Y2K – why I know it was a real problem (2015)
clarotesting.wordpress.com
clarotesting.wordpress.com
…except people tend to forget about such things. At least there no one blamed the Montreal protocol.
I know it’s a much bigger issue, but I wish climate change could also be tackled similarly. Changes do appear to be happening, albeit slowly.
A very funny depiction of this effect is in the hilarious episode "Charlie Work" of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the titular Charlie Kelly works tirelessly to have their bar pass health inspection, only to have the other main characters shrug and say "But we always pass health inspection".
On 9/10/2001, the assumption was that if someone was trying to hijack a plane, they were planning to ransom the passengers as hostages, so you should let them take over the plane so the hijackers don't hurt the passengers who fight back.
As of 9/11, the assumption is that they want to fly the plane into a building and kill everyone on it, so if someone tries to hijack a plane, everyone on the plane knows to fight them to the death with suitcases and shoelaces and now you can't hijack a plane anymore so there is no point in trying.
Whereas it's already pretty hard for a hijacker to access the controls after the passengers kill them.
Pre 9/11 an attempted hijacking would "just" be a harrowing tale (because of your own reasoning). Post 9/11 even an unsuccessful attempt would create an overwhelming wave of fear, panic, and paranoia for the very same reason you argue people would be willing to fight to the death.
We just had two terrorist attacks this week and it's already falling off the news cycle: I don't think that'd be the case if the public had been given flashbacks to 9/11.
There were unsuccessful attempts. Shoe bomber etc. -- passengers and flight staff stopped them.
I had a happy customer that was using software that I built in the early 90s. I was asked to 'Y2K certify' it, which I couldn't do for free, so they had to ditch it before Y2K. Even though I would have used proper datetimes, there may have been a couple of places where there were problems, such as printed reports or displaying dates on the screen. I certainly couldn't underwrite that it would work without reviewing it extensively.
Apart from cobol/mainframe projects to fix bugs, a significant part of Y2K preparation was throwing out whatever cobbled-together software businesses had, and replacing it with SAP. Indeed, a large part of the SAP sales-pitch in the mid-nineties was 'Y2K ready'. The number of SAP licences sold in the mid-late nineties is useful data for Y2K mitigation that was often overlooked.
It was highly likely that various applications within any particular business had Y2K problems, as with my little application. If they didn't, you get the original vendor to certify them as being 'Y2K ready'. For many people involved, it was quicker, cheaper, easier, and less risky to replace with SAP, rather than review and fix everything.
I am convinced that ERP (SAP, Oracle) and CRM (remember Siebel?) were given major boosts in adoption due to Y2K alone.
It's easy to imagine a lot of tech companies today taking a 'fix on failure' approach, because they're built on the idea that you deploy changes quickly, so they can accept a higher risk of faults. It's harder to make changes in banks, airlines & power stations, thus they're more risk averse, and far more likely to invest resources in the kind of effort the author describes to find & fix issues in advance.
2038 Epochalyspe countdown:
13 years, 11 days, 16 hours, 28 minutes
Or that their systems were not truly that significant…
One of the things people see, in hindsight, as overinvestment is large scale investigations (codebase reviews, archeology of documentation for embedded hardware, etc.) that found little wrong. Once it is known that for [whatever systemn] there were only a couple of problems that were easy to fix it feels like that effort was wasted: people stop seeing the risk of the unknown once they know.
Also, all that time/money investment wasn't just in the latter part of 1999, many systems were updated before then because they were tracking due dates months or years in advance. Furthermore there were a lot of things fixed (or replaced) that weren't fully Y2K issues but things that would crop up later because offsets had been used on two-digit years (49/50 was a common roll-over point instead of 99/00, but that was far from universal, with the matter being compounded by systems that talked to each other).
Some money was wasted. But I suspect, at least from a risk management perspective of knowing that things were going to be fine or mitigations were in place, that most of it would be considered well spent.
Hopefully we've learned the true lessons (no, I know we haven't!): don't take shortcuts for temporary gain in production, and don't assume systems you put in place now will be gone in a decade or more so you don't need to design for longer.
That's obviously mainly the fault of the media trying to make the story more exciting, as they always do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
We do not have a full list of problems that were averted. The only way you can state it was overblown is if you know what would have happened if we hadn’t fixed all the systems. There were definitely countries that didn't do much and had very few issues, but that doesn't prove that e.g. the far more computerised West wouldn't have had.
The only rational course was to check every system that the failure of which would cost more than checking it. It was insurance against a problem that had unknown levels of downside until the work was done.
One nuclear issue having occurred in what should have been a safe and controlled context demonstrates that there could have easily been 100 nuclear issues, all in one night. This is what happened because the system wasn’t patched yet. Extrapolate to banks, payment networks, shipping, defence.
Professionals don’t YOLO this shit. Many smart people were around making rational decisions.
It's annoyingly hard to search for old newspapers & TV news (does anyone know of a good free site for that?). The first thing I found was this Y2K survival kit:
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1824776914/vintage-y2k-survi...
> Futurists predict that riots will sweep through cities all around the world after Y2K knocks out electricity and destroys banking and commerce systems.
That's the sort of nonsense that was "promised", and to a large extent, exploited by Y2K consultants.
So when people say "it wasn't a problem", they aren't saying "you didn't have to do some IT work to make sure your phone system didn't go down" or whatever. They mean there were no planes falling out of the sky, trains crashing, riots & looting, etc.
The way back machine has it archived. I’d suggest looking at the copies of the site towards the end of 1999. A good example of such an article was ‘a crock of clocks’
If you wanted to hear my take on y2k 20 years later? Check the podcast: y2k an autobiography
Cheers