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View Full Version : Was Y2K a real problem?



BadName
March 17th, 2010, 02:37 AM
I have heard a lot of people saying it wasn't really going to cause that much of a problem and then i heard other people saying it didn't end in disaster because measures were taken. Which is true?

KinKiac
March 17th, 2010, 02:48 AM
No one really knows from my understanding what exactly would have happened if measures were not taken. The affected systems, which had only support for 2 digit dates, could have reset to 00 and continued to operate fine, or they could have glitched out and caused all sorts of problems depending on the exact system. I think it would depend on the coding of each piece of software in question. I may be wrong though, Im not a programmer of any kind.

juancarlospaco
March 17th, 2010, 03:55 AM
I remember pc stores selling "Y2K survival Kit", a box with Windows Crapware,
...and people buy it

KiwiNZ
March 17th, 2010, 04:04 AM
The unit I was managing at the time worked for 4 years to ensure that there would be no issues.
There would have been a lot of issues if not for that work.

undecim
March 17th, 2010, 04:08 AM
The 2010 bug was pretty bad, especially in the UK, because almost no one prepared for it. Imagine how bad 2K would have been if it weren't for all the preparation.

swoll1980
March 17th, 2010, 04:15 AM
You would think they would have this whole changing of the decade/century/millenium thing figured out by now.

doorknob60
March 17th, 2010, 04:27 AM
Not as bad as the PS3 leap day bug. The old fat PS3s made it think it was leap year when it wasn't, and it reset the date to something weird (1984 or something, not sure), and you coul;dn't get on PSN, and trophys got screwed up. Lol...

ndefontenay
March 17th, 2010, 04:31 AM
Depending how close your program relies on the date and how important your program is, a lot of things could screw up.

embedded programs where the data is little concern would keep working fine but banking system or system using age calculated based on your birth date and the current date would tell you are 30 years older than you really are (and therefore you can't get a life insurance for exemple).

A lot would have gone horribly wrong if everything wasn't taken cared of. What we depend expect is how fast the IT industry responded to it. People thought there was work for a decade.

witeshark17
March 17th, 2010, 05:08 AM
Clearly, all the counter measures handled the issue well :KS

Psumi
March 17th, 2010, 06:17 AM
Still have this to look forward to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

That is, if we survive this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis on Easter Sunday, 2036.

sgosnell
March 17th, 2010, 06:26 AM
They may get this whole decade/century/millenium thing figured out after another time or two. This was the first century and millenium change ever since computers were invented, so some uncertainty was to be expected. It's really just a holdover from the earliest computers, where memory was in very short supply, and you never wasted any of it, not even to use more than two bytes for the year. Programs were written for those early computers, and were still in use many years later, even after memory had become more available. It's now cheap and easy to use enough bytes to hold the complete year and more, and future rollover should present no problems.

Khakilang
March 17th, 2010, 08:40 AM
I tested my computer back than I just set the CPU clock to 11:55 on December 31st. and wait for it to turn to January 1st. after 5 min. My computer didn't crash and everything in my computer stay just the same. But I don't about those old servers.

fatality_uk
March 17th, 2010, 09:23 AM
It was a very "real" problem. I had my team run multiple scenarios to ensure that it didn't

HappinessNow
March 17th, 2010, 09:26 AM
Wasn't it in Russia where they decided to do nothing and then nothing happened?

phrostbyte
March 17th, 2010, 09:26 AM
For banks mostly.

Dayofswords
March 17th, 2010, 09:37 AM
love wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

crlang13
March 17th, 2010, 09:38 AM
For banks mostly.

+1. And anything old, I would imagine that most computers made in the 90s would have been OK though...

The whole idea of total global destruction/nukes going off etc. wasn't plausible though because of all the safeguards and what not...

handy
March 17th, 2010, 12:54 PM
A legal firm was one of my customers & they ran & still do run DOS software which is the key to being able to find any files they have in physical storage - you know the folders tied up in ribbon, amongst other things.

The old machine this software ran on had to be replaced, as the BIOS could not be patched to handle the the new millennium's numerical data.

Also, they had to spend thousands having the guy who wrote the software install a new upgraded version & move all of their data over to it, which was not a quick process.

Other machines that were younger than the DOS box all had their BIOS flashed, there were some patches required for other software.

If this work had not have been done, it would have cost the legal firm a great deal of money, & probably some customers as well.

They would very likely have been vulnerable to legal action from customers, & I expect that they would have lost, as they wouldn't have been able to prove that they had done everything in their power to protect their customers data.

sandyd
March 17th, 2010, 03:09 PM
in the year 2038, everyone linux user will have to use 64 bit lol.

Psumi
March 17th, 2010, 03:11 PM
in the year 2038, everyone linux user will have to use 64 bit lol.

Read this: http://code.google.com/p/y2038/

Tristam Green
March 17th, 2010, 03:17 PM
Not as bad as the PS3 leap day bug. The old fat PS3s made it think it was leap year when it wasn't, and it reset the date to something weird (1984 or something, not sure), and you coul;dn't get on PSN, and trophys got screwed up. Lol...

