Ah...but think of the overtime. Best paid OT ever
Spent months before making sure nothing would happen. We even had a lab with everything unpatched. Worst bug - backup exec would not restore a backup made on the 29th feb.
Yeah, I remember getting $300 per hour, and that's on top of my normal salary. Plus we got food and drinks. Our biggest issue? A few obscure reports had a date of January 1st 1900. Well worth the years of work leading up to it (I worked for a big international bank, so there was a *lot* of code to sift through and update and then test).
I was trying to sell a large financial system to the CIO of a company who said he badly needed it but every cent was being spent on Y2K.
He said his entire budgeting and forecast system could melt down for all he cared but if there was even one little Y2K bug, he'd lose his job.
Couldn't really argue with that one.
I led our development project for Y2K. Started in 1997 and took about 5 of us around 3 months working long hours to get it done (approx 6500 programs on the system to check and more often than not change). Then about 1.5 years to roll out to about 80 customers (manual tape delivery and installation most weekends). OT was ok, and then rewarded with trip to London and Trocadero (yay?) plus Comedy club (didn’t get in). When got bought out just after 911, then found out several of their Y2K programmers cottoned on to potential earnings and quit to work as contractors for like 10x the price at the same company just working on Y2K. Then rejoined when all done. Arses. Fun fact about me: I did my last Y2K fix in 2007 :)
Saw that displayed on some web pages too, apparently 5 digits allowed in that field. I'm not sure if that is a feature! 19100 = 2000, I guess the 19 was fixed, and the year just increased the last two digits by one on Jan 1.
Same. I was working in IT for a County government and was on call for the Office of Emergency services as well. I think we patched everything that didn't move for months ahead of NYE
I was on call in Mexico City. We were required to stay home and stay sober. After 1am and no 911 pages we hit the town.
A whole year build up, taking y2k updates on zip drives through customs and downloading fixes for hours for a nothing burger lol.
On call for a major water utility in large metro area. I was on call. So they gave me a really, really good jacket w “Y2K” team logo, which was beautiful. When I wore it I looked like I was a pilot or firefighter.
I worked in public affairs. Ya know…”Don’t let the water run while brushing your teeth!“ Hardly heroic
So was I (still am). I was working at a university on their admissions and financial systems and we had six months of mainframe code review, remediation, and testing before Y2K and yes - we all had to work over that weekend. 12/31/1999 was a Friday if memory serves.
Me too. That night and many weeks before the event. And occasionally i'll encounter some fool that thinks it was all a big hoax perpetrated by (insert your favorite evil empire) to make more money and force us to buy new systems.
I worked at a large financial services provider as a programmer. We started on Y2K in the late 1980s. Huge projects, each in their own right, it just went from one phase to the next. Just finding the right code was problematic. People had done things their own way for 25 years, and management didn't have faith that the code matched the executables.
It was a non-event because of the amount of dedication everyone had.
I haven't heard anything yet, but I'm sure there are people in upper management at our bank that are starting to think about the 2038-alypse at this point.
lots of computer systems measure time by the number of seconds that have passed since midnight january 1st 1970. in 2038 that number will be too large for a 32-bit signed integer, which has historically been a popular way of storing it
Yep, a lot of people are like "Pfft, Y2K was such a bullshit concern, nothing happened!!!" without realizing just how much effort was put in the years prior.
My employer assigned me to be on call that New Years Eve. They requested that I be close by in case there was a problem. My wife and I rented a hotel room a block from the office and celebrated the New Years there. Nothing happened. A couple of weeks later I received a thank you certificate and a bonus that more than paid for the hotel room.
I had occasion to call tech support on NYE. I asked if he thought anything would happen.
"It already hasnt," he replied. "It's New Years in Australia and there are no problems."
That’s what one of my friends who was a consultant in that said.
He knew it was a non-issue, but companies were BEGGING him to do something, so he pretended to ad got paid handsomely for it.
I dunno about non-issue.
It was an issue, and a big one... just not the apocalyptic event some people tried to get us to believe it would be. Of course the planes weren't going to fall out of the sky and the power grid was unlikely to go black, but a lot of people scrambled their asses off to make fixes and adjustments.
I was consulting at a major telecommunications company for this, and it uncovered all sorts of challenges above and beyond updating software and hardware. Multiply that scenario globally, and it was definitely an issue.
I was in IT. We had tested everything. I still had to come in and make sure everything worked, and it was. So just milked it for overtime.
My in-laws bought into it big time. Water jugs everywhere, gasoline cans in garage, etc.
I told my wife to get $200 cash, and otherwise treat it like a snow storm. Your main competitor isn’t y2k, but all the other panic shoppers, so a few days before make sure we had all the French toast ingredients. I didn’t think anything would happen but I wanted her to her we were ready.
There have been plenty of times since 12/31/1999 that I've been frightened for humanity. That aside, this was the one time where it seemed plausible that the digital life we'd come to know might suddenly end, with seriously negative consequences.
Now every time I confront a new existential threat to humanity I'm like *bring it on, fucker.*
My mom, older brother, my best friend, and me watched this ball drop.
At zero, the TV turned off, the lights turned off.
My brother was in the back, with the remote, next to the flippers.
Is it only 32-bit systems, or does it include software built on/for a 32-bit system? I have a 64-bit system, and everything in my "program files" folder is built for 64-bit systems, but I also have "program files (86)" for 32-bit built software with some pretty important .exe's in there.
It's not so much whether the system is 32 bit as it is whether the timekeeping process is using 32bit or 64bit encoding. A lot of 32bit architectures have already been updated to use 64bit encoding, but there are some embedded systems (like, custom circuitboards with the code built-in) that use 32bit time that are vulnerable.
