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Top-level
@tychotithonus @robertatcara I also took part in that fun. I drove around the Southern US flashing gas station pumps. The reason that there wasn't a lot of impact was the massive amount of work that was done. Interestingly enough, I boarded a transpacific flight on 1/1/00. 22 comments
 @passenger @Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara My friend taught me to think of my job as goalie. I'll only get attention when I've goobed.  @oheso @passenger @Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara I always thought of it as plumbing, for similar reasons. I like the goalie metaphor. @marnanel @oheso @passenger @Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara I was working at QVC in 1999. We had 6 digit dates throughout our system and had to change pretty much every single module we had. But it wasn't anything dramatic, mainly we'd planned it all well in advance. As I recall we might have had one or two obscure reports fail, but the show stayed on the air without a hitch.  @passenger @Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara Suddenly I understand why Americans celebrate firefighters as heroes but think that people who want to invest into infrastructure are communists Oh, there were hiccups for sure - plenty of issues that weren't caught until the real thing happened. But fortunately, the due diligence headed off most of the serious impact. :D @tychotithonus @Xavier @robertatcara As a regular person just going through life it appeared seamless. Thank you! @tychotithonus @ljohn44 @Xavier @robertatcara A lot of mom & pop businesses relying on ancient equipment for payroll, inventory, orders, etc., had failures but they didn't advertise that fact.  @Lizzz @tychotithonus @ljohn44 @Xavier @robertatcara at the micro scale delete and setup fresh in Jan was a workable solution. It's an annoying arvo for someone. It's the big businesses that needed to act, and by and large they did.  @ysegrim @Lizzz @tychotithonus @ljohn44 @Xavier @robertatcara Yes, a lot of work was done to prevent problems. And, in the weeks following, a lot of work was done to detect, prevent, and recover from problems. ACM's "comp.risks" usenet forum describes some of the problems that happened. Interesting! I haven't read them in detail, but here are some convenience links to the Usenet comp.risks posts for the month of January, 2000: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.risks/c/7AGzwqmZtH8 Briefly, from memory, there were *quite a few* problems of small retail establishments resending duplicate charges due to bugs in their software that treated "year 00" as something that could never happen. This would have been avoided by updating their software. And they were informed. Problems were averted by banks detecting and rejecting the duplicates. Also, we lost track of one of our spy satellites for a few weeks. Read the comp.risks entries for details. @ysegrim @tychotithonus @ljohn44 @Xavier @robertatcara Interesting that being in different TZs would have given all of us different experiences.  @Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara it me! power grid doing scada - we didn't have such fancy switching panels as that one, backup was just a huge magnetic thing with a broom which look like that ah good tiems has it been a quarter of century already *weeps*  @Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara that sounds awesome, can you tell us more about the work you did at each station? |
Gregory's Server
@Xavier @tychotithonus @robertatcara
The reward of working in infrastructure is that the better we do our job, the more useless everyone thinks we are.
I suppose this means that your people did your jobs *very* well on that project.