@tychotithonus @robertatcara Yep. Those of us who were there did a whole bunch of work precisely so that nothing happened, and we knew at the time that it would mean a lot of people would assume there wasn’t a problem in the first place. Such is the lot of the people who maintain critical infrastructure well, rather than letting it fail and “heroically” fixing it - no-one notices when you’re doing a good job.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Same. Our first rollover test caused a nine hour power outage in western Pennsylvania.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Every time I hear someone say the Y2k problem was a "big fuss over nothing," I glance over at the closer-than-we-think Y2k38 problem and sigh.

And don't get me started on what I see going on with SARS, COVID, and bird flu while it seems half the country no longer believes in germ theory.

Good times. 😌

@tychotithonus @robertatcara It was definitely taken seriously where I was at IBM, and a tremendous amount of necessary mitigation was involved to prevent as many problems as possible. After Y2K, the software developer in charge of the operation transferred to our team.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara There's a good essay here: https://www.philosophersbeard.org/2019/06/for-sake-of-science-let-anti-vaxxers.html on this phenomenon - "the paradox of expertise".

@tychotithonus @robertatcara True story. My father was brought out of retirement to work on the issue. A lot of time, money and effort was put into mitigating it.

Fortunately I worked for a startup at the time with all new hardware/software but my leadership still forbade me from traveling for NYs and I had an engineer parked in the office in case we needed to do take action on anything.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Yea, i just started my career w/ fixing y2k bugs, which were definately there and needed to be ironed out. What an epic clickbaity bs.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara "Fly all over [Alaska]"

Sounds like fun. How much of that had to be done in a Beaver on floats?

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Same exact energy.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

See also: Vaccinations, Preventative Health Care, Oil Changes, Tooth Brushing, other…

It's far too easy to shrug off the effects of an injury avoided.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara irritating. I’ll share one too! Leading up to #Y2k, I worked at Westinghouse as a contractor and then a FTE. We fixed tons of stuff. And because we were (“were,” he says) garbage at network segmentation, I’m quite sure that the production code I personally fixed averted a nuclear disaster in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

So yeah. You’re fucking welcome. 🤗 🍄☁️

Y2K wasn’t a big deal because we made it not a big deal.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara A lot of dumbass prepper types got upset when nothing happened with Y2K, because they were getting all hot in the trousers at the thought of doing all that prepper stuff. They've never got over their sulk at the effort put into making sure society didn't collapse. That is why they keep talking up the dismissive "fuss over nothing" line, they don't want to prevent pain and suffering, because they want to cosplay Mad Max/Baron Hardup, they wanted and want collapse.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I talked in 1996 with a guy who started to work in the IT department of a bank just then and they did the same since 1995: test all software on computers with the ate set to a few minutes before 2000 and see what happens/fails (and subsequently fix it).

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

People did a great job heading that off. The only thing I noticed was that I got an email from 30 years in the future. :)

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
There is no glory in prevention. Sadly so.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

I see this attitude in so many places. We only hear about the misses that resulted in a big bang, and this makes everyone assume no bang means nothing to it rather than no bang could mean the people responsible to stop the bang actually did their job right.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara As one who had to fix a lot of code for Y2K I'll agree with the huge effort it took to avoid failure.
Like a duck, smooth on the surface, paddling like mad to fight the current.

If you want to see what happens when the system fails, just look at modern Public Health where the pins have been kicked out from under us.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara HAHAHA. I AM PISSING MYSELF: YOU PEOPLE HAVE LITERALLY ONE JOB, MAKE SURE THE 1s AND 0s DONT FUCK UP. 1999 Infrastructure peeps there like * Godamn * how did we not see this?Also, you obviously didn’t fix everything, and nothing fucked up; Time 1, you people 0…..1..0..0..0…1…1.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara yeah, at the place I worked for then, a large retailer, we discovered code that would have discarded all data recorded after the first of the year as “old”.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

Yes, by late 1999, things were "good to go" - because of years of hard work by tons of people. It was "a nothing burger" because of a ridiculous amount of work, not because it wasn't a problem.

(I say this as someone who worked at Intel over Y2k, and *KNEW* nothing would go wrong, because of all the preparation.)

