12/31/1999

[Rich Engelhardt]

I was on call.

I worked in IT.

Only one call came in near midnight. It was from the Ohio Lottery. I called them to see what the problem was, but, the person that placed the after hours holiday emergency call ($250) had left ang gone home.

Whoopee!!! I made an easy $50 just for taking that call.

Looking back on Y2K....

[mike stenson]

I was doing systems engineering and change control. We watched what happened in Australia, then had a party that night.

I was also on call.

[glenn bradley]

1999 was a banner year in I.T. Some genius got the story (which is true in many cases) rolling. Neckties around conference tables understood little of "that computer stuff" and made blanket decisions. We flew all over the country certifying equipment as Y2K compliant. We were honest with our customer base when they wanted equipment certified that couldn't have been effected. Trying to explain things to most folks triggered the onset of MEGLO (my eye glaze over) and we would finish the conversation with nothing changed. The blanket ruling (the easy decision for the lazy) was that ALL I.T. hardware be certified. Between this and the already rolling internet explosion it was a great time to be a geek.

I don't remember ever not being on call . . . even when I wasn't on call :D

[Lisa Starr]

Yep. I was a programmer that could "do" COBOL. Does that show my age? I wrote code during most of 1999 to update old code that prefixed dates with the 19. Some people still wanted me to just change it to prefix with the "20". I tried in vain to get them to let me adjust it to a four position year. Of course, I imagine most of that code is long gone now.

[Kev Williams]

Was working in this basement in 1999- just like this very minute, and, 2019, 2009, 1989, 1979 ;)

For Xmas that year some friends gave us this countdown clock:
470842
It's been counting up ever since. I just took this pic, had to find the thing ;) -- IIRC we had to change the batteries when we moved into our mobile home, that was 2009, it's still running on those batteries- actual time on my watch said 1:48 when I took this pic, so it's picked up an hour and 5 minutes in 12 years. Guess that's not TOO bad, just changed out an alarm clock that was gaining over a minute per week...

Time, what a concept... :D

[Lee DeRaud]

I was at Boeing working on Navy contracts. The cost to certify that our systems did not have any Y2K issues exceeded by many orders of magnitude the probable cost of the much-feared problems.

[Brian Elfert]

IT consulting companies were running flat out doing Y2K testing and remediation in the years leading up to Jan 1, 2000. The level of Y2K hysteria was crazy. CEOs and company boards were going to ridiculous lengths to get stuff "Y2K certified". I heard about companies wanting things that would not break if the date was wrong, or didn't have any dates in it at all, to be certified. Things like wall clocks, microwaves and refrigerators in break rooms, and machinery on factory floors that had no electronics at all like conveyors with just an on/off switch.

[Bill Dufour]

Working at the cannery a year later I heard they had tossed a dumpster full of cans before they realized they had not expired by just under 100 years.
Bill D

[Lee DeRaud]

And then there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
when the 32-bit Unix (et al) clock time integer rolls over.

That means Kev only has about 17 years left to upgrade from XP. :)

[Brian Elfert]

Working at the cannery a year later I heard they had tossed a dumpster full of cans before they realized they had not expired by just under 100 years.
Bill D

This sounds like a bunch of braindead workers and management. Nobody realized that an expiration date of 01/01/00 was actually the year 2000 and not the year 1900?

[Andrew Seemann]

After all the code I had to check and rewrite 22 years ago, to this day I still I refuse to write, program, or use 2 digit years on anything.

[Brian Elfert]

And then there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
when the 32-bit Unix (et al) clock time integer rolls over.


I heard about this issue 20+ years ago. It seemed so far in the future back then that I thought for sure it would have been fixed by 2022 already.

I expect to retire in 2039 so I will have to deal with this before I retire. My employer likes to keep operating systems running long past end of life. With virtualization we get new servers regularly so failure of old physical servers is no longer the reason to finally upgrade. We still running a Windows application on a Windows OS that is 20+ years old! My manager and the rest of the team have been begging IT management to replace this ancient crap before it gets hacked due to no security patches for 10+ years. One of our old systems failed a few weeks ago and we spent two days getting it working again. We have been telling IT management for several years it was going to fail eventually.

[Alan Rutherford]

Y2K bugs:

470903

[Mike Soaper]

I remember all of the concern about manufacuring equipment going down because of the 2 digit date issue.

It gave me some concern for a couple I knew that after years of trying to have kids finaly had triplets, then a set of twins and then another baby, 6 kids all under the age of two. My concern was that they could be in deep shi*, er poo, if the diaper factories stopped working :)

[Curt Harms]

Yep. I was a programmer that could "do" COBOL. Does that show my age? I wrote code during most of 1999 to update old code that prefixed dates with the 19. Some people still wanted me to just change it to prefix with the "20". I tried in vain to get them to let me adjust it to a four position year. Of course, I imagine most of that code is long gone now.

Not necessarily. I read that there's more COBOL running than one might think doing jobs that if it fails would make the news.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I had been scrambling for weeks updating software between multiple CT and MR scanners at several surrounding hospitals and clinics. Being in a remote area, I waited for the calls to come but the only one I got was because an institution lost power and the backup generator failed. The techs wanted to know where the breakers were on some of the x-ray equipment.

