Having watched another video saying Y2K wasn’t real - my standard clarification

[nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@jonn_blanchard I literally had this conversation not an hour ago. It wasn't an issue because we fixed it before doomsday.

I remember back in 1999, I knew a guy who ran a public access show about Y2K prepping. He was so full of shit, but he was good looking and charismatic, so people listened to him.

I knew so many people who prepped HARD, bought trucks and trailers(for mobility), guns guns guns, stockpiled food and water. It was nuts and pathetic.

And then some of us woke up that morning and enjoyed our coffee.

[divverent@misskey.de]

@jonn_blanchard@retrochat.online I had the probably funniest Y2K bug. A video store software called "Videka" jumped from 1999 straight to 2001. Quick testing showed it did consider it a leap year, which gave hope.

Some messing around and I saw a string like

19941995199619971998199920012002200320042005

in the binary... so yeah, I binary patched it to the correct sequence and it worked perfectly.

I suspect it was made in QuickBasic and for some odd reason had logic like

Year$ = MID("19941995...2005", Year% * 4 + 1, 4)

for whatever dumb reason...

Soon after video stores became irrelevant.

[mikefromlfe@cupoftea.social]

@nuintari @jonn_blanchard
Yes! I was working over midnight at a major hospital and then.... nothing bad happened. (The joy of being a senior in the system)

Nothing happening was due to all the planning and work that lots of professionals put in in advance of Y2K

[nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@MikeFromLFE @jonn_blanchard

I was with my girl, literally the first thing I did in 2000 was have an orgasm The last thing I did in 1999 was the same.

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@jonn_blanchard <weeps in frustration...>

[decadecity@hachyderm.io]

@jonn_blanchard As a rookie field engineer going around patching stuff I wasn't working on anything as big as banks, hospitals or mass transport but I did see a lot of small businesses that would have been crippled by the loss of their IT capabilities.

[bencotterill@mastodon.social]

@jonn_blanchard @Binder My dad spent that night looking at screens. One thing that went wrong was the urinalysis checker in a toilet at a nuclear power station.

[cynblogger@sfba.social]

@jonn_blanchard
I had the world’s best programmer who started planning 24 years ahead. ️

[resuna@ohai.social]

@peteri @jonn_blanchard

And that doesn't address the y2k failures that happened basically every 5 years after 2000 as software where the problem was "solved" by redefining the rollover date using a window rolled over.

[cj@dragonscave.space]

@jonn_blanchard @Fragglemuppet If you put the work in up front then it always looks too easy. We just rolled out a huge project across multiple states with no issues at all. I don't think people realize how amazing this was because we just made it look too easy. It was three years of hard work with a one year sprint at the end.

[alsvha@sunny.garden]

@jonn_blanchard I actually think if the media hadn't blown the situation up as they did, I'm not sure so many would have actually cared about fixing it either.

It definitely was real, but conspiracy theories exists in all walks of life, so I guess it's just par for the course that (some) people doubt Y2K.

[svelmoe@hachyderm.io]

@jonn_blanchard I work on a live project which still contain handling of 2 digit year.

Stuff would have blown up if not done correctly.

[dacig@mastodon.social]

@jonn_blanchard Sorry to be a little sceptical (and not wanting to demean anybody's job) but...I don't remember any major disruption.
How to reconcile that with thousands (millions) of systems that were under peril to fail, and yet not one big enough to notice.
I mean, how come no major issue fell through the cracks? Were engineers 100% succesfull?

[jonn_blanchard@retrochat.online]

@dacig they did, there are accounts of things that failed. And not every system was affected, more “modern” systems that weren’t designed in an age where every byte was important didn’t have the same issues

[markhburton@mstdn.social]

@jonn_blanchard
Y2K was indeed real.

As an aside, the best, tongue in cheek, marketing ploy of those days was the Y2K compliant vegetable brush.

[jonn_blanchard@retrochat.online]

@markhburton so many companies had weird products to take advantage of the worry

[deborahh@cosocial.ca]

@jonn_blanchard @ShaulaEvans same

[jfrench@cupoftea.social]

@jonn_blanchard being on call on Jan 1 2000 was the most lucrative hangover I ever had

[mansr@society.oftrolls.com]

@sverx @jonn_blanchard I'd like to know what kind of reasoning led someone to implement the 100 year exception for leap years while deeming the 400 year one too much effort when they could have got away (until 2100) with doing neither.

[sverx@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mansr @jonn_blanchard I remember discussing with colleagues back then and only *some* of them knew the rule about the 100 years exception, but *none* of them knew about the rule of the 400 years exception to the exception.

I bet also some of the people fixing the programs for Y2K were unaware of some of those rules...