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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
Well, you say that….
But of course with the widespread adoption of quantum computing in 2045, the *nix timestamp convention was changed from counting seconds to counting Planck time. (The higher clock resolution resulted in a better user experience in World of Warcraft 28.) Given that there are about a billion billion billion more Plank time units in a single second than there are seconds in the age of the universe, that 64 bit value didn’t get us very far: even unsigned 128-bit integers were good for only about a microsecond.
Isn’t that funny that resolution has vastly different meanings in different years. The only time I use the UTC calculator in comment #5 is to lock down VMware. I would hate to carry around multiple 32 bit words for no reason. I’m still stingy that way. I don’t really care about 2045. I won’t be programming. Heck, I’d be lucky to be still breathing.
My job in the late 1990s involved preparing small businesses for Y2K. I would open a presentation about dealing with it with a slide showing the direst possible predictions about what could happen as a result. After going through the predictions I would close with “Scary, huh?” A lot of attendees inevitably nodded in agreement.
Then I went to the second slide. It went through a bunch of climate doomsday predictions starting in 1973. This included stuff like we would all be dead from pollution by 2000, we would run out of petroleum by 2000, there would be mass starvation by 2000, the oceans would boil due to man-made global warming. All of which were patently wrong. Everyone would chuckle.
Then I would point out the flaw in every prediction. They all started out “If nothing changes . . .” I’d next ask you are driving down the road and you see an accident blocking all lanes of traffic ahead of you. Do you ignore it and drive straight ahead? Universal head shaking. Everyone agreed you would slow down, and see if you could drive around it or wait until it got cleared.
I’d say Y2K would be the same way. People would do things to prevent problems and it would be a big nothing-burger. I also suggested simple tests of their systems. (The pushing the clock to 11:59:50 on Dec 31, 2001 was one of them btw.) And ways to steer around the car wreck.
Everyone went away happy except the doomsayers.
I was in the computer biz and told anyone who asked that nothing was going to happen and all files are backed up daily on tape, but it was all hands on deck at work that night. I mentioned to anyone who would listen that, in the unlikely event of anything happening we would know as soon as midnight came in Australia 16 or so hours before NY.
The cockroaches will be in charge by then.
Actually, they’re in charge now.
Nevermind.
Is that AD or BC? The morlocks will be in charge.
Oops, Got my Bushes crossed🤦♂️
In 1985 I was just a few years out of college and finishing my MBA. My job was to set up one of the first medical cost accounting systems in the nation at a local hospital. The systems analyst I was working with started lamenting that the database only allowed 2 digits for the birth year in the patient/client database. Plus it did not consider any year beyond 1999. Good grief I thought…1999 is so far in the future…who cares?
By 1999 I was executive director for a group of 35 anesthesiologists. We ran the billing off of a few IBM clone PC’s and sent the data each night to a mainframe at a local billing software company for processing and mailing of patient invoices. On December 31, 1999, walked around the office and downloaded/installed a few patches provided by Microsoft (I think). On January 2, 2000, I walked around the office and a couple of the 7 or 8 computers had to be restarted a 2nd time but other than that…business as usual.
Depending on what you mean by “cost accounting”, you were a few decades late.
My dad was doing computerized medical billing for a company called MediStat in (at least) the 1970s, if not earlier. And they weren’t the only ones.
The medical cost accounting system took each individual procedure and identified the cost components in terms of labor, fixed equipment, material, and overhead allocations. Yes, we knew what we were billing for each procedure but did not have a strong basis for what the price was. Determining the cost for each xray procedure, lab test and so on was a massive undertaking.
I remeber all the prepers. Espically all the Christian Prepers thinking the end times are here so buy lots of food and gold. TBN tv network really played it up so they could get money. My Grandmother( an avid TBN viewer) was one of those despite my dad her son in law being a DBA and telling her it was all nonesense. It was like catnip to Christian endtime doomsayers. I have friends who sort of fall in this I love. But Y2K was yet another data point for the inaccuracy of this bad theogoly that is just really just a domesdays cult.
Yes, the preppers over-reacted quite a bit. Though I got to benefit from a close relative who was “prepping.” He bought an electrical generator just in case. June of 1999 saw a number of storms hit Minneapolis. When our power went out I got to borrow the generator and keep the fridge, freezer, and coffee pot going. We had a total of 10 days that June with no electricity. Other neighbors lost a lot of food. We kept going thanks to my prepper relative.
That relative never used the generator for himself as Y2K just flopped.
Systems with 4-digit years were never thought to have a problem, as far as I know.
The issue was systems with 2-digit years. 99 rolling over to 00 is a different thing than 1999 to 2000.
And as I “always” do, I remind people that one of the reasons it turned out to be a “nothing-burger” was that a whole lot of work got put into making it one. Some didn’t get done until around 1999, but I was building a new business accounting system expanded to 4-digit years in the early 80s. Partly because one sub-system dealt with mortgage contracts and 20-year contracts were already subject to “Y2K” in the 80s.
When you’re figuring “ages” of things, coming up with a negative number can be a Problem.
