It’s the same story with acid rain. “Ooo, what happened with that ‘acid rain’ scare that happened in the 70’s and 80’s??” Uh, international accords requiring sulfur dioxide scrubbers on fossil fuel-burning plants, emissions standards for vehicles, and ultra low sulfur for road diesel fixed it…?

Oh you mean the WOKE accords from the SHADOW UN

Pour one out for the y2k bug while you’re at it.

Oh yeah. "There was such a fuss about Y2K, and in the end nothing happened." "Well fuck, you" - me after speedrunning updating decades old software to support 4-digit year instead of 2.

I remember. Was not a fun time to be a community college IT tech. Thankfully I was still classified as a student worker. I was grateful for a couple weeks off from that mess and just having to worry about my other job (I was also a line cook.) myferretsatepepethefrog.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-...

I appreciate you 🫶🏻 Love, Gen Xer

We appreciate you.

My Dad worked a lot of weekends in 1999 testing all that for NASDAQ.

SAP ERP was a big winner from the Y2K fear - large companies swapped out all their systems for one integrated system (already Y2K ready) - gave SAP a huge boost into the market.

I also credit clinton's booming economy with the gazillion$$ spent on y2k preparedness.

Wait THAT’s why we all have to deal with the hell that is SAP?!?

Yup. SAP's brilliant packaging of y2k - compliant database + complete set of apps outsold all the other better engineered standalone database systems. Sad. I loved sybase.

1999: Worked in tech at a telecommunications company. Friends and family: "Y2K was a hoax" Me: "I will kill you all"

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.

I had a client back then that was being all kinds of awful but terrified of y2k I knew the one place it mattered I fixed that - it would have stopped water testing But then I wrote a program to open every program file (db stuff) and just added a header that it was y2k verified and billed for all

Good thinking 😂

yep. my husband was also involved in Y2K remediation.

Any sufficiently successful mitigation strategy looks like a panic to a layperson.

Brilliant analysis of human nature.

My dad was a programmer he was working like a freaking madman making changes to existing programs all over the fucking United States for Banks, the military and a few other organizations for the two years leading up to y2k 80+ weeks were short weeks. It was insane.

Most of the fixes weren't even that, they just changed the windowing of it to be 1920-2020. Tho we didn't hear much about that in the news. It was a fascinating phenomena to see most of the 'fixes' were just a quick bodge. www.hpcwire.com/1999/03/19/c...

I worked on a bunch of old COBOL back then. We mostly did the exact shift you mentioned. In a few cases we did rewrite things to accept a four digit year but that required a lot of additional changes across the process and on the backend data, so was the exception.

lol in my case I basically rewrote ours. Original one was running on a mainframe, and there was no way in hell I'd learn its inner working in time. So I just rewrote it for PC.

Yeah this pushed a bunch of panicky projects over the deployment line. Bank systems were flaky as hell for the next couple years and we all just shrugged and raised an eyebrow

I worked at a place that wrote COBOL, it was really fun learning about the history. They had coincidentally rewrote their date processing system in C for performance (lots of date calculations and comparisons due to billing) and completely side-stepped the issue.

It's 1999, COBOL guy makes a killing consulting on Y2K coding. Panics. Decides he'll go into cryostasis to avoid fallout from the transition. Wakes up in a medical suite. Friendly staff welcome him back. "Wow. How'd it go? Is it 2001?" "Afraid not. It's 2999 and we understand you know some COBOL."

2038 is coming down fast.

Now, this is a neat solution! Heh, proto-microservice.

It was more like using a library. I was impressed to see that you could get the compiler to just link in C object files. Its a lot like how some of the number handling libraries in python just use a c program underneath for speed.

"this microservice could be a library" 😇

if this conversation is happening it should probably not be, but

Not just the number crunching libraries. A huge chunk of the underlying framework for the official release of Python is Cython bindings.

This is of course one of the reasons why most COBOL isn't portable. Every compiler vendor has their own method to do it. I personally like gnuCOBOL's, tho it isn't well documented. IBM's looked gnarly but more idiomatic. Microfocus was extremely terse and unintuitive.

I keep waiting for people to realize that in fact COBOL is really useful and replacing it for backend banking work or SSA is insanely hard and just start paying people to learn and maintain it.

Acid Rain, Ozone layer, Y2K...all overblown by the media and resolved themselves without intervention, just like Covid and Climate change eventually will...

Chattel slavery, leaded gasoline, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones,

Still have acid rain, no more freon, most companies rewrote their software pre 2k.

Frankly, if there were VMs and sandbox deployers at the degree we have now, I'm sure widespread simple demos of "Look, here's what this old code would've been doing to your precious database" would've changed minds right the hell quick

Time to start planning for the Unix 2038 bug fixes.

Yeah. A good friend was a retired programmer. Quadrupled his retirement funds traveling all over the country fixing code for Y2K.

I love that one. Though not as much as all those old Cobol programers

Can't wait for the brake dust kerfuffle (fuck cars)

Another one people now have no clue about: lead in gasoline. Everyone in the world now has unleaded gas but it took a lot of convincing its presence was a bad thing for everyone and definitely not worth the minor benefits it provided (reducing engine knock) ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasol...

Saw something similar about how Y2K was overblown by someone was maybe 10-12 years old when companies spent millions mitigating the effects of a decision to store the year as two digits in payroll/pension databases. Do a little reading…

I was one of the programmers who worked on that. I was terrified on New Year’s Eve about what might happen. It was such relief when everything was ok.

Same. We didn't have a building sized generator for our datacenter so we shut down everything for an hour and a half just to make sure we didn't get forced down the hard way.

I worked 3 hours of overtime that night in case it all went to hell. It was rather anticlimactic.

What I remember was not the anticlimax, but the relaxation from no climax. Admittedly not the usual path of a drama, but maybe it was a sign that this millennium would be fully postmodern.

yeah, I was sitting on a conference call with a lot of my co-workers hoping that nothing fell over as midnight arrived across all the world's time zones (I worked for an outfit that spanned all of them). It all worked…

I was especially happy when Sydney stayed up. Whew.

Or, or, or Donald Trump personally sealed the ozone by himself in another of his pre-presidency selfless acts

"The atmosphere would not be doing this kind of thing if I were president"

He seals it himself most days. That's what the orange does, it keeps the hole sealed. It is not a benevolent act, but a threat; he controls the ozone layer, not us. Every time his pale visage remains uncovered it is a reminder of the horrors he keeps locked away. And could release at any time.