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25th Anniversary of the Disaster that Didn’t Happen
Twenty-five years ago today, we were all holding our breath. The world was certain to end: planes falling out of the sky, water systems stopping, machines blowing up. Yes, that pesky Y2K bug.
My dad had this globe.
I was a young engineering manager at the time, working for a small equipment manufacturer. I was in complete amazement at the mass stupidity and how the scare spread like a virus. Obviously, once we got the real virus, this effect was a hundred times greater.
I had printed and saved the best threatening letters but somehow lost them over the years. The best ones were from customers with machines long out of warranty. I remember one from a law firm threatening to sue if I don’t provide certification that the machine wouldn’t crash at midnight. I called back and told them it’s out of warranty. You’re on your own.
Some databases would be affected but the mass hysteria wasn’t warranted. Especially since most of my programs didn’t even use dates.
Beware! The threat is still out there. Today is 12/29/2024. This is just as inaccurate as the Y2K problem.
Is it 12/29/2024 AD or 12/29/2024 BC?
Published in General
I maintain that Y2K did precipitate the 2001 recession, which brought us Bill Clinton, et al. It was a garden-variety recession (compared to 2008-09) that started in March 2001 and ended December 2001, but not officially recognized until much later, so its cause was conflated in the public’s mind with September 11. All the investment that occurred in 1998-99 getting ready for 2000, and the Fed’s decision to make lots of cash available in case there was a run on ATMs, then pump it back out of the economy set the stage for a slowdown in 2001. “Solve” one problem, create another.
It always baffled me that so many people never thought of performing the simple test that I had done on my own home computer in January of 1999: adjust the date forward to 23:59 12/31/1999 and just let the clock roll over early to see what it would do.
When nothing happened and everything worked as it should my 13 year old self was sorely disappointed. I spent the remainder of the year in deep skepticism of the Y2K bug news, and was not at all surprised when nothing happened on New Year’s Day.
Come to think of it, that was pretty foundational to my reaction two decades later to the panic about COVID-19. I pretty much started out furious that I had to cancel my honeymoon in Northern Italy over a nothing-burger that the government and media where trying to make into the next Y2K, and my opinion of it all went down-hill from there.
Y’all are laughing it up now, but just wait until January 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 UTC when the Epoch ends and the Unix timestamps roll over.
At the time I was enjoying it as a sort-of social experiment. Maybe this was in preparation for the up and coming Chinese virus. There are a lot of similarities if you think about it.
Y2K bug sounds much better than the 2147483647000 bug…
https://www.epochconverter.com
My cousin is a computer geek. A bank paid him $10k to spend the night in their computer lab that night. He told them it was unnecessary, but they insisted. They found him in the lobby, asleep on a couch in the morning. They asked him if he at least was awake at midnight to check on things. He responded, “Of course not.”
1999/2000, a friend held a massive New Years Eve party at his house. As the countdown began, a mischievous friend snuck out to the garage and found the breaker-panel, then at the stroke of midnight, he plunged the house into darkness, “3-2-1 HAPPY new ye…” And for about 10 seconds, I thought “I am not prepared.” Then we saw the street lights were on, we knew there were no problems in New York, what’s going on here? Then the mischievous Scott threw the breakers back on and emerged from the garage to uproarious, relieved laughter.
“Planes falling out of the sky, water systems stopping, machines blowing up.”
Jane Garvey, who was FAA Administrator at the time, celebrate New Year on the feared Y2K rollover by flying from DCA to DFW.
Members of the media were invited to join her. As of the Dec 28 date of the linked press release, seats were still available.
A nice example of leadership and PR.
The dirty little secret of Y2K was that developers had been reporting potential problems since the late 70s and requesting time and budget to fix it. This was generally denied by the bean counters as being in the category of Not My Problem. So the developers went ahead and fixed what issues they found without telling anyone.
I was in charge of IT at an accounting firm at the time. I wasn’t too worried, since all the systems had Y2K patches available and I had installed them.
Even so, I was at the office at midnight. And my wife came along to keep me company. Nothing bad happened, and from the boss’s corner office window we could see the ball drop that they do in Buffalo, and the fireworks.
I sent out an email assuring everyone that all was well. Kind of a fun evening, actually.
$10K to sleep at a computer lab? Almost worth it. When I was in college I worked as a security guard. One assignment was to fill in for someone at a prep school in Winchendon, MA. It was overnight. I had never been there before. The guy I was replacing went through my duties for a half hour. I sat in the chair in the lobby and watch him leave. A security guard kicked my feet and I woke up. It was my morning replacement. Easiest nights work ever.
Ummm, what? That was at the end of the Clinton administration.
$10K for a single shift? I’d even be willing to stay awake.
I remember having a conversation on Christmas day with my cousin, he asked me (as the Resident IT guy in the family) what I thought was going to happen on New Years Eve.
I told him probably nothing disastrous, but maybe a few weird things that nobody would expect. There had been a satellite outage a few months previously that had caused “pay at the pump” to quit working at bunch of gas stations for a few days. I figured there might be a few things like that.
But there had been a huge amount of investment over the previous couple of years of upgrading and replacing systems. Without that, it might have been a bigger deal.
Where I worked, we were more worried about the actual rollover than anything else, so we took the precaution of shutting down and powering off everything in our computer room around 6 PM on New Years Eve and then came in and brought it all back up the next morning.
