said planes were gonna fall out of the sky!

[WetDad]

There were several at a tiny private airport in case of FAA problems.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Was not even close. It had been anticipated since 1995 and high-value machines were being updated. Also, updates were sent to home computers. Beyond that, the worse that would happen was that a business computer would stop and ask for input on the date. I have seen what goes into a cold start of a mainframe. There are many operator checkpoints asking for input, one of which is the date. The operators would have been informed and know what to do.  Whoever was not aware of any Y2k issues would have been living under a rock since Jan 1, 1999 and not even know what a computer was. Alll years are internally read as 4digits and computer calendars omit the month and just read the day as a 3-digit number: The so-called Julian Calendar. This goes back to the original DOS as of  1983 that I know  of

[oznl]

It was the non-event of the century.  As I was part of the "technical" faculty, I had to be on standby for that evening.  I couldn't drink any alcohol and I had to phone in to a recorded message service every 15 minutes for any work orders that arose.

Of course, nothing happened although I DID get paid for that.  We actually knew nothing was going to happen just after 10pm as that's when New Zealand rolled over and didn't wink out of existence.  It was worse for one of my friends who worked for Microsoft and had to spend new year's eve sitting in a bank's data center in case Windows NT imploded: presumably as some kind of hostage.

There WERE a few Y2K issues but these mostly arose before the event itself at the point where software had to look past the Y2K date for some reason.  Mostly they were anticipated.

There's another event of this type coming btw:

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

You might want to start digging your bomb shelters and assembling your survival kits now...

 

[zzyzx]

19 minutes ago, oznl said:

There's another event of this type coming btw:

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

@oznl:  Ah, the second mention in this thread about the Unix Epoch issue.... < GRIN >

And mostly a dead issue by this point from:

• Changing 32 bit SIGNED int on 32 bit systems, to unsigned
• Changing from a 32 bit int to a 64 bit int on systems now running 64 bit CPUs....