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

[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:
Y2k clock.jpg
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...

[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:

Y2kBugs_191117.jpg

[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.