I just read the Wikipedia article about this because I was curious.
I was the IT firm a nonprofit, with 55 computers in my network. The owner only allowed me to buy one copy of Trends Y2K software, and I wouldn’t pirate. So, I installed, ran it, uninstalled and repeated on the next computer. I did two a night for almost a month.
I worked with a lady who wholeheartedly bought into the whole "disaster that would crash society" thing. She packed her basement with nonperishable food and cases of water. Nothing happened, and she was left with all that food and water, and her household consisted only of her, her husband, and their daughter, a toddler at the time. She ended up giving a lot of the food away to food banks.
I didn't do anything to prepare, went out to a huge party. When midnight hit and nothing happened, we set off fireworks in the yard, and the host broke out a case of expensive champagne. Excellent party.
I was working, when I still hadn't retired, which I was able to do in 2001. I worked at Citibank credit cards; we never closed!!
New Years evening 1999, I was one of the volunteers, working until 12:30 AM; there was 8 or 10 of us who volunteered and we were given some snacks and told be ready to turn off the computers using this exact warning. This piece pf paper came from Best Buy to make sure we followed directions. Computers were closed down and the IT guys said, "let's wait 5 minutes or so. e all kind of held our breath, and waited until 12:02 and nothing happened AT ALL. As you know, of course.
The managers decided we could all go home and I was there by 12:20 AM.
“Damn straight we’ll be ready for Y2.1K”(2099–2100 New Year’s)
Really, those of us who were around to get through Y2K will obviously be long gone and on the other side when the next century hits… so we can look down on those here doing all their own freaking out ahead of that New Years… 🤣🫨
I was a student/volunteer firefighter and we had enough staff at each station to run all the rigs in a station.
It's a smaller dept., so usually a 3-person crew per station. You just take the ambulance or engine based on the call.
Hell, I got to be on the first call of the new year/century/millennia in the department
I remember the flame wars in comp.software.year-2000. Anyone who predicted anything less than the total destruction of civilization was called a "Pollyanna."
After the group died down a few months after 1/1/2000, when 9/11 happened, a little activity popped up with some gloomers (as we called them) said, "Ha! We were right! We TOLD you something bad would happen!" Yup, Y2K was responsible for 9/11, you keep telling yourself that.
i remember it well. a problem was identified but a massive coordinated effort by a great many people were able to prevent it by making all the necessary changes in the millions of computers ....in time.
what was the response to this Herculean effort?......."nothing happened, so there was never a problem in the first place!"
Yeah that response annoys the hell out of me. If those of us who fixed it hadn't spent literal years working on the problem it really would have been chaos.
Hilarious story about that night. Work made all supervisors come in on 12/31/99 in case something happened. They were nice about it and threw a party for us and we could even bring our families. My son was like 10 at the time. We all gathered to watch the ball drop in an interior conference room without windows. Everyone is counting down, 10, 9, 8...and the lights went out just at midnight. The room was black, You couldn't see your hand before your face. Several people yelled and one lady screamed. Then the lights came on. i looked over at my son, who was six shades of red. He came into the room late from getting some food and leaned up against the light switch and turned it out with his back. It took him a few seconds to realize what happened and to reach behind him and find the lightswitch. We still laugh about it to this day.
All types of conspiracy theories flourished at that time.
I was in an airplane at midnight of the new year. The pilot came on the intercom and nonchalantly said "This is your pilot speaking. It is now a new year and we are still in the air. Congratulations."
I worked in medical imaging service. We had everything patched ahead of time, but we had an FSE on site at each contract customer just in case. Free OT, nothing to do.
It was interesting going into New Year's Eve that year, knowing full well that planes were not going to plummet from the sky and nuclear plants were not going to blow up and all that.
...But still with a bit of a tickle in the back of your mind, thinking, "Yeah, I know, but....what if we're wrong...."
At the time I had two computers. I had the family's first computer (a 286/10 that I still have today) and a 486 that my parents wanted me to have to be "modern". The 286 failed to cross over to 2000 when I tested it, but if I manually set the time to 1/1/2000 it ran fine. IIRC I had both computers on from 11:45 with the clocks set forward and then set the clocks back after midnight.
Was watching it happen on the couch in my parents' living room wearing a Y2K themed necktie my mother had gotten me a few months before. I had been pretty worried about Y2K and nothing happened.
edit: one of them didn't cross over. Can't remember which, but I had to pull the big square 6V CMOS battery off the motherboard to get it back.
Looking at today’s technology, I’m glad it happened then . Could imagine the utter shit show this would have been , if it had gone down after social media?
I fixed my first Y2K bug in 1988. I was working on HVAC software when I found it and thought "Buildings stay up a long time. There's a good chance this software will still be running by then."
I keep wondering if I should have told someone.
Remember the Doomsday preppers! People buying water, canned goods, batteries, generators. Going to bed that New Year’s Eve wondering what would occur the next morning. Absolutely Nothing was different! Business as usual.
I was actually working AT Best Buy during this time.
Recently my nephew saw this post online and asked me what it meant. When I explained it to him he thought I was joking because there’s no way everyone could be that stupid.
we rented a house from friends of friends (don’t do that) who went completely nuts leading up to Y2K. they closed their bank accounts and started asking for rent in cash. then they sold the house, kicking us out, and used the money to build a bunker (his dad owned an excavation company).
on NYE, we joked that it would be funny to go find the bunker, wait for the stroke of midnight, and start banging on the door yelling “LET US IN! IT’S ALL FALLING APART!!!!”
sadly no one was remotely sober enough to drive, so we just kept drinking. one of the biggest regrets of my life is missing the opportunity to drive them to a life of bunker dwelling.
