4 ms·

One thing that I found interesting was the various media coverage of the time describing Y2K as a 'non-event'. The media - and consequently the public - was ge

One thing that I found interesting was the various media coverage of the time describing Y2K as a 'non-event'. The media - and consequently the public - was generally unaware that it was a non-event because of the massive resources poured into making it so. Instead they wrote it up as a bunch of hype and paranoia over nothing. IMO it's one of the greatest unsung engineering success stories of our time.

thesimp 10y ago
Yes, indeed! As someone who also sat in a room (with many other people) watching the clock tick until the stroke of midnight I still get pissed off if people remember y2k as the event that "did not happen". Nothing happened because most of 1998 and 1999 was spent running around customer sites checking & patching software. I work with industrial control systems and the oldest code comment that was found about the year 2000 problem was in code from the early 80s. The programmer long retired but that code was still running oil refineries. There were very little large chemical installations in the pacific so we waited for updates from sites in New Zealand. After those sites rolled into the new year without problem everybody relaxed and we knew that our software installed in middle east oil&gas sites would work ok so people would have petrol and diesel in the new millennium. Then the rollover in the EU and US region were easy after that.
- all_usernames 10y ago
  "I still get pissed off if people remember [it] as the event that "did not happen"" Welcome to the life of any operations engineer, my friend. If we're doing our job right, no one notices that the insanely complex and down-to-the-wire maintenance goes smoothly.
  - trendia 10y ago
    "Nobody gets credit for fixing problems that didn't happen." [0] [0] http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/SimSS/Shayne/RepenningSterman-CMR01.pdf http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/SimSS/Shayne/RepenningS...
  - fillskills 10y ago
    I run OPS and Tech at a startup. A very thankless job I must say.
    - Moru 10y ago
      Ever tried cleaning a school? Students can even be heard saying things like "It's their job to pick up after me so it doesn't matter that I throw garbage on the floor".
  - hueving 10y ago
    It's the life of any job where you maintain something. Even janitors aren't noticed until they quit and the trash starts to stink.
  - mentos 10y ago
    Ha reminds me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-OQhot_ml0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-OQhot_ml0
- j1o1h1n 10y ago
  I was on an island in Sydney harbour sitting behind someone with a handheld video camera. As the first firework exploded, his video camera turned off. Everyone looked around at the buildings, waiting for the lights to flicker.
- function_seven 10y ago
  > the oldest code comment that was found about the year 2000 problem was in code from the early 80s. Do you remember what that comment was? I mean, was it something like /* TODO: this won’t work after 1999-12-31, fixme */ or was it more like /* Using four bytes to handle dates beyond 2000 */
  - thesimp 10y ago
    It was a comment from someone who understood that 2 digit year notation was bad and explained why he used the full year notation. At this time memory was still counted in kilobytes so it probably was an expensive use of two extra bytes.
ht85 10y ago
Yeah... I wondered the same when nothing happened, it seemed like a big deal for nothing. Then the next day when I opened ACDSee it said my license had expired. It was a pirated license that previously had shown valid until 2050 or something. All of a sudden it put the whole thing in perspective, and I realized that those things could happen anywhere causing small bugs, and much bigger ones in systems where dates actually mattered.
- 13of40 10y ago
  I had a PDP-11/74 running RSTS that wouldn't boot after Y2K. I think I had to dig around inside it to reset the clock before it would turn on again. It was an old machine at the time, but I'm pretty sure there were still some like it in the field, so someone was pulling their hair out on January 1st.
rogerbinns 10y ago
Some things did break on Jan 1st 2000. We found that our 16 bit Windows client failed (blocked) SSL validation, and that some customers still used the 16 bit client! (It wasn't the certificate having a date in the future which they will all have done for around a year at that point. It was getting the local time and using that to decide if the certificate was valid.)
takinola 10y ago
But the counterpoint to your argument is that there were lots of countries and companies that were being derided as not being Y2K-ready and nothing much happened to them as well. It's very hard to say that Y2K preparedness work was unnecessary but it is not clear that a lot of it was justified.
booleandilemma 10y ago
When trouble is solved before it forms, who calls that clever? When there is a victory without battle, who talks about bravery? Sun Tzu
- eternalban 10y ago
  According to an old story, a lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art. The physician, whose reputation was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house. "My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood. "As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords." - Translator's Introduction, Taoism and The Art of War The Art of War, Sun Tzu, Thomas Cleary
paulddraper 10y ago
> The media - and consequently the public - was generally unaware that it was a non-event Really? I was only 10 during y2k and not techie at all (yet). I remember it everywhere...news, school discussions, tshirts, TV, general conversation (similar to zombie apocalypse emergency plans some people talk about). If anything, I'd say the hype was a little too high. Planes falling out of the sky, nuclear weapons detonating, etc. Still...I agree. Zero issues. Very impressive.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- stouset 10y ago
  That's sort of his point. The narrative after the Y2K rollover was that it had been a whole lot of hype and didn't end up being a big deal after all. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the reason it wasn't a big deal was the massive amount of effort expended to make the transition seamless.
scurvy 10y ago
I formerly worked as an escalation support engineer in Microsoft's Product Support Services (PSS) for Windows networking. I, and a lot of other people, were at our desks in Las Colinas, TX for the Y2K rollover. Nothing happened. We got a press call from a reporter asking if anything was going on. I said I wasn't allowed to talk to the press, but half the people on the floor were already drinking. We knew early on that the Windows dev teams had done their job as Y2K hit Australia and nothing happened. Then Europe and nothing happened. Even though I "missed out" on the big Y2K celebrations and instead had to celebrate with a bunch of nerd coworkers in a boring office building, it felt good to be a part of something where we all banded together and pulled off a major piece of work.
- yuhong 10y ago
  This was before MS had a formal support lifecycle, right?
  - scurvy 10y ago
    I'm not sure if I follow your question. I worked in Windows NT networking escalation/debug support. We did NT4 and Windows 2000. You had to have a support contract with MS or work off some Pay Per Incident vouchers. Some people had Premier contracts and got to speak with me quickly (but already had first line dedicated engineers), but I mostly handled escalations from our outsourced support specialists (Keane in Arizona and one other I can't remember). The Pro customers (non Premier) definitely drove the most support volume and often had the more difficult cases. Premier cases were often "hey what if" cases that we answered quickly or were straight bugs. Believe it or not, bug defects are easy because they're usually obvious and the path forward is also obvious (install checked builds to get more info and/or set up break points and remote debug for crashes).
    - yuhong 10y ago
      So do you know for example when they exactly ended NT 3.51 updates?
tinus_hn 10y ago
If you believed the hype your toaster oven would have exploded on Y2K because it had a clock on the front. A lot of work went into fixing the real problems but there also was a lot of fuss about nothing.

