Gregory's ServerAs someone who spent a large portion of '98 and '99 making sure shit didn't break on Y2K, I'd like to extend a very heartfelt FUCK YOU to HBO for greenlighting a piece of shit documentary that suggests that effort wasn't necessary.
 24 comments
 @jgilbert right? My dad was a software test manager for a company selling disc libraries used by everything from nuclear power plants to critical DoD infrastructure back then. We had barrels of flour, sugar, rice, and powdered milk, cooking and heating fuel, and other supplies in the basement on Dec 31 1999.  @jgilbert  I don't remember any hysteria. There was trepidation, even I had some of that and I was fairly confident my main project was ok. That didn't prevent me logging in just before midnight and watching the time recording tick over uneventfully. There was a certain tone of regret that there wasn't a terminal disaster for the news to cover.  @jgilbert Did we watch the same documentary? I don’t recall them insinuating it was effortless?? @shawnhooper @catzilla @jgilbert So from what I can gather what is a POS is the blurb that goes with the documentary? Is the documentary itself different from that? @ariaflame @shawnhooper @jgilbert Yeah, the documentary is made from archive footage from that era, I found it quite ok. There is coverage about right wingers and preppers coopting y2k but there is a lot about how the issue worked and why it happened (and the mass effort to fix it) We both work in tech since last century and enjoyed it. The blurb is poorly written, don’t get angry at things you haven’t seen. @catzilla @shawnhooper @jgilbert I think a lot of us have been oversensitised over the last decade or so. @ariaflame @shawnhooper @jgilbert Oh yes absolutely and that’s totally fair. There is no lack of conspiracy content on streaming media. This is fortunately not the case. @catzilla I'm looking at the description that frames them as rumors, and calls it mass hysteria. So,.... yes? @jgilbert But did you watch the documentary or are you just looking at the description? @jgilbert the best we could do was fill the bathtubs with water and haul oursleves out of New York while the Cobalt programmers saved our data infrastructure - I still wonder if the internet would have been better today and less commercial if there was a default then. That's the problem with these 'ticking time bomb' type of problems. Either you solve the problem in time and they accuse you of having exaggerated it, or you don't and they accuse you of having neglected it.   @jgilbert Just wait until Jan 2038 when all the 32-bit *nix systems (and a lot of legacy Windoze stuff) all forget what date it is. New Zealand should get hit first, because timezones. Much more here[1]. I'll be 80 later that year, and if I'm still breathing, there's a fair chance I might get my last ever programming gig off the back of that! Happy days 😂 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem?wprov=sfla1 @bytebro oh, yeah, no, I'm aware, and already prepping my sub-par assembly skills in anticipation of getting those lucrative "Our car model won't turn on after this date, let's do an upgrade" and "our smart elevators and ovens won't work after the rollover" contract work. 👍 @jgilbert 'Scuse my language, but really, fuck the smart ovens and elevators - they're part of the problem and have no reason being online in the first place. But wait until someone's pension matures 'many years in the past' (or years in the future)! That's going to be fun, as long as one isn't directly affected. And as I said, if I'm spared, I may even get some interesting work out of it :) @jgilbert 98-99 I sat next to the group that was doing Y2K work for a massive national phone and data carrier, and those guys were working their asses off. My experience was that I spent a very dull 6 months going though COBOL code, checking for date fields. Changing YY to YYYY. They may have been non-critical systems but a lot of the telco's billing could have fouled up and caused financial issues. Unix code has its own Y2K38 problem. Could be lots of last minute work for programmers on those legacy systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Similar_date_bugs |
@jgilbert ok great, now I'm mad too. (Also worked very hard from '97-00 for a gov't agency not known for wasting $$ - the most exciting thing that happened was a drunk ran into an electric pole and we had to run on generators for a second)