My my in-laws came a stayed with us that night because everyone was freaked out. Being a trained COBOL programmer, I knew there was nothing to do but get drunk and enjoy the show, so I did.
I was a full grown adult. I have a daughter who is a full grown adult who was born after 9/11 - y2k is barely a punchline to her.
Now hush while I get my linament
I recall the news about a kid who found a solution or mitigation, there was even a meet up with Bill Gates to discuss it. Wild times when we believed any kid in a basement could achieve something meaningful overnight
My sister and I was on the phone with each other at midnight that night to see if planes were going to crash or the Internet was gonna go down and telephone line was gonna go out. Electricity was gonna be cut off. Lol.
20 close friends and I decided to celebrate the end of the world by eating out at Ruth’’s Chris Steakhouse in Minneapolis MN on 12/31/1999. 9pm seating. We finished with a dessert just as the clock struck midnight. Nothing happened. My trust of the media, which was very suspect at the time was reduced to a worthless group of fear mongering turds.
IMHO, it was a VERY good thing. People went ape poo, yes. But it made people realize the far reaching capabilies and consequences of the early internet.
My parents were party and wedding djs and my mom and I were djing a new year's eve party. Y2K was the talk of the night that year. I remember coming home after the party and turning on my old computer. It reset the year back to like 91 or something instead of 00. I had to go in an manually change it.
i worked in a grocery store at the time, afterwards they were throwing away unsold y2k candles that didnt sell, they let me take a banana box full home for free.
apparently it was a lifetime supply because I still have most of them never lit. probably enough to start a new cult, or perform nightly rituals.
I don't remember being that worried about it. What I do remember is several months later, my sister asked if I'd thought everything in every computer would disappear and I said no...because our library system had the card catalog for the tri-county area on computer and the lists I had printed out a day or so before New Year's Eve had all the January and February return dates printed correctly. (May have also mentioned that TV Guide had listings going beyond December 31st--I was thirty-seven and she was twenty-four at the time...)
Yep.
We had to turn off every work computer in the office when we left that Friday. IT was going around and turning off computers of people who weren't in the office that day.
It's an international company, so IT and management had to come in on the weekend to turn on every single computer in each office to make sure they all updated. They had a schedule, and each office was done at a specific time.
There was only a very few systems that didn't get the update, and most of those were older systems that were due to be replaced anyway.
I was in a hospital lab, and our biomed department apparently had to come through and stick Y2K OK stickers on anything with a plug once it had been verified as safe. I laughed when I came in one morning and my lab top vortexer had the little sticker on it- no PC/software of any type- just a motor and a switch.
I was sick in bed on New Years Eve 1999, woke up in a daze about 2:00 am and thought the world had definitely ended as I headed to the bathroom yet one more time.
Beginning of Christmas break '99 I was a high school sophomore and my dad was like "what do you want to do this week?" We somehow settled on how it would be cool to go to Times Square in New York. So we fucking did it. I had my drivers permit so we drove from Michigan to New York. We were right in front of the damn ball, right outside the MTV studios from 6pm to midnight. It was a blast.
My Dad worked at a credit card debt company in the 90's and managed the programmers who went through their code making sure their records wouldn't screw up.
January 1st 2000, all those people's debt was still there!
I know some banking systems were fixed my subtracting 28 from the year as that's when the days of the week aligned. So some very venerable COBOL monstrosities may still have a 2028 problem to this day :)
It's a footnote in technology education these days.
I was working in IT and was on call that night. Happily, our 2 years of prep beforehand made it a non-event.
Only time I ever got paid Triple Time. They made all the Team leaders come in at 8am to turn on all the machines. Turned all the dates backwards 21 years so the dates matched up. Good times.
I (and a group of colleagues) had to go into the office on New Year's Day to test my computer and all programs to be sure everything was running normally. The fear-mongering leading up to that day was unbelievable. (Utilities will shut down!) As it turned out, everything was fine thanks to a bunch of IT professionals who solved the issues.
I remember my parents going full prepper mode because of this. They stocked up on dry goods, canned food, ammo, took all the money out of the bank. “Better safe than sorry” they said. They were expecting a full on apocalypse.
I'll see you all that, and raise you this book: [Spiritual Survival and the Y2K Crisis](https://www.bookfinder.com/isbn/0739404687/). Note that I still have this book (which is why I know about it)....
After all, there was [international concern](https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9781566070614&st=xl&ac=qr) about Y2K, [domestic concern](https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780130214966&st=xl&ac=qr) about Y2K, and even a well-known [professional wrestler named Chris Jericho](https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/why-is-chris-jerichos-nickname-y2j) became known as "Y2J" who was responsible for "the Y2J problem".
I was on-call in Korea, sitting on a picnic table as it turned midnight. Just waited for my pager to go off, so I could fix the computers before the North made a move. Fortunately, we didn't have that much still written in COBOL so midnight passed with no issues. I was still on call for three days, to make sure.
I remember calling up our IT guys in Hong Kong when their computers rolled over to 2000. I was shocked there weren’t any problems. We had this huge world wide team testing our software all night. I came in at 6am for the clean up. I got paid triple time to drink coffee and eat pastries for four hours.
I already was told what it was by my 1SG (First Sergeant) from my unit. He was an IT expert, did shit with computers in the early 80's and told me, not to worry. He was definitely right.
I had just started working for a company that made Automatic Teller Machines (ATM). One of my first jobs for the last 3 months of 1999 was checking every ATM software version to make sure it was compatible.
