Ask HN: Was Y2K ever really a threat?

I was wondering if y2k was baseless or real.

Absolutely a "threat". There were numerous systems in corporations running old software in COBOL, and other un-exciting languages. There were numerous databases with 2 bytes for the year field.

The "threat" is qualified in that these systems would have surely crashed or produced bad results if un-patched. They clearly needed to be fixed.

Was the threat as dire as alarmists said? Was civilization on the brink? We'll never know really, because a slew of contractors and developers audited systems, monkey patched, and upgraded. Problem solved.

Thanks I didn't live(sentiently at least) through Y2K and your response was perfect.

Video about the END OF TIME. UNIX time that is, and it talks about the Y2K issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA

Thanks that's a great video.

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