"Was Y2K a scam?" Topic

1) Of course, nothing happened.
2) Yes, very overhyped.
3) Mmm-hmm, overhyped by people cashing in on "fixes".
4) Uh, no, the fixes are why nothing happened.
5) No, and we should start on Y3K now.
6) Alert! Why is no one working on Y9.999K?!?!?!
7) Well, it all started when someone spiked my egg nog, I began to wonder why there was a goat on my desk. Especially since I live in a goat-free zone. (No kidding, I asked. We moved to Maryland and I wanted to know, just in case. I can raise rabbits in approved hutches, though.) Then I realized it was a stuffed toy goat, which is a result of the confluence of (1) I was in the Navy, (2) SWMBO is a Capricorn, and (c) DOM is also a Capricorn, leading to many goat jokes. Also, pretty much everyone here, including SOM, enjoys a good goatburger. So the goat says, "Um, OK, so how you gettin' to the shore". And I reply, "Funny you should ask, I got a car now." And the goat asks, "Oh, wow, how'd you get a car?" And I replies, "My parents drove it up from the Bahamas." And he's all like, "You're kidding!?!??!?" And I'm all, "I must be. The Bahamas are islands." The important thing, then, is that Christian Ronaldo just got that penalty shot, which is the first one in the entire series he has made. But really not, since SWMBO and I are watching it on replay on ESPN3 online. So there have been some more penalty goals since, then, but not yet. Which leads us to the important topic of time travel and how the CIA is sponsored 22nd Century computer technicians to go back in time to the 80's and establish a date format that would cause Y2K to happen so they could funnel thousands of dollars of "repair costs" into shell companies that didn't do anything and then bury it all in suitcases, to dig it up in the present (but not our present) where the value has been increased since it is antique money since the US Dollar was replaced by the much more attractive Canadian Dollar after the invasion.

1 and 2.

Gotts keep that revenue stream coming in.

The potential problems was real, but my understanding was the patches were all sorted pretty much in the years laying up to it.

It was a wakeup call that worked too well. I read a analysis just after Y2k. It is thought that due to it being over-hyped, the amount of pre-event preparedness and debate started a mini-boost of our tech level.
I worked the midnite shift at AAA as a dispatcher and between 12 and 1 I had to reboot the records system. It failed to work NOT because of Y2K but because the IT were so intent on making it failure proof they forgot to allow certain processes to kick in at midnite. So until 10-11 am in the morning we were using 19th C. records technique that had to be inputted after the system was running properly.

Since I was the only dispatcher that could do the job WITHOUT computers it was a good thing I was there. No one else could write stuff down, answer a phone and use the radio at the same time…

The mind boggles.

1, 2 and 3.

I lost everything.

I don't care which it "really" was… I made my fortune!

I go with 2 and 4. Could have been a lot worse.

Between 3 and 4
I was on a response team at a major university. In the end nothing of consequence was allowed to happen. But a lot of work went in up front to prevent things. Just some none networked items lost the date. Since these are not connected there was no chain reaction of failures.

But lots of hype to sell to a scared public.

Oddly with some much good planning done in 2000, it blows my mind that collapses like New Orleans after Katrina could happen. Too many people just tossed out plans and supplies after the date related disaster did not go off as advertised.

4. I, and many others, put in lots of hours to ensure nothing happened.

4. There was a very real threat, but the IT industry reacted promptly and intelligently. There was no need for the "people cashing in" to hype anything, since they had more work thrown at them than they could handle. The hype came from our incompetent, ignorant, irresponsible news media aided by outsiders who were nearly as ignorant as the reporters but quite willing to pose as experts.

What the public was never told was that it was a mainframe/minicomputer problem and that their Macs/PCs would not even notice. Both Apple and Microsoft tried to get that word out, but the press in their frenzy to sell newspapers and ad time effectively throttled those efforts. Non-problems don't sell. Look at their handling of the Ebola scare.

4. It didn't sneak up on the programmers, they were dealing with it for years before the public started to freak out.

Goats.

No the world really ended and we are in the matrix,

did someone just wake up after being asleep the last 14 years ?
does anyone really care ? LOL

Spent several years preparing the software for the company I worked for at the time. It was real and only the upfront work by millions around the world for years before anyone knew about it (the public) made it not happen.