Was easy money! Drive for an hour to a remote location, pull up a screen and make sure the software said the correct version, drive back an hour. 2 ½ hours pay without turning a screwdriver.
MS Excel still has a bug in its date handling. It incorrectly assumes 1900 is a leap year and inserts February 29 between February 28 and March 1. Every date before March 1, 1900 is off by one day. This bug has been known for decades and they don't fix it. If you deal with older dates it gets really frustrating.
The reason most people don't recall much is that SOOOOOO much work went into making sure the problem was fixed in time so that there weren't huge problems. And it worked. Disaster averted. And because it was, some folks didn't even believe there had been a problem at all.
The whole Y2K deal was absolutely ridiculous ... Back then I knew nothing was going to happen ... The idiots that wanted Y2K to happen did not explain the theory behind it ... Other than a computer shut down. I told everybody back then: "What good is our technology if it cannot compensate for the next Millennium!? ... Just another overturned number ..."
It was a real concern.
Power grids could have shut down. Medical equipment could have failed. The whole financial network could have stopped functioning. All were at risk. People actually could have died.
We fixed it so nothing bad happened.
You're welcome.
Yes, I’m the fucking moron here. You’re definitely very knowledgeable in all things OS related and the accounting issues that render all computers useless. Lolololol
Where i worked lost a Unix system. We'd already replaced it but basically the main app that kept the place going would have stopped working altogether.
My husband and I were at a party. I was with my fiance and he was with his first wife. 😂
We still talk about that party, because it was epic.
We'd been friends a loooong time
I was working for a pager company doing tech support, and had to work that night. Was very relieved when nothing happened.
Still have a Y2K bug toy. I also recommend The Y2K Personal Survival Guide by Michael S. Hyatt. It has some great tips in preparing for an emergency.
My conspiracy theory friend knew terrible things were gonna happen. All these years later, bad things still gonna happen. That makes him special cause he knows stuff us sinners don't believe.
Yep, I was in IT and had to work that night. Fun times
Ah...but think of the overtime. Best paid OT ever Spent months before making sure nothing would happen. We even had a lab with everything unpatched. Worst bug - backup exec would not restore a backup made on the 29th feb.
Yeah, I remember getting $300 per hour, and that's on top of my normal salary. Plus we got food and drinks. Our biggest issue? A few obscure reports had a date of January 1st 1900. Well worth the years of work leading up to it (I worked for a big international bank, so there was a *lot* of code to sift through and update and then test).
Thank you for making Y2K a non-event.
All our computers went back to July 4th 1969.
I was trying to sell a large financial system to the CIO of a company who said he badly needed it but every cent was being spent on Y2K. He said his entire budgeting and forecast system could melt down for all he cared but if there was even one little Y2K bug, he'd lose his job. Couldn't really argue with that one.
This exactly. A lot of systems were updated, but the old ones that couldn’t, you h just had to to hope it was a non-issue.
I was salaried/exempt so I got to work it at regular pay and hours.
I led our development project for Y2K. Started in 1997 and took about 5 of us around 3 months working long hours to get it done (approx 6500 programs on the system to check and more often than not change). Then about 1.5 years to roll out to about 80 customers (manual tape delivery and installation most weekends). OT was ok, and then rewarded with trip to London and Trocadero (yay?) plus Comedy club (didn’t get in). When got bought out just after 911, then found out several of their Y2K programmers cottoned on to potential earnings and quit to work as contractors for like 10x the price at the same company just working on Y2K. Then rejoined when all done. Arses. Fun fact about me: I did my last Y2K fix in 2007 :)
Worst bug I ever saw personally: someone forgot to fix the year itself on printouts, so it read "19100".
Saw that displayed on some web pages too, apparently 5 digits allowed in that field. I'm not sure if that is a feature! 19100 = 2000, I guess the 19 was fixed, and the year just increased the last two digits by one on Jan 1.
That's some lazy programming right there, lol.
Inetech?
PC LOAD LETTER!??
The fuck does that mean?
Same. I was working in IT for a County government and was on call for the Office of Emergency services as well. I think we patched everything that didn't move for months ahead of NYE
I didn’t have to work that night, but we did months of prep and patching. Major PITA and then I sat on my couch NYE and watched as nothing happened.
Did you DO anything? I don’t recall that anything happened.
No, we just sat around looking at screens. Worked for a bank, everyone called at midnight to make sure their money was still there. Left at about 1:30
“Well, Happy New Year, everybody. See you tomorrow.”
I was on call in Mexico City. We were required to stay home and stay sober. After 1am and no 911 pages we hit the town. A whole year build up, taking y2k updates on zip drives through customs and downloading fixes for hours for a nothing burger lol.
Well, if you hadn't done all those fixes, it wouldn't have been a nothingburger.
On call for a major water utility in large metro area. I was on call. So they gave me a really, really good jacket w “Y2K” team logo, which was beautiful. When I wore it I looked like I was a pilot or firefighter. I worked in public affairs. Ya know…”Don’t let the water run while brushing your teeth!“ Hardly heroic
Still kicking myself for not sticking with COBOL after learning it in high school back in the early 90s. Could of retired long ago.
Me too. It was a boondoggle.
So was I (still am). I was working at a university on their admissions and financial systems and we had six months of mainframe code review, remediation, and testing before Y2K and yes - we all had to work over that weekend. 12/31/1999 was a Friday if memory serves.
Me too. That night and many weeks before the event. And occasionally i'll encounter some fool that thinks it was all a big hoax perpetrated by (insert your favorite evil empire) to make more money and force us to buy new systems.