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

I did a lot of y2K work and it was real - but on our air cargo system, because our clock started in 1970, the real emergency was 2002 when we ran out of bits in the timestamps. Sorted that too. #Sperry494

The y2K was a con myth really boils my proverbial.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara What myth? The full title of the article seems completely on point -- it "seems" like a joke BECAUSE it was taken so seriously by the people who needed to fix it. And the article itself makes it very clear that without that effort it could have been disastrous. The popular view that it was "no big deal" is precisely because it was handled so effectively beforehand. Just like the article and its title says.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara thank you. It boils my blood to hear people dismiss your and my hard work as a false alarm.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara A good friend of mine was a COBOL guru and the amount of money he made on contracts betweene '98 and '00 bought his family a house in SF. The bugs were real, and so was the incentive to get them fixed.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Yeah, we were a victim of our own success. Like we've seen vaccines, the ozone hole and acid rain. If science does it's job right, you shouldn't notice. And since no one is listening about climate change, we're about to see what happens when we miss one.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

Same. The IT folks at my company worked very hard to make sure that #Y2K would not be a problem.

My team and I and the rest of the IT organization spent the better part of a year testing, upgrading, mitigating, and making sure that there would be no issues.

We succeeded.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I spent a summer working for EDS Trans-alliance, an electronic funds transfer company. I mostly did help desk stuff, with our customers being banks doing debit card processing/reconciliation.

Spent a solid month as a helper-monkey going around apply Y2K patches to everything in creation. Even then, the results come flip-over weren't pretty.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
It's a bit maddening isn't it?
A bad situation is on the horizon, and folks work their asses off to try and get ahead of the problem.
Then OTHER people shrug and act like it was no big deal because we DIDN'T hit total catastrophe.

@tychotithonus @Shanmonster @robertatcara Absolutely. I fixed a few for my clients (and missed one, but not a big deal).

I’m not sure the Unix time one is going to go as well.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Indeed. Much of my early and formative career as a #BusinessAnalyst was on an enterprise scale redevelopment to move a state government department off of multiple non-compliant mainframe systems into a unified and Y2K compliant client-server solution. Major project that served multiple goals, but things could have been bad without it.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
You're right about Y2K having real and potentially drastic consequences, but most were averted by rigorous efforts of many organizations.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

+1000

i burned 2 years of my life preparing for it, along with many friends also doing patches, upgrades, readiness checklists.

we were all up, online, pagers, computers, phones, ready that night. no NYE parties for anyone i knew.

sure. non-event. right...

Y2K was a rare, successful, proactive remediation of a potential catastrophy.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I’ve seen the same thing done about CFCs and the ozone layer, where the response was so effective it makes the people making a fuss about it seem like doomsayers in retrospect if you don’t know the full story. My only hope is that we someday talk about climate change the same way.

@tychotithonus

Sad fact is prevention never gets any respect, except from other preventionists.

@robertatcara

@tychotithonus @robertatcara don't know how to tell you this, but every ATM in Alaska made by a certain company nearly failing definitely sounds like a big fuss over nothing

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

IDK who are propagating these false ideas being amplified without giving any thought to them, with zero journalistic integrity, and zero investigative work done.

Y2K disruptions were minimal because people around the world worked their arses off to make them minimal.

Saying that disruptions were minimal without context or sense of proportion sounds like "Y2K was a hoax and Bill Gates wants to plant chips into your bloodstream" type of lunacy.

Y2K-earthers.

#Y2K

@tychotithonus @robertatcara thank you for the history.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
Really? The chips in Australia must be different. I didn't "upgrade" anything (comp, playstation or megastar, microwave, fridge)[I could reset my pc to any date in those days] and nothing happened. No planes fell from the sky either.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara @wintersweet I remember being told Y2K was "a big fuss" precisely so it would seem like the panic was over nothing.

In other words, folks worked overtime to make sure any impact would be minimized.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara agree. I put together a comprehensive report on effects of y2k bug plus preparedness steps for several municipalities & school districts in 1997. If the proactive steps had not been taken, it would have been fairly catastrophic.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara "If we do this right, it'll look like we overreacted."

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I worked in/around a lot of COBOL/RPG on AS400 shops that had been preparing for years but still had a small number of roll-over bugs from storing the year as a two-digit number. My friends worked overtime for months before and after, so it wasn't insignificant.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara All I remember is that at that time I would have been 12 years old. I remember we had a computer that ran Windows 95 and, out of curiosity, maybe a year ahead of time, I set its clock forward and let it tick over just to see what would happen, and it was all fine.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I was working for an aerospace firm at the time and we spent a lot of man hours to nip Y2K issues in the bud before they became a problem.

Anyone claiming Y2K wasn't a genuine issue is profoundly ignorant.