thesimp 10y ago

Yes, indeed! As someone who also sat in a room (with many other people) watching the clock tick until the stroke of midnight I still get pissed off if people remember y2k as the event that "did not happen". Nothing happened because most of 1998 and 1999 was spent running around customer sites checking & patching software. I work with industrial control systems and the oldest code comment that was found about the year 2000 problem was in code from the early 80s. The programmer long retired but that code was still running oil refineries. There were very little large chemical installations in the pacific so we waited for updates from sites in New Zealand. After those sites rolled into the new year without problem everybody relaxed and we knew that our software installed in middle east oil&gas sites would work ok so people would have petrol and diesel in the new millennium. Then the rollover in the EU and US region were easy after that.

all_usernames 10y ago
"I still get pissed off if people remember [it] as the event that "did not happen"" Welcome to the life of any operations engineer, my friend. If we're doing our job right, no one notices that the insanely complex and down-to-the-wire maintenance goes smoothly.
- trendia 10y ago
  "Nobody gets credit for fixing problems that didn't happen." [0] [0] http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/SimSS/Shayne/RepenningSterman-CMR01.pdf http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/SimSS/Shayne/RepenningS...
- fillskills 10y ago
  I run OPS and Tech at a startup. A very thankless job I must say.
  - Moru 10y ago
    Ever tried cleaning a school? Students can even be heard saying things like "It's their job to pick up after me so it doesn't matter that I throw garbage on the floor".
- hueving 10y ago
  It's the life of any job where you maintain something. Even janitors aren't noticed until they quit and the trash starts to stink.
- mentos 10y ago
  Ha reminds me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-OQhot_ml0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-OQhot_ml0
j1o1h1n 10y ago
I was on an island in Sydney harbour sitting behind someone with a handheld video camera. As the first firework exploded, his video camera turned off. Everyone looked around at the buildings, waiting for the lights to flicker.
function_seven 10y ago
> the oldest code comment that was found about the year 2000 problem was in code from the early 80s. Do you remember what that comment was? I mean, was it something like /* TODO: this won’t work after 1999-12-31, fixme */ or was it more like /* Using four bytes to handle dates beyond 2000 */
- thesimp 10y ago
  It was a comment from someone who understood that 2 digit year notation was bad and explained why he used the full year notation. At this time memory was still counted in kilobytes so it probably was an expensive use of two extra bytes.