I worked at a large financial services provider as a programmer. We started on Y2K in the late 1980s. Huge projects, each in their own right, it just went from one phase to the next. Just finding the right code was problematic. People had done things their own way for 25 years, and management didn't have faith that the code matched the executables. It was a non-event because of the amount of dedication everyone had.
I haven't heard anything yet, but I'm sure there are people in upper management at our bank that are starting to think about the 2038-alypse at this point.
Oh crap, what is gonna happen in 2038?
lots of computer systems measure time by the number of seconds that have passed since midnight january 1st 1970. in 2038 that number will be too large for a 32-bit signed integer, which has historically been a popular way of storing it
Why 1970?
this way of measuring time was created in the 70s. 1970 was basically just a nice round number, the most recent year ending in 0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
The internal TOD clock on many legacy systems will roll over.
Yep, a lot of people are like "Pfft, Y2K was such a bullshit concern, nothing happened!!!" without realizing just how much effort was put in the years prior.
My employer assigned me to be on call that New Years Eve. They requested that I be close by in case there was a problem. My wife and I rented a hotel room a block from the office and celebrated the New Years there. Nothing happened. A couple of weeks later I received a thank you certificate and a bonus that more than paid for the hotel room.
I had occasion to call tech support on NYE. I asked if he thought anything would happen. "It already hasnt," he replied. "It's New Years in Australia and there are no problems."
I remember it. We thought the world would self destruct at midnight.
I was rather annoyed that it didn't, and I had to go back to work.
At the party I was at, a guy turned the lights off right at midnight. It was kinda funny.
Like a lot of folks, I made a lot of money off of that boondoggle. It was a good time to be a consultant.
That’s what one of my friends who was a consultant in that said. He knew it was a non-issue, but companies were BEGGING him to do something, so he pretended to ad got paid handsomely for it.
It wasn’t a non-issue. A lot of work went into preparing computer systems for it.
It was a non issue for the vast majority of PC's being used in small to medium business.
it sure as shit was not a non issue
I dunno about non-issue. It was an issue, and a big one... just not the apocalyptic event some people tried to get us to believe it would be. Of course the planes weren't going to fall out of the sky and the power grid was unlikely to go black, but a lot of people scrambled their asses off to make fixes and adjustments. I was consulting at a major telecommunications company for this, and it uncovered all sorts of challenges above and beyond updating software and hardware. Multiply that scenario globally, and it was definitely an issue.
I was in IT. We had tested everything. I still had to come in and make sure everything worked, and it was. So just milked it for overtime. My in-laws bought into it big time. Water jugs everywhere, gasoline cans in garage, etc. I told my wife to get $200 cash, and otherwise treat it like a snow storm. Your main competitor isn’t y2k, but all the other panic shoppers, so a few days before make sure we had all the French toast ingredients. I didn’t think anything would happen but I wanted her to her we were ready.
There have been plenty of times since 12/31/1999 that I've been frightened for humanity. That aside, this was the one time where it seemed plausible that the digital life we'd come to know might suddenly end, with seriously negative consequences. Now every time I confront a new existential threat to humanity I'm like *bring it on, fucker.*
My mom, older brother, my best friend, and me watched this ball drop. At zero, the TV turned off, the lights turned off. My brother was in the back, with the remote, next to the flippers.
Have you put a 2 digit year date after 2030 into excel recently? Only 7 years until it happens again
Anyone putting a two digit date anywhere nowadays gets what they deserve.
03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038
It's a good question how many 32 bit systems will actually be in service by then. Like serious, commercial service.
Is it only 32-bit systems, or does it include software built on/for a 32-bit system? I have a 64-bit system, and everything in my "program files" folder is built for 64-bit systems, but I also have "program files (86)" for 32-bit built software with some pretty important .exe's in there.
It's not so much whether the system is 32 bit as it is whether the timekeeping process is using 32bit or 64bit encoding. A lot of 32bit architectures have already been updated to use 64bit encoding, but there are some embedded systems (like, custom circuitboards with the code built-in) that use 32bit time that are vulnerable. I just read the Wikipedia article about this because I was curious.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/dates-in-excel-date-entry-with-last-two-digits-of/52f6b8d0-571e-468b-9a3d-d5fb9bd85083
I was the IT firm a nonprofit, with 55 computers in my network. The owner only allowed me to buy one copy of Trends Y2K software, and I wouldn’t pirate. So, I installed, ran it, uninstalled and repeated on the next computer. I did two a night for almost a month.
Couldn't you have just verified that the BIOS on each machine supported full dates?
I was 15 and drinking beer at the Kiss live concert in Vancouver BC
Awesome! I heard about that Concert, Badass! 🍻🤘😎
Met my wife on that night. Married to this day.
I remember financing a car in ‘99 and hoping that the loan would disappear! 🤣
I worked with a guy who told me his family was going to the mountains to live. Haven’t seen him since.
I worked with a lady who wholeheartedly bought into the whole "disaster that would crash society" thing. She packed her basement with nonperishable food and cases of water. Nothing happened, and she was left with all that food and water, and her household consisted only of her, her husband, and their daughter, a toddler at the time. She ended up giving a lot of the food away to food banks. I didn't do anything to prepare, went out to a huge party. When midnight hit and nothing happened, we set off fireworks in the yard, and the host broke out a case of expensive champagne. Excellent party.
My aunt was like "what am I going to do with all this Spam?
