I worked in unix ops at a telco, and even there my coworkers were like "y-2-OKAY" for the next year. They had every opportunity to see the amount of work that went into it. Bunch of knobs.

I get the sentiment but Y2K paid off my student loans.

I was telco-adjacent in those days - and the screaming "it was a hoax for the [software industrial complex]" can still be heard. "Because we spent $500 billion to prevent it" is not the flex I thought it was.

😭

I worked at Depository Trust Company (electronic custodian of trillions of dollars) in 1997, to proofread their Y2K preparation documents. They put *a ton* of resources into this thing. Odd behavior if it was a hoax.

I spent January of 2000 cleaning up mangled data for a client who converted their data to non-character string dates, but didn’t update their modified software to use the new date format. This mangled receipt & other dates to nonsense dates like Jan 5, 24 CE when Jeshua Ben Yusuf was a carpenter

🤣

There’s a book I’ve been meaning to get to someday about this exact problem, where people don’t listen to experts warning of oncoming catastrophe, and I remember an interview w one of the authors pointing to y2k as something people cite for ignoring warnings bc they don’t know how close it was

📌

This book was really good and really terrifying.

We should start moving all timestamps back to 32 bits in preparation for 2038. We will save lots of memory and people will be able have more Chrome tabs open! And then on January 20th say "Sorry, I'm taking the week off for MLK day, I'll fix your shit when I get back."

I'm hoping there's a ton of code out there still with this problem (and no source, I guess that's less likely). It'll be just right for me to get some sweet, sweet retirement time consulting.

I'm wondering about embedded devices myself. 😧

Related/unrelated to some of your other mentions, but as a 13 year old I read a fictional account of a group of hackers single handedly patching all of the critical infrastructure before Y2K hit (while being perused as terrorists of course) and I have appreciated a group of fictional nerds more.

YUP I was hired at a health insurance claims administrator in April of 1999 to bring them out of the stone age, and I have 7 months to do it.