Laptops are SOOOO overrated…
Only if the people in Australia were running the same systems. But the systems I was working on weren’t even marketed in Australia.
No, the Morlocks would require a 6-digit year.
I buy another fairly high-end refurbished laptop on ebay every couple of years. I rely on it when I travel for business. For years my strategy has been to keep nothing of value on it, just easily replaceable tools and applications, and to use remote access software and Dropbox to access and sync what I need while on the client’s site. That makes the laptop essentially a commodity for me, and the relative fragility of the machine isn’t an issue.
I still remember the first mention I heard of the Y2K issue. I was reading an issue of Computerworld Magazine, sometime late 1980s or very early 1990. They had run an article on the subject of “what will you be doing on the job in the 2000s”, and then published a latter to the editor in a followup issue that said “I don’t know what we’ll be doing in 2000, but I know that in 1999 we’ll be rewriting code that subtracts two-digit years and expects a positive result.”
That’s the way to do it, if it must be done.
I’ll never understand how people can think that a “Core i7” laptop is just as powerful as a “Core i7” desktop, for example. Really? The fact that the laptop has maybe a 50-to-90-watt power supply that can run EVERYTHING including the display, AND charge the battery too, versus the desktop having maybe a 500 to 900 watt power supply not including the monitor, doesn’t make any impression? And that big video card with its own heat sinks and fans, etc? Which might actually be taking most of the power?
At the risk of changing the subject:
There is something called the theory of mind. It refers to how we think about the way other people perceive things, the way we form assumptions about the similarities between our own understanding of things and that of others.
We aren’t all good at it.
The reality is that the vast majority of people know almost nothing about computers, about the energy cost of computing, about the tradeoffs inherent in miniaturization and dense packaging. Of course people will think that an I7 is an I7 is an I7, regardless of the box it’s in or the size of the power supply or heat sink.
The… ironic?… part for me is that the systems I did the Y2K-compliant software for, that company was out of business before 2000.
Which is a shame, because I wrote some awesome software for them.
Hopefully some of the people I worked with, learned from me and started doing better themselves.
I use a docking station with a laptop (EDIT) 2TB SSD and three screens. I’ve been doing it like this for years. My laptops last about 5 years before the hinges start to break and fans need to be replaced. Desktop days are over for me. I’m on the road often and just unplug one cable and go. I’m not impressed with speed because the faster the processor, the more bloated the OS and software. It’s strictly for work (and this).
A docking station is handy for extending storage, networking, etc. But it doesn’t add to processing or display power. I wouldn’t want to run 3 screens off a laptop. At least not for anything really serious. Maybe writing/editing text would be okay.
I edited 2GB to 2TB.
There is no flickering or any perceivable delay. Power and data are through the USB C port. I have 5 USB devices, Ethernet and 2 monitors connected. Two concurrent VM’s. No issues whatsoever. I am setting up a replacement because this is wearing out.
OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Version 10.0.19045 Build 19045
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name TIM-WC
System Manufacturer Dell Inc.
System Model XPS 15 7590
System Type x64-based PC
System SKU 0905
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2592 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Dell Inc. 1.12.0, 6/10/2021
People using desktops are running a lot more than two VMs etc. But if that’s all you need, then maybe a laptop is fine.
(Still though, don’t confuse your laptop i7 for a regular i7. A desktop i7 would be significantly faster.)
I’ve considered that. I’ve also thought about putting in a rack and consolidating my NAS and servers in one place. Or merging my Windows and Linux boxes into a single whopping server and virtualizing everything. If I were ten years younger I’d do it. Now it seems like a lot of work for not a great return; what I have suits my needs.
And John Koenig and the rest of them, were already out gallivanting through the cosmos for 3 months…
I fiddled some with NAS in the past, but I found an easier solution was to get the commercial-type rackmount systems that I’ve been using for years, which hold multiple drives. My current “desktop” system, a Dell PowerEdge R710, holds 8. And network sharing is easy too. I got that system from ebay for about $125 as I recall, with dual quad-core Xeon 2.93 ghz CPUs, and 48 gig RAM. I actually wound up spending more on the rackmount rails and cable-management arm, than the computer itself cost. I got the rails etc new, because I wanted to make sure all the little fiddly-bits were included.
I got a bargain on a 48u rack unit on wheels, brand new overstock/surplus, for about $100, about 20 years ago now. I’ve had several different systems in it since then, plus UPS unit (first a Compaq, now an APC) and PDU. But a rack itself “never” needs to be upgraded.
But I don’t mess with VMs, never have. I believe in separation of function anyway, so I have separate COMPUTERS for some different tasks, not just VMs. I don’t want to lose something because something else caused things to freeze or crash.
By the time the media and the Government started talking about it, Y2K was a solved problem. The few instances where it might still have been a legitimate concern could easily be tested for well in advance. I’m not saying it wasn’t ever a concern , or that it didn’t take work to mitigate, but it was never going to be the apocalypse that the media/government complex tried to turn it into. That was just fear porn and making it rain for favored
donorsvendors and contractors.