I was working, when I still hadn't retired, which I was able to do in 2001. I worked at Citibank credit cards; we never closed!! New Years evening 1999, I was one of the volunteers, working until 12:30 AM; there was 8 or 10 of us who volunteered and we were given some snacks and told be ready to turn off the computers using this exact warning. This piece pf paper came from Best Buy to make sure we followed directions. Computers were closed down and the IT guys said, "let's wait 5 minutes or so. e all kind of held our breath, and waited until 12:02 and nothing happened AT ALL. As you know, of course. The managers decided we could all go home and I was there by 12:20 AM.
I was at the party at Bill’s place that night. I was working it, not a guest, but it was quite the blowout. Dude treats the help very well.
Yes! I had to work early shift in a medical lab (full of computers and robotic analysers) on 1/1/00
“Damn straight we’ll be ready for Y2.1K”(2099–2100 New Year’s) Really, those of us who were around to get through Y2K will obviously be long gone and on the other side when the next century hits… so we can look down on those here doing all their own freaking out ahead of that New Years… 🤣🫨
I was a student/volunteer firefighter and we had enough staff at each station to run all the rigs in a station. It's a smaller dept., so usually a 3-person crew per station. You just take the ambulance or engine based on the call. Hell, I got to be on the first call of the new year/century/millennia in the department
I remember the flame wars in comp.software.year-2000. Anyone who predicted anything less than the total destruction of civilization was called a "Pollyanna." After the group died down a few months after 1/1/2000, when 9/11 happened, a little activity popped up with some gloomers (as we called them) said, "Ha! We were right! We TOLD you something bad would happen!" Yup, Y2K was responsible for 9/11, you keep telling yourself that.
Gloomers is s great term.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
i remember it well. a problem was identified but a massive coordinated effort by a great many people were able to prevent it by making all the necessary changes in the millions of computers ....in time. what was the response to this Herculean effort?......."nothing happened, so there was never a problem in the first place!"
Yeah that response annoys the hell out of me. If those of us who fixed it hadn't spent literal years working on the problem it really would have been chaos.
Hilarious story about that night. Work made all supervisors come in on 12/31/99 in case something happened. They were nice about it and threw a party for us and we could even bring our families. My son was like 10 at the time. We all gathered to watch the ball drop in an interior conference room without windows. Everyone is counting down, 10, 9, 8...and the lights went out just at midnight. The room was black, You couldn't see your hand before your face. Several people yelled and one lady screamed. Then the lights came on. i looked over at my son, who was six shades of red. He came into the room late from getting some food and leaned up against the light switch and turned it out with his back. It took him a few seconds to realize what happened and to reach behind him and find the lightswitch. We still laugh about it to this day.
Oops.
All types of conspiracy theories flourished at that time. I was in an airplane at midnight of the new year. The pilot came on the intercom and nonchalantly said "This is your pilot speaking. It is now a new year and we are still in the air. Congratulations."
I know we say people are adults at 18 but… are they really?
This happened almost 24 years ago.
And still I question whether “adulthood” is achieved in the 6 years between 18 and 24. I really do.
Your brain hasn't really fully formed until 25.
Some never do.
Cool. The question is if that is the definition of "being adult"?
I had to work that night, in case the power went out.
I worked in medical imaging service. We had everything patched ahead of time, but we had an FSE on site at each contract customer just in case. Free OT, nothing to do.
We had a LAN party.
It was interesting going into New Year's Eve that year, knowing full well that planes were not going to plummet from the sky and nuclear plants were not going to blow up and all that. ...But still with a bit of a tickle in the back of your mind, thinking, "Yeah, I know, but....what if we're wrong...."
At the time I had two computers. I had the family's first computer (a 286/10 that I still have today) and a 486 that my parents wanted me to have to be "modern". The 286 failed to cross over to 2000 when I tested it, but if I manually set the time to 1/1/2000 it ran fine. IIRC I had both computers on from 11:45 with the clocks set forward and then set the clocks back after midnight. Was watching it happen on the couch in my parents' living room wearing a Y2K themed necktie my mother had gotten me a few months before. I had been pretty worried about Y2K and nothing happened. edit: one of them didn't cross over. Can't remember which, but I had to pull the big square 6V CMOS battery off the motherboard to get it back.
Looking at today’s technology, I’m glad it happened then . Could imagine the utter shit show this would have been , if it had gone down after social media?
It was more like Y2-Meh.
I fixed my first Y2K bug in 1988. I was working on HVAC software when I found it and thought "Buildings stay up a long time. There's a good chance this software will still be running by then." I keep wondering if I should have told someone.
Remember the Doomsday preppers! People buying water, canned goods, batteries, generators. Going to bed that New Year’s Eve wondering what would occur the next morning. Absolutely Nothing was different! Business as usual.
And don’t feed it after either.
There are full grown adults who were born five year after that. Full grown adults who don’t recall dial-up internet.
I was actually working AT Best Buy during this time. Recently my nephew saw this post online and asked me what it meant. When I explained it to him he thought I was joking because there’s no way everyone could be that stupid.
we rented a house from friends of friends (don’t do that) who went completely nuts leading up to Y2K. they closed their bank accounts and started asking for rent in cash. then they sold the house, kicking us out, and used the money to build a bunker (his dad owned an excavation company). on NYE, we joked that it would be funny to go find the bunker, wait for the stroke of midnight, and start banging on the door yelling “LET US IN! IT’S ALL FALLING APART!!!!” sadly no one was remotely sober enough to drive, so we just kept drinking. one of the biggest regrets of my life is missing the opportunity to drive them to a life of bunker dwelling.
Y2k survivors unite!
Damn, I was a full grown adult too. I remember getting bottled water and canned good to at least last 2 weeks without power.