I am a surviving victim of the ApocalyPS3.

Psumi
March 17th, 2010, 03:19 PM
I am a surviving victim of the ApocalyPS3.

The WKC servers were empty because no one could sign in, so all my friends were offline, lol.

Only the new Fatties and the slims were not affected. The old ones that had PS2 compatibility were all affected.

sandyd
March 17th, 2010, 04:38 PM
Read this: http://code.google.com/p/y2038/

aww man. we cant convince more people to use 64 bit...

Tom.Gee
March 17th, 2010, 08:13 PM
As I recall, NIS Time servers at midnight, 1/1/2000, began reporting the time as 1/1/19100, which lead to outages in downstream time critical apps. Just one of the Y2K bugs that got overlooked and spawned consequences. There were also FIFO stacks in PDA and cell phone messaging systems that were discovered to overwrite the newest messages with incoming messages rather than automatically deleting the oldest of messages. All in all, had the prep work not been done, there would have been many more disasters.

Phrea
March 17th, 2010, 08:35 PM
love wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

From Wikipedia:
In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.

I would definitely poop my pants if I were there. :o
Nuclear winter has arrived ! ;)

samalex
March 17th, 2010, 10:06 PM
I have heard a lot of people saying it wasn't really going to cause that much of a problem and then i heard other people saying it didn't end in disaster because measures were taken. Which is true?

The biggest problem for us was in the prep. The company I worked for at the time had a few hundred PC's, and we had to evaluate every one since they were all pretty much custom built to verify the BIOS was Y2K compliant. The ones that weren't compliant got replaced.. moved to Dell about that time.

This also a chance to move from Win 95/98/NT to Win 2000, so right at the end we started rolling out Win 2000 Workstation. So not only were we replacing 40%-60% of our systems but we were moving to a new OS.

On top of all this we had code changes and software testing that.

If we had've done nothing I'm not sure if the results would've been any different, but Y2K came and went with no problems. At least I got some overtime since I went in about 10pm and got off at around 8am :)

Sam

handy
March 18th, 2010, 12:35 AM
I must admit that both Y2K & the implementation of GST in my country, were both very good money spinners for me, as they generated lots of work.

[Edit:] Though as I previously mentioned, there were businesses that I worked for that if they had not have done anything re. Y2K, it would have cost them a huge amount of money.

DNCashman
March 18th, 2010, 12:51 AM
Nothing major on my end, but I remember the hysteria.

What was even more fail was when I went to a new years party for 2000. I was in my early teens and our parents tried to pull off a joke by cutting the power to pretend it was a problem. Little did they realise that this was nullified as other houses still had power.

But yes, it gave people a reason to sell "y2k kits" and the like.

PupSpark
March 18th, 2010, 01:53 AM
Computer Programmer, 1999: "Yeah, people won't be using these in 2000. I'll just make the clock work for 1999."

hydraulicjj
March 18th, 2010, 02:13 AM
Why did they abbreviate it to y2k anyway? Isn't that the kind of behaviour that caused the problem in the first place? ;)

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chillicampari
March 18th, 2010, 02:19 AM
Why did they abbreviate it to y2k anyway? Isn't that the kind of behaviour that caused the problem in the first place? ;)

...

Wins thread.

hydraulicjj
March 18th, 2010, 02:20 AM
Wins thread.
Hooray! :D

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handy
March 18th, 2010, 02:20 AM
Why did they abbreviate it to y2k anyway?

Which would you rather type?



Isn't that the kind of behaviour that caused the problem in the first place? ;)

If you are serious?

No not really.

Have a search of the net for the details which have a long history.

handy
March 18th, 2010, 02:34 AM
It would be great if at the end of this century, the overall effects of climate change were seen in a similar light as those of the Y2K bug.

As many still think that Y2K wasn't really anything but hype.

Ask anyone from a financial institution who is in the know & they will tell you quite the opposite.

There was an enormous amount of work required to prevent what would very likely have been a temporary market collapse which may have even been able to cause a mini recession.

Tom.Gee
March 18th, 2010, 08:29 AM
Why did they abbreviate it to y2k anyway? Isn't that the kind of behaviour that caused the problem in the first place?

I believe it is crafted as an engineer's shorthand, like when they describe a resistor value of 4,700 ohms, longhand abbreviated as 4.7 K ohms, as simply 4K7. Of course, like "UK", "USA", or even "Pi", "Y2K" is not a piece of data that can be regarded ambiguously, but a fairly unique albeit brief, proper name. David Eddy, a programmer in Boston is widely credited as the person who coined the term "Y2K". http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/y2k/notebook.html

That said, your point is well taken.

handy
March 18th, 2010, 08:36 AM
I’m one of the culprits who created this problem. I used to write those programs back in the 1960s and 1970s, anunning through various mathematical exercises before we started to write our programs so that they could be very clearly delimited with respect to space and the use of capacity. It never entered our minds that those programs would have lasted for more than a few years. As a consequence, they are very poorly documented. If I were to go back and look at some of the programs I wrote 30 years ago, I would have one terribly difficult time working my way through step-by-step. ”

—Alan Greenspan, 1998

From wiki.

hydraulicjj
March 19th, 2010, 03:50 AM
Which would you rather type?


