3 ms·
Ask HN: Was Y2K ever really a threat?
I was wondering if y2k was baseless or real.
- hamgra 13y agoVideo about the END OF TIME. UNIX time that is, and it talks about the Y2K issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA
- garrettdreyfus 13y agoThanks that's a great video.
- Codhisattva 13y agoAbsolutely a "threat". There were numerous systems in corporations running old software in COBOL, and other un-exciting languages. There were numerous databases with 2 bytes for the year field. The "threat" is qualified in that these systems would have surely crashed or produced bad results if un-patched. They clearly needed to be fixed. Was the threat as dire as alarmists said? Was civilization on the brink? We'll never know really, because a slew of contractors and developers audited systems, monkey patched, and upgraded. Problem solved.
- garrettdreyfus 13y agoThanks I didn't live(sentiently at least) through Y2K and your response was perfect.