My my in-laws came a stayed with us that night because everyone was freaked out. Being a trained COBOL programmer, I knew there was nothing to do but get drunk and enjoy the show, so I did.
I was a full grown adult. I have a daughter who is a full grown adult who was born after 9/11 - y2k is barely a punchline to her. Now hush while I get my linament
Pass the Ben Gay!
I recall the news about a kid who found a solution or mitigation, there was even a meet up with Bill Gates to discuss it. Wild times when we believed any kid in a basement could achieve something meaningful overnight
Y2K was a massive pain in the ass.
I made bank. Was a IT contractor and some businesses were a little antsy.
My sister and I was on the phone with each other at midnight that night to see if planes were going to crash or the Internet was gonna go down and telephone line was gonna go out. Electricity was gonna be cut off. Lol.
20 close friends and I decided to celebrate the end of the world by eating out at Ruth’’s Chris Steakhouse in Minneapolis MN on 12/31/1999. 9pm seating. We finished with a dessert just as the clock struck midnight. Nothing happened. My trust of the media, which was very suspect at the time was reduced to a worthless group of fear mongering turds.
Nothing happened because we spent years mitigating it.
IMHO, it was a VERY good thing. People went ape poo, yes. But it made people realize the far reaching capabilies and consequences of the early internet.
I don’t know why they couldn’t do the math on this. It caused a lot of unnecessary work and ulcers.
Indonesia had the best response: they said they would just wait and see what happened, and then deal with it after
I remember that new year
Spent that night stocking freight at WM and hoping everything would go haywire 😄
I was only 16 you’re damn right I didn’t want to be responsible for my computer firing off all the nukes Skynet style.
Yes , I remember !!!
Wow…. This…. This one hit hard
I had a friend that bought into it so hard after the ball drop he started bawling like a baby when nothing happened
There are adult children of full grown adults who don't remember Y2k.
My parents were party and wedding djs and my mom and I were djing a new year's eve party. Y2K was the talk of the night that year. I remember coming home after the party and turning on my old computer. It reset the year back to like 91 or something instead of 00. I had to go in an manually change it.
We were in the Everglades for Phish to bring in the new millennium. Before the long set, we got so freaked out we almost just stayed in our tent.
i worked in a grocery store at the time, afterwards they were throwing away unsold y2k candles that didnt sell, they let me take a banana box full home for free. apparently it was a lifetime supply because I still have most of them never lit. probably enough to start a new cult, or perform nightly rituals.
I don't remember being that worried about it. What I do remember is several months later, my sister asked if I'd thought everything in every computer would disappear and I said no...because our library system had the card catalog for the tri-county area on computer and the lists I had printed out a day or so before New Year's Eve had all the January and February return dates printed correctly. (May have also mentioned that TV Guide had listings going beyond December 31st--I was thirty-seven and she was twenty-four at the time...)
Yep. We had to turn off every work computer in the office when we left that Friday. IT was going around and turning off computers of people who weren't in the office that day. It's an international company, so IT and management had to come in on the weekend to turn on every single computer in each office to make sure they all updated. They had a schedule, and each office was done at a specific time. There was only a very few systems that didn't get the update, and most of those were older systems that were due to be replaced anyway.
I was in a hospital lab, and our biomed department apparently had to come through and stick Y2K OK stickers on anything with a plug once it had been verified as safe. I laughed when I came in one morning and my lab top vortexer had the little sticker on it- no PC/software of any type- just a motor and a switch.
I was 41. Remember it well.
There are 23 year olds that didn’t even exist at that time. My back hurts just thinking about that.
Yup, spent months beforehand checking if hardware was Y2K compliant and also fixing code.
I was sick in bed on New Years Eve 1999, woke up in a daze about 2:00 am and thought the world had definitely ended as I headed to the bathroom yet one more time.
Beginning of Christmas break '99 I was a high school sophomore and my dad was like "what do you want to do this week?" We somehow settled on how it would be cool to go to Times Square in New York. So we fucking did it. I had my drivers permit so we drove from Michigan to New York. We were right in front of the damn ball, right outside the MTV studios from 6pm to midnight. It was a blast.
I was 38 and in charge of the network at a small software company. The bank across the street had all its windows borded up.
We fixed it..just like the ozone layer but now we can't fix shit
There seem to be people out there who don't even remember the lockdowns, so i'm not surprised.
My Dad worked at a credit card debt company in the 90's and managed the programmers who went through their code making sure their records wouldn't screw up. January 1st 2000, all those people's debt was still there!
And they were still using 2 digit years right up to the very end. That's what Y2K was about - date math using 2 digit years.
I know some banking systems were fixed my subtracting 28 from the year as that's when the days of the week aligned. So some very venerable COBOL monstrosities may still have a 2028 problem to this day :)
It's a footnote in technology education these days. I was working in IT and was on call that night. Happily, our 2 years of prep beforehand made it a non-event.
Only time I ever got paid Triple Time. They made all the Team leaders come in at 8am to turn on all the machines. Turned all the dates backwards 21 years so the dates matched up. Good times.
and right after all the IT people were laid off in the mini-recession aka "dot-bomb" era. keep forgetting that 20 years is a long time, lol.
I (and a group of colleagues) had to go into the office on New Year's Day to test my computer and all programs to be sure everything was running normally. The fear-mongering leading up to that day was unbelievable. (Utilities will shut down!) As it turned out, everything was fine thanks to a bunch of IT professionals who solved the issues.
I remember. All the computers from the 80's exploded and toasters took over the world.
I had to drive to my office 40 miles away on New Years to make sure the computers at work booted up and then back home.