Fair point. :D


If you are serious?

No not really.

Have a search of the net for the details which have a long history.

No i'm not being serious and have done a fair amount of research into y2k (and 2038 problem). :D

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handy
March 19th, 2010, 08:34 AM
Fair point. :D

Cool

[QUOTE=hydraulicjj;8990892]
No i'm not being serious and have done a fair amount of research into y2k (and 2038 problem). :D

& very cool. :)

ndefontenay
March 19th, 2010, 08:46 AM
aww man. we cant convince more people to use 64 bit...

I'm switching to 64 with Lucid. people will when they know that half their ram is just sitting doing nothing...

dyslexia
March 19th, 2010, 08:58 AM
He comes back every thousand years... King Arthur was the last manifestation...

dmizer
March 19th, 2010, 09:04 AM
I worked for a major long distance telephone company in the US during this time. We spent at least 4 years with a dedicated staff working directly with Nortel on this problem. Testing indicated that the big Nortel DMS250s (http://www2.nortel.com/go/product_content.jsp?segId=0&parId=0&prod_id=8661&lcid=-1) as well as the international DMS300s we had been using since the 1970's were not up to the y2k task. At the time our switches were carrying around 70% of Toll free, VPN, and 100% of government leased hotline traffic.

We also had various other critical technologies including SCP/SDPs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Control_Point), DMS100s for the LECs, soft switches, and many things I no longer recall, all of which needed programming maintenance for the y2k date problem.

Yes, the y2k thing was VERY real.

Edit:
On a humorous side note, my vet was using an ancient Wang for his rabies certificate database. In 1999, my vet printed out my dog's rabies certificate which proudly presented the expiration date (one year later) as: Sep. 30, 100 ... he casually crossed out "100" and hand wrote in 2000 instead. That was his y2k fix :-D

katie-xx
March 19th, 2010, 12:28 PM
The 2010 bug was pretty bad, especially in the UK, because almost no one prepared for it. Imagine how bad 2K would have been if it weren't for all the preparation.

Hey yes.
It was so bad that this UK based software engineer had never even heard of it until I read it here. Where do you guys get your info from ??


Kate

3rdalbum
March 19th, 2010, 01:16 PM
In 2003 I was looking in a market stall with second-hand books. There was a book written in the 1990s about the disaster about to befall man due to the Y2K bug... the stallholders had put it in the "Fiction" section!

RabbitWho
March 19th, 2010, 03:29 PM
I believe it is crafted as an engineer's shorthand, like when they describe a resistor value of 4,700 ohms, longhand abbreviated as 4.7 K ohms, as simply 4K7. Of course, like "UK", "USA", or even "Pi", "Y2K" is not a piece of data that can be regarded ambiguously, but a fairly unique albeit brief, proper name. David Eddy, a programmer in Boston is widely credited as the person who coined the term "Y2K". http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/y2k/notebook.html

That said, your point is well taken.


But it wasn't his point, I've heard people say that exact sentence 100 times. It used to be in an ad on the Paramount Comedy channel.

markbuntu
March 19th, 2010, 10:02 PM
If it wasn't for Y2k programming and outsourcing in India would not have taken off like it did. It was fate that India's refusal to pay MS license fees and the adoption of unix for its university computer courses in the 1980s put it in this position. The US had plenty of MS geeks but not nearly enough unix geeks for all the critical hardware that needed to be checked and fixed. $Billions went to India for programming and jump started an entire industry there.

Old_Grey_Wolf
March 19th, 2010, 10:49 PM
The Y2K problem did exist for old programs that used 2 digit dates. Most operating systems used on personal computers already used 4 digit dates. There were some old ones that still used 2 digit dates; however, the Y2K problem was more of a nuisance for those home computers than a problem that would stop them from working.

There where programs written for banks, government, insurance companies, etc. that would have had problems with the 2 versus 4 digit dates. They were written in languages that are almost dead these days; for example, COBAL and PASCAL. They were written during a time when memory and storage were a limiting resource. These programs had to be modified to operate with the year 2000 rolled over. Unfortunately they were very important to the infrastructure of business operations.

These programs were modified..However, some were not modified to use 4 digit dates. Businesses were not willing to spend the money to rewrite all the code so they decided to go with a less expensive solution. What was done was based upon the assumption that these programs would not be used beyond 2030, for example. So, the programs originally interpreted 00 – 99 as 1900 – 1999. They were modified to interpret 31 – 00 as 1931 – 2000, and 01 – 30 as 2001 – 2030.

If these programs are still in use in 2030, highly unlikely, they will crash in 2030.

:lolflag:

The Y2K problem was 10 years ago. I question how many of those old programs are still in use. I hope not many.