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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

From what I've heard, a number of IT departments used it as justification to dump legacy systems.

For example, at a former employer of mine, a big justification for getting rid of the IBM-compatible mainframe and a lot of legacy systems which ran on it (various in-house apps written in COBOL and FORTRAN) was Y2K.

In reality, they probably could have updated the mainframe systems to be Y2K-compliant. But, they didn't want to do that. They wanted to dump it all and replace it with an off-the-shelf solution running on Unix and/or Windows. And, for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with Y2K itself (the expense and limitations of the mainframe platform), it probably was the right call. But, Y2K helped moved it from "wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-we" column into the "must-be-done" column.

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COBOL programmers were charging a fortune to be hauled out of retirement to work on this. There was a huge shortage of experienced COBOL devs. And devs who actually understood the specific legacy system involved were even rarer. If the company had customised their system and not kept the documentation up to date or trained new programmers on the system, well, they didn't have a choice. They had to replace it.

My Boss at BT took Voluntary redundancy and went COBOL contracting he made Bank!

It's adorable that these answers are all in the past tense. This is still going on. Many of these systems still exist.

To be fair, I've met a lot of young COBOL programmers since starting to work on mainframe systems last year. I think the "elderly COBOL programmer coaxed out of retirement by dumptrucks full of money" dynamic that supposedly dominated the Y2K response is less prevalent these days, and companies that still run mainframe systems just realize they have to hire regular programmers and teach them COBOL and z/OS.

well, I witnessed it, so it's not really a supposition is it?

Sorry, didn't mean any slight at you by that. I don't doubt your account, but having no idea how widespread the practice was, its dominance on a large scale is just a supposition on my part.

> From what I've heard, a number of IT departments used it as justification to dump legacy systems.

> In reality, they probably could have updated the mainframe systems to be Y2K-compliant.

Legacy systems weren't always mainframe systems and, in any case a “legacy system” is precisely one you are no longer confident you can safely update for changing business requirements.

A change in a pervasive assumption touching many parts of a system (like “all dates are always in the 20th century”) is precisely the kind of thing that is high risk with a legacy systems.

Worked in a project to migrate a huge and critical .gov database from an AS400 nobody understood anymore to Microsoft SQL Server. We had to guess some of the values in some bitwise fields through trial and error. Made it with a few weeks to spare - nobody noticed.

I'm quite surprised no-one understood an AS/400 in 2000 - they were still pretty current and an important part of the IBM range, surely.

Understanding the OS of the AS/400 is a far cry from understanding all the custom software running on it.

Oh, understanding the underlying system, that's comparatively easy. Understanding the bespoke business logic and how it's represented in the system...now that's harder, an order of magnitude at least.

Story time: years ago (2010-ish?), we were doing some light web CMS work for a client. Nothing too complex, except we had to regenerate one section off a data feed that we received in a very peculiar custom format.

Great, everything worked, we finished on time and on budget. And then: "oh, and could you also check this other site? We need some minor tweaks on what your predecessors made". That other site was also consuming that data feed, so we took a peek. It ran in PHP3, walled off from everything, processed its own intermediate languageS, and the output was a massive 200+ page PDF (which was then manually shipped to offset print in large quantities). For Reasons, this had to run daily and had to work on first try. There was no documentation, no comments, and no development environment: apparently this was made directly on prod and carefully left untouched.

Needless to say, the code was massively interdependent, so that the minor tweaks were actually somewhat harder. We did manage to set up a development VM though, and document it a bit - but last I checked, the Monstrous Book Of Monsters Generator still seems to be chugging along in its containment.

I was working at British Telecom at the time and we found about 500 or so systems that where running but no longer had any value.

And don't get me started on Oracle refusing to provide updated y2k compliant backports!

> from "wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-we" column into the "must-be-done" column

Sounds like some of the benefits from the Coronavirus crisis, like the increase in working from home.

As they say in DC, never let a good crisis go to waste

How apropos to current events.

Wasn’t this originally said by Winston Churchill?

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