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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
That is the sort of common sense that is sorely missing in major discussions.
Of course for old school programmers who could come out of semi-retirement to use ancient programming languages that might “ensure” planes wouldn’t fall out of the skies, and submarines wouldn’t launch their nukes, it was a very beneficial era, in terms of having a new found source of wealth.
It’s really an empirical question, and I haven’t seen the data.
Does the evidence suggest that, absent significant mitigation efforts prior to the rollover, there would have been a lot of serious and potentially catastrophic failures? I find it completely plausible. But, again, I haven’t seen the data.
What seems sketchy to me, however, is to say something to the effect of “we obviously wasted a lot of money preventing potential Y2K problems, given that when Y2K finally arrived there were no major problems experienced.”
Agreed. Maybe some businesses and institutions wasted money updating software that didn’t need to be updated. But we know for a fact that 00 is less than 99, so any software that needs to sort records by date would have had incorrect results with a data set that spans two centuries.
The entire issue boiled down to this…
Any PLC running basically anything doesn’t care what the date is. 00 – xx is clearly an issue in a defined area. Everyone put a blanket Covid-era panic over the entire issue. If you question the groupthink you are the problem.
Yes, this. Were airplanes going to fall out of the sky? Elevators stuck? No. Blame the press for the hysteria and ignorance.
I worked for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and a TON of effort was involved to make Y2K a non-issue. There were many legacy systems out there written in COBOL or other non-compliant (2-digit years) systems that either had to updated to do the date math correctly, expand the year field or be replaced outright.
I supported payroll for our customer and we spent two years moving 7 HR, payroll and benefits systems, written in different languages, different databases or file systems to a consolidated client server package, which had to be customized to our needs.
I went into San Francisco on New Year’s Day to run two test payrolls with the payroll manager.
So go ahead, make your jokes. I worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. No OT. You got paid, your benefits and vacation accrued properly because many IT professionals busted their asses or came out of retirement to address the “hoax.”
If wasn’t really a “crunch” in the 80s, of course. And it gave me some extra justification to do something else I’d been wanting.
The software house I worked at then, had multiple customer installations where the “standard” accounting package had slight modifications for the particular customers. And each was hard-coded. Which meant that they had to keep a separate copy of all the different versions, and any changes that were made such as for computing payroll taxes from year to year, had to be made in all of the different versions. Y2K would have required the same.
I had also gotten pretty tired of finishing a setup for some customer, and then the word would come down, “Our next customer project: an accounting system!” with its own little tweaks etc.
So I started working on a new “universal” accounting system where all of those hard-coded tweaks became configurable options. Such as 12, or 13, or 14 accounting periods. It’s not difficult to write a program that loops “from 1 to X” rather than “from 1 to 12” or “from 1 to 13” or “from 1 to 14” if you make it that way to start with.
After that, it was just one package of software for everyone, and it behaved according to their selected options.
And the first thing I wrote for the new system was a calendar section, with 4-digit years. Everything else worked from that.
Ironically, as mentioned previously, the computer systems that ran those programs went out of business within about 10 years.
Moving to the “clicks not code” paradigm was a good thing. There was certainly a lot of triage in what systems were retrofitted or replaced entirely during that era. Our Time and Attendance system – mainframe batch COBOL, natch – was a Frankenstein’s monster of re-purposed programs with tons of “spaghetti code” and GOTO’s. We unironically referred to it as “T&A.” Due to its complexity it was gonna have to be a retrofit. So one of the programmers given the task went through the code to insert the calls to the special EDS utility whenever date math or comparisons occurred in the programs.
This allowed “T&A” to soldier on long enough to become a custom web app and eventually got replaced with a COTS solution.
Fun times.
Yes, often it was easier to take one of the already-modified programs that was already closer to what a new customer wanted, and modify it a bit more. Rather than start over again with the original “vanilla” version.
But the configurable system I came up with, was of course even better. And adding more configurable options to it later was easier too.
I didn’t mention it before, but even the “configuration” stuff was not included in the applications themselves. i.e., each application did not have a configuration/options screen/”control panel.” All of that was handled by a Configuration section of the larger system. Like it had the Calendar section that every other application used, but no application had its own Calendar controls/settings/etc. They just took it from the… “main” system.
Each application had its “configuration requirements” that the Configuration System used. The configurable options for each application were set up in the Configuration system, once. When an application was first created. It didn’t need to be done for each customer, etc. If that makes sense.
It worked really well, and was actually quite simple to use. But I don’t think any of the other programmers I worked with, including our “bosses,” would have been able to do it. Hopefully they learned some from seeing me do it, though.
I don’t remember this advice:
https://x.com/Judianna/status/1874272503474118991
It probably didn’t matter for any computer system using 4-digit years. I doubt any PC/Windows type system had that problem starting long ago.
I remember this – me and my buddy had to monitor our systems that night to make sure nothing happened – nothing did, we ended up drinking beers in the server room
Whew, we lived through Y2K+25. It’s a silly piece of American history but I’m glad so many peoples experiences got recorded here.
But the REASON nothing happened could easily be that other people besides you and your buddy put a lot of work into it that you were unaware of.
On the “25th anniversary” part rather than the “disaster that didn’t happen” part:
Clearly I am old.
Here we are a quarter of the way through the 21st century. I.e., the “turn of the century” from the 20th to the 21st was 25 years ago. Yet when I hear “turn of the century” I still do not think of that “turn.” I think of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century.
I remember, as a teenager in the 70’s, calculating that I’d be 41 when the year 2000 came around, and it was hard to imagine being that old. Now it’s hard to remember being that young!