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Was employed by a large bank in their web division. We fixed many Y2K bugs that would have been triggered. Was on duty New Year's eve and there were a few Y2K
by f2000 7y ago
Was employed by a large bank in their web division. We fixed many Y2K bugs that would have been triggered. Was on duty New Year's eve and there were a few Y2K bugs that surfaced but nothing show stopping. My anecdotal opinion is that the panic to fix these bugs likely prevented some larger cascading effect/catastrophe. Remember, this was 1999 when testing/QA practices were not always de rigueur. For some shops, Y2K mitigation might have the first time their code base was subjected to any sort of automated tests :-))
- ZainRiz 7y agoFun story related to this: During the Y2K panic Sun Microsystems (IIRC) announced that they would pay a bounty of ~$1,000 per Y2K bug that anyone found in their software. As you noted, there was very little automated testing at the time so these problems were really hard to discover. James Whittaker (a college professor at the time) worked with his students to create a program that would parse Sun's binaries and discover many types of Y2K bugs. They wrote the code, hit run, and waited. And waited. And waited. One week later the code printed out it's findings: It found tens of thousands of bugs. James Whittaker went to Sun Microsystems with his lawyer. They saw the results and then brought in their own lawyers. Eventually there was some settlement. One of James' students bought a car with his share.