I worked in my family’s retail flooring store at the time. We got a form letter from some company wanting to know if the product we sold them was Y2K compliant. I suppose someone ordered letters sent out to every vendor they had bought anything from. I wrote back that carpeting neither knows nor cares what the date is.
I spent that New Year’s Eve, and overnight, with Tony L, in the server room, labor and delivery unit, at Washington Hospital PA. The only system we had that crashed, despite all assurances from the vendor to the contrary that it would not, was the system used for fetal monitoring. I’ll never forget it. The rest of the family was at a wedding.
The room had a window, and from it, you could just see the tops of the fireworks in Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle,” down at Point State Park.
Consulting firms were hiring everyone and splashing money around. One of my first temporary jobs after moving to Chicago early 2001 was to help with the dissolution of one of them. I worked in their lavish, empty office to audit worthless stock options and ensure no one got more than their fair share of nothing.
It never made sense to me that a machine wouldn’t just roll over to 00 and keep going until it had to repeat itself. Am I glad they updated the nuclear power plants? Yeah, I think that was a good “just in case” scenario.
Oh, some carpeting cares:
What happened? Did it start working again after being restarted?
It could be silly, stupid things. A lot of elevators keep track of the last time they’ve undergone routine maintenance. They take the current time, subtract from it the time at which they were last checked, and if the number is out of range, the elevator heads to the basement and takes itself out of service. I think that one was caught pretty early, so the software was updated before the fateful date.
I got my start in programming writing banking software in 1979 on IBM System34 and System38 machines, mostly in RPG-II. Space was at a premium, and we didn’t store dates in full eight-digit format. I forget how we compressed them, exactly, but it had the effect of using an extra bit to store a century indicator. We were always Y2K compliant. But I saw a lot of software that was not, and that would have failed had it not been patched prior to 1/1/2000.
In December of 1999 I was working on a high-pressure contract in Austin, flying home every other weekend to be with the wife and kids in Sarasota Florida. January 1, 2000 was a Saturday, and it wasn’t a weekend I would normally have been home, but I flew home early Friday anyway just in case, to avoid being stranded in Austin in the event that serious problems did arise.
In other words, I took the Y2K thing seriously as a plausible danger. Was that wrong? I don’t know. I’ve never seen a comprehensive analysis of the impact of Y2K mitigation investment — maybe it was unnecessary, or maybe all those billions spent fixing things actually prevented what they were intended to prevent. I’m sure the analysis has been done. Maybe someday I’ll look it up.
In the leadup to 2000 I used to imagine this fanciful event:
December 31, 1999, tens of thousands are gathered on a cold clear night in Times Square to watch the ball descend and usher in the new year. As the countdown reaches zero and the crowd begins to cheer, instantly the air is filled with a light snow from a suddenly cloudy sky, the gaudy lights of Times Square are gone, and everything seems hushed and muted, as if a heavy blanket had been thrown over the crowd. The cheering falters and is quickly silenced, as the confused crowd discovers that it’s surrounded by horse-drawn carriages illuminated by flickering gas lights on the streets of New York City circa 1900.
After a few moments the clouds part and an angel straight out of Central Casting descends in a pillar of light, its voice echoing over the crowd: “We apologize for this temporary inconvenience. Heaven introduced automation in the 1950s, and it appears that we failed to account for the changing century. We are working to correct the situation as quickly as possible.”
Imagine you have a database with inventory and sales records in it. You want a list of your aged inventory with the oldest at the top of the list. You run this in 2000 and it’s going to show your oldest inventory as being bought in 00, with 99 being the newest, which is backward. You want a report showing your month-by-month sales for the last five years, but the computer is going to stop with the data on 12/31/99. For some businesses, it’s just a hassle because you have to run two reports, then add the results up. For some businesses, it’s more than just an inconvenience.
My favorite contemporaneous Y2K story was that during 1999 I attended a train show at the Sacramento (California) train museum. A bunch of old trains (real ones, not toys or models). Hung prominently on one of the steam engines from the late 19th century was a big sign, “Y2K Compliant.”
Our church did have an unusual (for that congregation) New Year’s Eve worship service that year both because of the momentousness of moving into a new millennium but also to acknowledge that weird things might happen in the world as the date change propagated through computer systems.
Hopefully, computer software will have moved to five-digit year fields well before we get to 9999.
No, we shut it down, just before midnight (that was the plan), and it wouldn’t come back up. I guess that happened at all its installations. Sometime the following morning they got it patched and back up and running.
Either that, or they’ll just have to pass a continuing resolution lifting the four-digit date ceiling and extending the life of the current versions for the next six months.
Did you guys redecorate before the holidays?
Two years ago I had to move an old computer running NT. It hasn’t lost power in years. I told the town it had a 50/50 chance of booting back up. It didn’t. I blew it out, reseated to boards, nothing. So I did what any good engineer would do, I kicked it. It booted. I ran.
I always warn people who ask me to try to fix their computers that (a) I’m happy to help but I’m not a hardware guy, and (b) if it’s an old machine there’s a chance it won’t work as well once I put it back together as it did before. And I won’t do anything with laptops except recover data — and that only if they’re willing to scrap the device when I’m done.
The timestamp for Unix counts the number of seconds since midnight, Jan. 1, 1970. One response to the Y2K38 bug is to go from a signed 32 bit value that has a maximum value of January 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 UTC to a signed 64 bit value which rolls over on Sunday, December 4, 292,277,026,596 at 15:30:07 UTC. So we’ll be good for a while.