By the time the media hyped it up, all the work had been done.

Dan

Yeah it was hyped – remember that movie that showed all manner of disasters?
But if it hadn't been fixed a lot of folks would have been mighty ed off.

I designed a system in the 80's that used an online calendar. I used a 4 position year just to avoid Y2K problems. It was designed to be good until 2100. Other people wrote batch programs that used the calendar and just used the low order 2 positions. Those parts had to be patched. Why they ignored the 4 position year is beyond me. Would people have died? No. People would have been jerked around.

A possible concern that people took measures to ensure wouldn't be a concern and a ton of people scamming their fellow man for a few more bucks

Forget Y3K. It's just over 23 years until we get to go through it all again at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038.

y2038.com

I ignored it and my nose turned blue.

#4, I was there and working on it. The computer system of then current employer had no issues. Ironically our fax system (which no one thought to worry about) went berserk! :)

-Will

1, 2, and 4. And I made a nicely bundle from it, thank you very much. (Some advantages to being a 'legacy' programmer..).

Actually quite a lot of stuff did happen – IT workers had done the job pretty thoroughly but there were still Elevators that failed and embedded building control systems that went down, a Chinese Airliner got into trouble, etc.

4. I missed the biggest party ever, being on duty.

Given the amount of work my team put in to patch stuff, then no, it wasn't overhyped. Some stuff still broke. As noted above, it also drove innovation.

Amusingly the timer on my cooker broke, good job it wasn't controlling something important:)

3 and 4.

There were 2 Y2Ks. The one that I worked on because of sloppy programming back in the 90s, then there was the Y2K of the Media.

My work worked. I'do be very upset if people thought my work was for nothing. I may not have stopped Boeings spiralling I ti the ground, but it was important to my employer.

But I can understand people being underwhelmed after the fact, given the doomsday media.

Cheers,
JohnG

COBOL programmers did quite well out of it.

Doug

A friend of mine had a guy on his block who went up and down the street telling everyone they needed to buy a generator like he did. He was convinced that there would be no power at midnight.
So he put the generator in his driveway, and on the stroke of midnight he fired it up and threw the switch. He had forgotten to turn off the power to the house, and burned out his electrical panel.
He was right, on January 1st he had no power.

8) Unsure. But kissed my then girlfriend(my wife now) at midnight local time , through a new century.

Yes, absolutely it was real. I have a good friend who is a programmer who earned a TON of cash working over-time on Y2K fixes for his company. The crash was avoided because of all of the hard work that went in to avoiding it.

4.

Though many of the news predictions were MASSIVELY over hyped. Most people do not know that the first Y2K problem came up in 1970 – 30 year mortgage payoff dates.

I actually had it happen in the early nineties but in reverse, I was working on patient tracking software and one of the patients was born before 1900. I'm actually surprised to hear about that only once.

1,2 & 3. It serves as a good example of why one should be careful of what 'experts' say, especially experts offering to sell a solution.

I worked about 100 hours a week, for 3 months, looking for Y2K bugs. They were hard to find in many cases and were low density in number. The World spent billions looking for and fixing the issue. DID SOMEONE EXPECT AFTER THAT AMOUNT OF MONEY AND EFFORT THAT SOMETHING WOULD HAPPEN THAT WAS MAJOR???? That is the crazy part to me. Things broke after Y2K but none of them were associated with mass disruption because of hard work.

Let's put this into perspective. I used to take custody of $350 USDB every week day for 15 minutes. It was a very complex process and my role was to determine what was locked and what was liquid so fund managers could know what they had to play with. One day the peso crashed. OK. Not a big deal on the whole as most of the money wasn't in pesos. But some of it was and that small portion was in every single fund. No bank would give a value for the peso. This resulted in one line of a fortran program to have to deal with an N/A results. It was ok with zero. It was ok with really large numbers. It was not ok with an indeterminate amount. So it crashed and caused the value of the derivative to be indeterminate. That caused a few other crashes. Those brought down the entire FOCUS accounting system at a large financial institution you might have your money at. For 3 days the company was unable to say how much money it had or the value of any of its funds.

It took 2,000 IT engineers to get the system back up and running. That was just one company, taken down by *one line of code*.

So, think we dodge the bullet on Y2K? Bet your butt we did.