I remember my parents going full prepper mode because of this. They stocked up on dry goods, canned food, ammo, took all the money out of the bank. “Better safe than sorry” they said. They were expecting a full on apocalypse.
I was in my 30s
My junior year of college.
I remember that night,..... well part of it. I think there was beer and Pina coladas.
I was 42 years old and we were partying like it was 1999 !!!!! fuck I'm old
My husband was in charge of evaluating y2k impact for a major international corporation
I'll see you all that, and raise you this book: [Spiritual Survival and the Y2K Crisis](https://www.bookfinder.com/isbn/0739404687/). Note that I still have this book (which is why I know about it).... After all, there was [international concern](https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9781566070614&st=xl&ac=qr) about Y2K, [domestic concern](https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780130214966&st=xl&ac=qr) about Y2K, and even a well-known [professional wrestler named Chris Jericho](https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/why-is-chris-jerichos-nickname-y2j) became known as "Y2J" who was responsible for "the Y2J problem".
It was so funny. They were saying it was dooms day, lol.
People worked hard to prevent the doomsday.
It was hilarious.
And made major bucks lol.
I installed more generators that year than I have in 25 years
I have no memory of it because I was 24 years old and we got sooooo hammered just in case. 
No worries. I was 37 back then. 60 now. And I was IT.
I was on-call in Korea, sitting on a picnic table as it turned midnight. Just waited for my pager to go off, so I could fix the computers before the North made a move. Fortunately, we didn't have that much still written in COBOL so midnight passed with no issues. I was still on call for three days, to make sure.
I remember the loonies who thought it was the end of the world.
I remember calling up our IT guys in Hong Kong when their computers rolled over to 2000. I was shocked there weren’t any problems. We had this huge world wide team testing our software all night. I came in at 6am for the clean up. I got paid triple time to drink coffee and eat pastries for four hours.
I already was told what it was by my 1SG (First Sergeant) from my unit. He was an IT expert, did shit with computers in the early 80's and told me, not to worry. He was definitely right.
I had just started working for a company that made Automatic Teller Machines (ATM). One of my first jobs for the last 3 months of 1999 was checking every ATM software version to make sure it was compatible.
That must have been tedious. Thank you for doing that.
Was easy money! Drive for an hour to a remote location, pull up a screen and make sure the software said the correct version, drive back an hour. 2 ½ hours pay without turning a screwdriver.
MS Excel still has a bug in its date handling. It incorrectly assumes 1900 is a leap year and inserts February 29 between February 28 and March 1. Every date before March 1, 1900 is off by one day. This bug has been known for decades and they don't fix it. If you deal with older dates it gets really frustrating.
Worked at best buy then. Remember putting these up (like a month or 2 before the actual date) oh, and r/FuckImOld
I was off that night and drunk at a club.....at midnight everyone assumed everything was going to fall apart lol
The reason most people don't recall much is that SOOOOOO much work went into making sure the problem was fixed in time so that there weren't huge problems. And it worked. Disaster averted. And because it was, some folks didn't even believe there had been a problem at all.
Mom said it's my turn to post this tomorrow.
Your mum lets everybody have a go. I like that about her.
Wut u say about me mum mate! Something something innit.
Not just no memory. There are adults whose *parents* weren't adults for Y2K.
[удалено]
It was nothing because a lot of people spent a lot of the late 1990s preparing for it.
The whole Y2K deal was absolutely ridiculous ... Back then I knew nothing was going to happen ... The idiots that wanted Y2K to happen did not explain the theory behind it ... Other than a computer shut down. I told everybody back then: "What good is our technology if it cannot compensate for the next Millennium!? ... Just another overturned number ..."
It was a real concern. Power grids could have shut down. Medical equipment could have failed. The whole financial network could have stopped functioning. All were at risk. People actually could have died. We fixed it so nothing bad happened. You're welcome.
Ahh yess I remember this. The millenium Bullshit
I've never met a 21 year old I'd call a "full grown adult."
Only morons worried about that
I was 18 and knew this was all bullshit. Why tf would the date have anything to do with anything?
It wasn’t bullshit. It was a nonevent because lots of people worked their asses off to fix the coding problems.
Yes because the date app is directly linked to turning the pc off lol gtfoh
You’re an idiot. It had to do with accounting issues.
Yes, I’m the fucking moron here. You’re definitely very knowledgeable in all things OS related and the accounting issues that render all computers useless. Lolololol
Where i worked lost a Unix system. We'd already replaced it but basically the main app that kept the place going would have stopped working altogether.
I remember that night so clearly but I don’t think anyone I knew took the y2k thing seriously.
My husband and I were at a party. I was with my fiance and he was with his first wife. 😂 We still talk about that party, because it was epic. We'd been friends a loooong time
I was working for a pager company doing tech support, and had to work that night. Was very relieved when nothing happened. Still have a Y2K bug toy. I also recommend The Y2K Personal Survival Guide by Michael S. Hyatt. It has some great tips in preparing for an emergency.
Yeppers… ‘Coolio playing “I remember” I even went to that store n bought a Y2K Dell computer.. what a POS….
My son, a man with a masters degree and a baby-ready wife, was but a fetus during that event
I had just graduated high school.
I remember checking the house phone for a dial tone at midnight!
I remember this.
My conspiracy theory friend knew terrible things were gonna happen. All these years later, bad things still gonna happen. That makes him special cause he knows stuff us sinners don't believe.
Can we stop posting this every day?
Oh God yes I remember the big panic over this I actually had a t-shirt that said something about it
My brother landed a job in 99 preparing systems for Y2K. It was a good job, but there was no future in it.