ht85 10y ago

Yeah... I wondered the same when nothing happened, it seemed like a big deal for nothing. Then the next day when I opened ACDSee it said my license had expired. It was a pirated license that previously had shown valid until 2050 or something. All of a sudden it put the whole thing in perspective, and I realized that those things could happen anywhere causing small bugs, and much bigger ones in systems where dates actually mattered.

13of40 10y ago
I had a PDP-11/74 running RSTS that wouldn't boot after Y2K. I think I had to dig around inside it to reset the clock before it would turn on again. It was an old machine at the time, but I'm pretty sure there were still some like it in the field, so someone was pulling their hair out on January 1st.

rogerbinns 10y ago

Some things did break on Jan 1st 2000. We found that our 16 bit Windows client failed (blocked) SSL validation, and that some customers still used the 16 bit client! (It wasn't the certificate having a date in the future which they will all have done for around a year at that point. It was getting the local time and using that to decide if the certificate was valid.)

takinola 10y ago

But the counterpoint to your argument is that there were lots of countries and companies that were being derided as not being Y2K-ready and nothing much happened to them as well. It's very hard to say that Y2K preparedness work was unnecessary but it is not clear that a lot of it was justified.

booleandilemma 10y ago

When trouble is solved before it forms, who calls that clever? When there is a victory without battle, who talks about bravery? Sun Tzu

eternalban 10y ago
According to an old story, a lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art. The physician, whose reputation was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house. "My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood. "As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords." - Translator's Introduction, Taoism and The Art of War The Art of War, Sun Tzu, Thomas Cleary

paulddraper 10y ago

> The media - and consequently the public - was generally unaware that it was a non-event Really? I was only 10 during y2k and not techie at all (yet). I remember it everywhere...news, school discussions, tshirts, TV, general conversation (similar to zombie apocalypse emergency plans some people talk about). If anything, I'd say the hype was a little too high. Planes falling out of the sky, nuclear weapons detonating, etc. Still...I agree. Zero issues. Very impressive.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stouset 10y ago
That's sort of his point. The narrative after the Y2K rollover was that it had been a whole lot of hype and didn't end up being a big deal after all. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the reason it wasn't a big deal was the massive amount of effort expended to make the transition seamless.

scurvy 10y ago

I formerly worked as an escalation support engineer in Microsoft's Product Support Services (PSS) for Windows networking. I, and a lot of other people, were at our desks in Las Colinas, TX for the Y2K rollover. Nothing happened. We got a press call from a reporter asking if anything was going on. I said I wasn't allowed to talk to the press, but half the people on the floor were already drinking. We knew early on that the Windows dev teams had done their job as Y2K hit Australia and nothing happened. Then Europe and nothing happened. Even though I "missed out" on the big Y2K celebrations and instead had to celebrate with a bunch of nerd coworkers in a boring office building, it felt good to be a part of something where we all banded together and pulled off a major piece of work.

yuhong 10y ago
This was before MS had a formal support lifecycle, right?
- scurvy 10y ago
  I'm not sure if I follow your question. I worked in Windows NT networking escalation/debug support. We did NT4 and Windows 2000. You had to have a support contract with MS or work off some Pay Per Incident vouchers. Some people had Premier contracts and got to speak with me quickly (but already had first line dedicated engineers), but I mostly handled escalations from our outsourced support specialists (Keane in Arizona and one other I can't remember). The Pro customers (non Premier) definitely drove the most support volume and often had the more difficult cases. Premier cases were often "hey what if" cases that we answered quickly or were straight bugs. Believe it or not, bug defects are easy because they're usually obvious and the path forward is also obvious (install checked builds to get more info and/or set up break points and remote debug for crashes).
  - yuhong 10y ago
    So do you know for example when they exactly ended NT 3.51 updates?

tinus_hn 10y ago

If you believed the hype your toaster oven would have exploded on Y2K because it had a clock on the front. A lot of work went into fixing the real problems but there also was a lot of fuss about nothing.