[Derek Meyer]

I have a friend who learned COBOL in the military, and became a programmer for Bank of America. He worked for them for years, then switched to doing projects on a series of 9 month contracts. A few years ago, he told me that Bank of America commisioned a feasibility study of converting all their COBOL based systems to something newer. The projected cost was over 1 trillion dollars. So, Bank of America will be on COBOL systems for eternity and there will always be a need for COBOL programmers.

[Brian Elfert]

I have a friend who learned COBOL in the military, and became a programmer for Bank of America. He worked for them for years, then switched to doing projects on a series of 9 month contracts. A few years ago, he told me that Bank of America commisioned a feasibility study of converting all their COBOL based systems to something newer. The projected cost was over 1 trillion dollars. So, Bank of America will be on COBOL systems for eternity and there will always be a need for COBOL programmers.

Are you sure that is not supposed to be $1 billion? $1 trillion would cover close to five million man years of work at $200,000 per worker.

[Lee DeRaud]

Are you sure that is not supposed to be $1 billion? $1 trillion would cover close to five million man years of work at $200,000 per worker.
If you took the total number of lines of COBOL in BofA's inventory and threw that number as a single project against the COCOMO estimation model, I don't think millions of person-years is at all out of the question. That might be a truly stupid way to handle the study, but then again, the people generating the estimate do have a vested interest in a "Big Number" answer.

(I'm a big fan of comedy in the workplace, so the first question to the powers-that-be would be, "What replacement language did you have in mind?" Second question would be, "Where do y'all keep the requirements documentation?")

[mike stenson]

I don't think it's all that out of line. I used to write COBAL, and APL, for the same reasons... I'm nowhere close to retirement age. It's not just the banks either. Pretty much any large, older, enterprise would be similar.

[Rick Potter]

I remember taking my 1922 Model 'T' hot rod to a big car show (L. A. Roadsters) in 1999, and putting a Y2K compliant sign on it. Got a few smiles.

[Roger Feeley]

I was working late that night. I was on my way home when the millennia kicked over. The traffic lights were fine.

I did some Y2K work but not a lot. I remember that I did something related to people and while I was expanding and converting year-of-birth I looked at gender that was a one byte field but defined as binary M/F. I didn’t have the mandate to change the way the field worked but I did change its size to 64 bits. That was my gift to the next guy. Now, I’m not sure that 64 bits would be enough.

[Lee DeRaud]

I used to write COBAL, and APL, for the same reasons.
That is a truly terrifying combination of skills. :)

[mike stenson]

That is a truly terrifying combination of skills. :)
... it also makes me feel so much older than I am.

Both predate my birth :eek:

[Derek Meyer]

Are you sure that is not supposed to be $1 billion? $1 trillion would cover close to five million man years of work at $200,000 per worker.

No, it was $1 Trillion. If it was only a billion it would probably be done by now. Bank of Americal had a net income of $17.9 billion for the fiscal year 2020, according to their annual report.

That $1 trillion figure is the total estimated cost, which includes all hardware, software, programming, data conversion and employee training. I also assume it factors in downtime and lost productivity, as there would likely be times that their main system would be down. They would want to minimize that, as they are a worldwide operation that runs 24/7/365. There would need to be huge amounts of testing and redundancy in any changeover/upgrade. It would also take a long time, maybe a decade, to complete. Absolutely huge project.

[Brian Elfert]

BOA has somehow managed to transition from computers printing balances in passbooks to telephone banking, online banking, credit and debit cards, and mobile banking, but they are just going to keep their legacy backend computer system running essentially forever? I suppose they will the one of the guys paying IBM or whoever boatloads of money to keep legacy systems. You can still pay Microsoft to patches for old versions of Windows, but it isn't cheap.

[mike stenson]

They likely upgrade the hardware, and the OS. Programming languages such as COBOL (and APL for that matter, still heavily used in ATM swiping last I heard) are not tied to the OS. Both are still around, although it's been a while since either had an updated version.

[Curt Harms]

I'm not an IT guy but for grins I searched COBOL for X86. It looks like IBM has a COBOL compiler for X86 so hardware may not be an issue.

[Brian Elfert]

I am assuming BOA would be running Cobol on mainframes. I work in IT, but never on a mainframe. In my world we will see programs written in a programming language that no longer work on the latest version of the OS and the latest compiler. Sometimes features are removed that the code depends on which prevents upgrading.

Maybe these aren't issues in the mainframe Cobol world.

[mike stenson]

Yea, I'm pretty sure (as in 99.999%) that this would all be a zOS environment. Not as much of an issue.

[Kev Williams]

BOA has somehow managed to transition from computers printing balances in passbooks to telephone banking, online banking, credit and debit cards, and mobile banking, but they are just going to keep their legacy backend computer system running essentially forever? I suppose they will the one of the guys paying IBM or whoever boatloads of money to keep legacy systems. You can still pay Microsoft to patches for old versions of Windows, but it isn't cheap.