@tychotithonus I remember there was a problem in Italy at a hospital, I can't remember whether people died or not. Planes would have dropped out of the sky. None of our code would have worked anymore so the power grid would have been out. Some people do talk a lot don't they. I'm sure they'll be saying the same crap next year.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Apropos of Y2K, did anyone else get this book back then?

#ttrpg #GURPS

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

I only played a minor role in Y2K. I did one small, explict fix for a metal buildings company in Houston, but in the years before that - yes, people were working on Y2K for *years* before the event - I worked for a database tools company and one of things I wrote was code to help people convert date fields in their databases to be Y2K compliant, so in that I indirectly helped a lot of people I imagine.

It boggles my mind to see people who think Y2K was a joke.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I was only in my early 20s, but was aware of how much effort was being put into it and wasn't overly worried because I knew lots of people were busting their asses to fix it.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara weird overlap here with the woman who said we should stop vaccinations for measles, rubella, etc because she never sees any cases of them. "And why do you think there were no problems on 2000/01/01?"

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Agreed. It was many thousands of IT folks working years to make sure it was no big deal. My company had hundreds of systems to triage, some 40+ yrs old: it's fine, minor or major fix, or replace the whole thing. I think all that slipped through was cosmetic.

Fast fwd 10 years, I'm managing a new team and I ask the tech lead of a very old, very high volume realtime system if the decade rollover would be an issue. No, it's all good, they said. 3am, my phone rings...

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I am trying to raise awareness of #Y2038, but the shrugs I get… I worry that we will not fix these things on time because you guys did such a phenomenal job and we will be ignored to the latest.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

Caught a ton of y2k bugs in UBS' back office systems in the late 90s, can confirm.

@tychotithonus Seemed completely plausible to me. I stocked up on rice and dried beans in case grocery stores couldn’t operate their POS systems. I’m glad it was resolved by proactive, capable people like you before it caused a crisis.
@robertatcara @skry

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I worked on fixing Y2K bugs in payment systems that ensured the largest grocery in Texas could pay its suppliers. Could have been a lot of empty shelves by mid January of 2000 if not for that 2 years of work.

@tychotithonus wow.

Weird to find your post here tonight, because I just had an issue with online payment because the card in my ApplePay had two digit expiration year. Y2K bug has finally caught up?! 😆

@tychotithonus

Yes, lots and lots of work went in to preparation.

There was also things that occurred afterwards that you never heard of. I logged at least one job a few months afterwards for y2k billing software issues.
@robertatcara

@tychotithonus @etherdiver @robertatcara I was there. The entire software engineering community united to make sure that the world did not end.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara The next date to care about is Y2K38 - which hopefully will be as uneventful as Y2K if we do our jobs properly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

@tychotithonus @robertatcara prevention paradox

@tychotithonus Nice example for a self-defeating phrophecy. @robertatcara

@tychotithonus @robertatcara how was date and time managed on such hardware for it to not be able to go past 2000? Using some bits, I don't understand why 1999+1 could not be managed? Wasn't UNIX epoch widespread in those times?

@tychotithonus @robertatcara this was an interesting example of an issue that was recognised well in advance and was clearly defined. For my team at the time there was a lot of testing. Both the 2 digit year storage and the 400 year rule on leap years would have caused issues. Some of them would have been cosmetic but others would have stopped systems working entirely. Some systems needed to manage the roll over correctly, other systems could be turned off and reconfigured on 1st Jan.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
Thank you for all your work.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara at one company I worked for in the late 1990’s (one of the biggest banks in the world though I worked for a services firm) we went from 1200 internally written apps to around 600 in preparation for Y2K.

A business leader was given an option - if they didn’t want to update their app to the bank’s standards they could sign a written statement that their app was not mission critical and they could have gotten an exception. No one took that “deal”

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

This kind of rubbish journalism not only misses the lessons of Y2K, but fuels the fire for ignoring action on climate change. It is more than just misleading, it's gravely irresponsible.

This is why I lose hope that humans can ever deal with climate change effectively. We have all the technology we need right now. What we lack is political will, or an informed population that demands meaningful action.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara if this myth prevails, 2038 should be interesting.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Now I see why my friend was so upset. This denial of lived reality is mind-boggling.

@tychotithonus
@robertatcara @logosity

Yes. The "nothing" consequence was *due to* the big fuss we all made and the work put in.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Yup, me and a whole heap of others worked for 2 years to make sure tax revenue software in Ireland knew what to do when the bimonthly tax periods (different ones for different taxes!) switched over. And towards the end, we were fielding cold calls from recruiters, looking to hire us in to finance houses and banks.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

The curse of preventative measures. If you prevent a disaster, people start thinking that the disaster would never have happened anyway and everyone just overreacted.

