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Comment by cylinder714 | Hacker News Reader

I was a new "sysmom" at SCO when this dropped. One of my senior colleagues (hey, K.!) patiently held my hand as I logged into each of our PCs running Xenix, tweaking each machines' setup before moving onto the next. Definitely more scary than the all-nighter we pulled at Netscape on New Year's Eve 2000. It felt like we were trying to prevent a contagion from spreading, which we were in fact.

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> all-nighter we pulled at Netscape on New Year's Eve 2000

Is the story of this recorded somewhere? It sounds like it'd be a very good read!

If there's an interesting Netscape story, I'd love to hear it. I can say that I was at another prominent tech company on that NYE and we basically pulled an all-nighter waiting for the Y2K sky to fall, but basically nothing went wrong. So, in the end, not a very exciting story.

I was running a Linux consultancy at the time and we had a party but were all on call in case the unexpected happened. Early in the day I got an e-mail from a friend in Australia: "Nothing fell apart, enjoy the party."

That is exactly what happened at Netscape: a whole lot of nothing. Our engineers combed through the source of all our server products: web, email, et cetera. In the end, they evidently did a great job, and nothing of any note went down.

A conference room was converted into a kind of incident center complete with floor to ceiling world map to plot the locations of any outages. Someone even brought a satellite TV dish mounted on a tripod in case local terrestrial TV failed.

No lie, in the runup to that night everyone was concerned, but as it wore on, our relief was sweet.

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