They likely upgrade the hardware, and the OS. Programming languages such as COBOL (and APL for that matter, still heavily used in ATM swiping last I heard) are not tied to the OS. Both are still around, although it's been a while since either had an updated version.

I'm no IT guy either, but I'm going to guess the REASON these languages haven't been updated is a simple one: They Work. Exactly why I jump thru hoops to keep my 7's running ;)

[Anuj Prateek]

I was on call.

I worked in IT.

Only one call came in near midnight. It was from the Ohio Lottery. I called them to see what the problem was, but, the person that placed the after hours holiday emergency call ($250) had left ang gone home.

Whoopee!!! I made an easy $50 just for taking that call.

Looking back on Y2K....

Time flies quickly. Two decades have passed and doesn't feel like more than a few years.

I joined a boarding school in 9th grade in July 1999. December was the first vacation from school. Schools reopened in first week of January. End of December was going back preparation time (shopping, packing, home food eating etc).

Back then New Year meant light fireworks, sending/receiving greeting cards, trunk calls to relatives etc. TV used to have special new year programming, which everyone watched. As far as I remember, that was one of the few days kids were awake after midnight.

[Rich Engelhardt]

I'm no IT guy either, but I'm going to guess the REASON these languages haven't been updated is a simple one: They Work. Exactly why I jump thru hoops to keep my 7's running Actually - they don't work. Nothing in the computer world really works.
The entire IT world is driven by - - patches & workarounds.

[Steve Demuth]

I have a friend who learned COBOL in the military, and became a programmer for Bank of America. He worked for them for years, then switched to doing projects on a series of 9 month contracts. A few years ago, he told me that Bank of America commisioned a feasibility study of converting all their COBOL based systems to something newer. The projected cost was over 1 trillion dollars. So, Bank of America will be on COBOL systems for eternity and there will always be a need for COBOL programmers.

I have seen similar estimates in a very large insurance company for which I used to do consulting work. In their case, it was claims processing systems, and due to their growth by acquisition and a long habit of independent IT in independent business units, they had over 500 claims processing "engines." So, the question was, how much to replace all of them with one? The estimates, done by one of the big five consulting firms, were astronomical.

But in reality, they got down to a handful of claims processing systems, including one that was a major rewrite of their core system for a fraction of that estimate, not by duplicating all the idiosyncrasies built into the requirements for those 500+ systems, but by migrating their business and data (they managed over 70,000 separate insurance plans) over time to the new system.

I've also done work for more one than bank or insurance company that couldn't fix or update a core system on which they relied, because they didn't have the source code for the system any longer - either because they had written the system and lost it, or because it relied on code from long-gone software vendors and they had mismanaged (or not managed at all) escrow of the vendor's source code. In at least one case, they had the source code, but no one had "escrowed' the compiler required to "interpret" it. I believe it has now been fixed with replacement code, but one of the missing-source-code systems was a core transactional system inside of SWIFT, the international payments clearing house.

[Lee DeRaud]

Actually - they don't work. Nothing in the computer world really works.
The entire IT world is driven by - - patches & workarounds.
I'm reminded of the (very) early days of networking at my jobsite. Internet access was subject the the whims of a makeshift DNS server, running on a woefully underpowered surplus PC in the sysadmin's cubicle. It's the kind of thing that gives "infrastructure" a bad name.

[Rob Luter]

Our IT guys thought Y2K was a joke. Our fiscal year ended in Q3 so Y2K for us happened in October. The sky didn't fall, the computers didn't crash, and our world didn't end.

[Kev Williams]

Actually - they don't work. Nothing in the computer world really works.
The entire IT world is driven by - - patches & workarounds.
And you just hit on EXACTLY the basis of my paranoia concerning self landing jumbo jets and gawd help us all, self driving cars, RV's and semi trucks...
I don't even LIKE computers. I only use them because they're necessary. By "they work" I only barely mean 'as well as can reasonably be expected' ;)

My 'smart phone' gets used maybe 4 times a month, to call/get called by- the wife. I got a 'better' replacement for it almost a year ago, haven't bothered to activate it. I've took a few pics with it...

[mike stenson]

There's a huge difference between consumer devices and 6 9s devices. There's also a huge difference between a programming language and an operating system.

[Lee DeRaud]

There's also a huge difference between a programming language and an operating system.
Unless you're working on an LMI LISP machine...I still have occasional flashbacks about that (mercifully short) phase of my career.

Someone way up the food chain declared, "We should have an AI lab. Hey, what could go wrong?"

[Brian Elfert]

I have worked in enterprise IT for 21 years now. We are running into lots of issues these days where the OS is out of date and needs to be upgraded or replaced. This often means the application development environment needs to go to the latest version too. Many times some code changes are required with the upgrade application development environment. Our applications team is always too busy to fix their code to work on the newer OSes so we sit with stuff on unsupported OSes.

Now, I know the mainframe world is a lot of different, but I assume every new model of mainframe or mainframe OS is not going to be 100% backwards compatible with the previous OS and/or hardware.