This happens with cyber security, site reliability work, vaccinations, you name it. We get a false sense of security when the people that work tirelessly (and most times thanklessly) keep the stuff we use, running.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
If it's any conciliation I remember there were a lot of scared people who stayed home on NYE waiting for the apocalypse 😂

I drove to Hershey for a cancelled concert 🤦‍♂️

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

It's only 15 years and a few days until 19th January 2038. Let's hope the people who think Y2K was nothing can cope with that one...

#y2k38
#Epochalypse

@tychotithonus @robertatcara @NormanDunbar +1 from me. There were an awful lot of very long days spent to make sure it was “a big fuss about nothing”. And no, I wasn’t paid overtime for it.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I also took my part in that fun. I drove around Germany flashing ATMs, the associated statement printers and photocopiers :D

@Sondra :bugcat_work:

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Next one should be 2028 !

@tychotithonus 👍
My sis was due to undergo an medical procedure on jan 2nd 2000, which was postponed a couple of days because the IT of the hospital had to be checked / taken care of, for the safety of the patients 🙏.
Obviously they would never have postponed procedures if there was no "real world consequences" of the year switch!

@tychotithonus Having lived in IT in that era, there was a lot of stuff we discovered having "funny" issues. A lot of the more critical stuff got fixed just in time. Apparently a lot of coders had used the year "00" as some kind of a special meaning, like marking stuff being disabled if the year was zeroes or the time was after 31st of December 1999.

Some of that legacy lives on, like JavaScript's year changed from "year" to "years since 1900", it giving a 3 number value of 124 for today.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

The original concerns were raised IN THE 60s, and some dude decided to make his life mission to advocate for it to be fixed for 35 years, and people only started to take things seriously around 1994 when that guy retired, and then it was panic on board as people did overtime to fix what amounted to a 40 years old mistake that cascaded out of control.

Honnestly, respect

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

As they say ... There's no glory in prevention.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara I listened to a software podcast, within the past year, where the guest seemed to imply that it was a hoax or not a big deal. The guest was a small child at the time of Y2K. I was flabbergasted.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara my contribution at the time was to remove unsupported software. I worked for a company that decided not to renew contracts and essentially threw in the towel because of Y2K. I ended 1999 unemployed. Best decision they had ever made honestly. The codebase was an antiquated steaming pile.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara part of the problem is a blithe assumption that there was this one huge bug - even this headline refers to “THE” Y2K bug - that could bring the whole digital world crashing down. It wasn’t a Godzilla that needed to be taken out, but countless tiny termites.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara IMHO the overall paranoia was: what if we have forgotten something?

It turns out we didn't forget anything important, so the people that were on call that night didn't had any trouble, but needed to be there just in case.

Better safe than sorry.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Riffing on the article, I think there really should be a "Term[inal] of the Unknown Programmer" for all those people who did the little things *so that there could be* so little real world impact. Quite remarkable really. I don't remember much impact on my own work in kernels and filesystems, but I knew many others who deserve kudos for their efforts.

Instead we get "nobody's getting that disease so we don't need the vaccine" denial and even derision.

What you said @tina

@tychotithonus @robertatcara
I remember the news that morning. Pundits complaining that the money spent must have been worthless since nothing happened. I remember thinking to myself nothing happened because of the money spent securing vulnerable systems. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara Yep. So much work to make sure "nothing happened" (I remember moving a digital mapping implementation to a whole new computer OS so it would continue to work!)

@tychotithonus @robertatcara … aaaaand (as a software developer myself) I hope we'll start doing so much earlier for the next big one (unixtime 31 bit rollover). :wink:

Modern languages and frameworks tend to use "long millitime" or more complex structures altogether, but "signed int" usage is still as of today all over the place.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara It was a 4 year project for an entire team at the place I worked in the late 90s. And no, that team was most definitely not twiddling their thumbs doing nothing.
Like you, it annoys me when those who saw little or no impact belittle the effort that went into making it as painless as possible.

@tychotithonus @robertatcara

Has anyone watched this yet? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26786629/

I haven't but it could be interesting!

@tychotithonus @robertatcara i have a conspiracy that y2k38 will be a conspiracy— this to me is data towards that.

i think there’s going to be a lot of misinformation and as technologists we’ll need to get out ahead of it so people can verify themselves that there would be a problem, but they’ve taken the proper precautions and will be safe.

like turbotax, for mass computing edge cases.