I was considered “brave” and “crazy” for offering to work that shift. People were losing their minds. It was the first time I realized how gullible the general public was. I was the calm in the storm. I reminded them that air was not controlled by a computer and we would survive. It would be like “camping nursing.” Midnight -NOTHING- and people felt stupid. I’m ready for that feeling again. It was priceless.
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I was in IT consulting leading up to Y2K.
Yes, the problem was overblown. That said, there were real issues lurking in a lot of companies that Y2K exposed, especially in banking (in my experience). The problem wasn't so much that the calendar broke the process, but that mission-critical legacy applications were undocumented and essentially unfixable. It would have been a minor nightmare if Y2K had just been ignored and then all those companies discovered and tried to fix those apps simultaneously in the weeks after 1/1/2000. A lot of people with "antiquated" skills got pulled out of retirement, and many apps were either totally rewritten or replaced by "good enough" commercial versions.
For those of us in IT, it was apparent several months out that all the "real" problems had already been fixed, and from then on, everyone was either in CYA mode, or was using the flowing faucet of cash to push through all those changes that were important but could never get funding - just call it "Y2K related" and you magically got the bucks and the higher ups didn't have the technical chops to question or dare be wrong.
Ironically, the end result was the consulting market crashed hard in the first quarter of 2000. Budgets were empty, everything that needed to be fixed in the short term was already fixed under the Y2K excuse, and IT departments cut their consultants (and, in some cases, staff) to the bone.
Right. I graduated nursing school late 90’s, was in banking prior to that. They were already working on bank programming issues in 1997-8 before I graduated. I don’t disagree the potential was there. But nursing? Paper charting? It was wild.
Some of the stuff was crazy, especially at first. There was a big concern about embedded controllers in things like elevators and machinery - I wasn't in that industry, but I suspect it ended up being a nothingburger.
The real problem was the uncertainty. If your code isn't well documented, then you can't just figure out where the problems are - you have to test every possible scenario. Then if you find a problem, do you still have the source code? The original compiler? Can you fix it and recompile in the latest version, or will that break other things? Are you better off recoding from scratch (and then fix all these other issues you had), or bringing in different software and customizing it?
But some stuff was just out-and-out ridiculous. I had to go to an engineering company. They had 50 identical Unix workstations (Solaris, I think) running CAD software. Unix didn't have a problem with dates. All the machines were updated to the same, latest BIOS. The CAD software didn't care what the date was and the manufacturer had certified that well in advance.
Absolute worst case, testing one machine was more than enough. They paid me to kick a working engineer off his workstation during business hours so I could do a small suite of tests to verify what we already knew, and then had me do it to every one of those 50 machines. Between what I was being billed out as, and all the wasted time of those engineers, it was a colossal waste of time and money. But somebody wanted the option to be able to sue my company if things went south, so I did it.
The hilarious thing was I had this same conversation nearly verbatim 50 times:
me: I'm here from xxxx, I've been instructed to test your workstation and software for Y2K compatibility per so-and-so. Will take about 15 minutes.
user: OK. You know these are unix machines, they don't have a Y2K problem?
me: I know.
user: And the CAD software doesn't care what the date is, plus mega-cad-corp certified this version for Y2K compatibility - we just upgraded to the latest version to be sure.
me: yep.
user: You just tested Joe's. Isn't this kind of a waste of time? All these machines are identical.
me: yep.
I can attest that everything you said is 100% accurate. I made a ton of cash as a contractor "fixing" Y2K problems but they were just funded projects under the guise of Y2K readyness.
Same here. I really did find a bug which was directly related to y2k but it was in a non-critical system and had a pretty trivial effect. I was still Mr. Big Dude for a day though.
One of our contracts to update BIOS for every PC and server in a very large financial company, but we knew the BIOS would work with no problem, but the company wanted to be sure. The amount companies wasted on Y2K BS was biblical. We raked them over the coals, and they were happy to pay.