I was 15 years old at the time when all of this madness was on the horizon. World news ran with it. Systems would crash and the world would decent into darkness. I was doing work experience in a shop in the galleries in Washington in November 1999, I remember people coming in and "stocking up", out of fear. A bloke working there was ****ting himself and asking if I thought it was real, my genuine instinct was to wholeheartedly tell me "it's a load of ****,mate". As a millennial, it was something that taught me to question everything and don't believe everything you've been told, I'm still like that now.That was 25 years ago but one of thoes moments in history where you didn't realise you were living through it. Anyone else remember the madness? Happy New Year everyone.
A lot of it was bollocks but there was a real issue. There was a lot of hysteria on this stuff but the effort to fix it in advance might have helped. Any 'underflow' error on an embedded system in power plant might have really knacked things up in unpredictable ways (caused by 2001 - 1999 not equaling 2, but because 01-99 equaling -98). Not sure how much that would have occurred on a date calculation though in a power stations though. Hard to tell how much was real or hype. I think there was a lot of business systems fixed meaning that checks weren't wrong or late, say.
Best night of my working career. Had to be on standby for when everything crashed and as it was New Years Eve we got payed triple time just for being on call from mdday 31st until midday the 1st. 72 hours pay for doing sweet fuack all
I was with the MOD in their iIT tech team at the time. Got more overtime than I’ve had my entire life and had little to nothing to do!
I got a significant bonus for jùst staying with the company over that period. In the end nowt happened but it did help me pay off the mortgage. There is another one looming if I recall with unix time function for 2038
The Y2K issue was very real. The media stories about the end of the world being near were not. I work in IT and a spent probably 3 years leading it up to it fixing the date format and testing endless systems. We ran fail scripts and there were lots of stuff that would not have happened properly, including things like payroll. It is probably one of the best examples of the IT world working together to prevent some pretty significant global issues. One report indicated nearly £400bn had been spent globally upto 1998 fixing the problems before they had impact. Nobody needed to stock pile beans and live in a cave mind. There were still some pretty uncomfortable issues not identified or resolved that had real life consequences. Banking issues, airlines had problems. Some amusing things like the first baby born in denmark on Jan 1st was recorded as being 100. Some serious things like a social care system losing sight of patients over 100 for a short time. Most of these things were dealt with very quickly of course, because we knew to look for them. If you are still reading this, well done, there continue to be problems of a similar nature. Time recording in computer systsems can be mega precise and bloody complicated. It is thought that the loss of the NASA deep impact space craft in 2013 was down to date / time recording issues and poss an indirect consequence of Y2K. We also have Y38K to look forward too, which is a rather dull issue so dont bother with it. In summary, the media and crazy theories ran wild in the time leading upto Y2K, but the work behind the scenes prevented the vast majority of issues seeing the light of day, though it was a real threat. Us IT geeks are superheroes really
Until recently I worked with a lad who was part of the same thing. He may even have been part of your team. Anyway, in the army we generally went by the last three numbers of our regimental number, so in my case mine was 244. He told me that whenever a number has to be allocated to someone with the surname of Bond they would always try and give them a number ending in 007. Is that true or just a daft story he made up?
I remember it well, the problem was the media blew the story up about possible consequences, but didn't follow up on all the work companies were doing behind the scenes to put things right. I was at uni and graduated in 1998 and I remember talking to one of the computer technicians in the ecology centre at Sunderland Uni one day about it. He said they were checking every computer and laptop the uni had to make sure they were millennium compliant and replacing ones that weren't with ones that were. It was a massive piece of work, but well over two years in advance they were working on it and pretty much on target to have it finished in time. In the end the millennium bug caused minimal problems because of the time and money spent to prevent it for years in advance. If that time and money hadn't been spent you can bet it would have caused a lot more problems and cost a massive amount more to put right.
Made a fortune out of it, testing, testing and testing again to make sure nothing would fail. Re-assured everyone nowt would happen and they still insisted on paying me another fortune to be on-call NYE.
It would have been a major issue for the majority of IT systems if nothing was done, but fortunately systems were modified and tested well in advance. The fact the majority of people were not inconvenienced at the turn of the year is a testament to the people who modified the old systems.
We tested all our pc's way in advance and didn't find any issues with the date ticking over from 1999-2000. Most of the issues had been patched or work arounds in place well before there would have been any issues. Some very old systems would likely have been affected but it was all just the press massively exaggerating the problem and dodgy companies cashing in with "fixes".
