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Y2K Bugs: The Year In Review? 167

Posted by Cliff from the my-what-a-year-it-has-been dept.
xipho asks: "Its been almost a year since the Y2K fiasco. Is there a summary of the 'devastation' caused somewhere? Was there really any effect? What about 2001, weren't more problems predicted? Why no hype? Was this all just a good example of the potential mass hysteria that the media can seed?" It would be nice to know who was really bit by the Y2K Bug and how much impact uncorrected systems would have had on our lives if the mad rush for corrections had not been made. Would things have actually been as bad as the media predicted?
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Y2K Bugs - The Year in Review? More

Y2K Bugs - The Year in Review?

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  • CP/M (Score:2)

    by Ape ( 266658 )
    actually it seems that only decendants of CP/m were affected, especially the microsoft wing (most others had sense enough to update long ago). If I'm wrong please correct me (i.e. if im a moron please do inform me :)
  • Well, my rent bill for January, 2001 showed "January, 2000" and had the rent I was paying last year on it.

    Naturally, I paid last year's (lower) amount. I can't wait to see their explanation.

    --RJ
  • If it had not been for the mass hysteria, the world wouldnt have sat up and noticed that they had to spend billions of dollars on hiring us to do the necessary work. Y2k was not just about one year or a couple of digits, it along with the explosion of Internet, created all this Dot com hype, created all these jobs, and put the economy on the forward gear. Now that we are on a slowdown, with possible recession looming, we need another miracle to turn all this around. I am thankful that the dotcom bubble is finally burst though. Cant imagine anyone buying stupid pets on the internet though, what a friggin biz model..

    www.fuckedcompany.com - Watch this space, you might end up there :)
  • ...but the year is 191000!

    Err..

    ----------
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I mean year 19100. Doh

    There goes my karma :(

    ----------

  • Here's a couple . . . (Score:4)

    by Floyd Turbo ( 84609 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @01:58PM (#1426441) Journal
    (1) When I made a donation to the EFF [eff.org], my on-line "receipt" showed that it happened in 1900 -- rather too long ago for me to take a tax deduction.

    (2) Some guy returned a video and was charged for it being 100 years overdue. That, and a few other "catastrophes" are summed up in this article [go.com].

    Other than that, well . . .


    --
  • Remember January 1-7, 2000 when all of a sudden the very same pundits who were predicting doom, gloom and armageddon decided that US "COMPUTER PEOPLE" had gotten them all excited over nothing.

    That almost made me seek out someone selling nice armaments to "fix" some of the broadcasting towers for the big media outlets...

  • Nope, no y200k issues here, but then again, we did a code audit and made fixes. Most other people did too. I think the devestation would have come in the form of economic chaos .. note the guy above who got to pay his previous years rent. Imagine what would have happened if 80% of the invoices/bills sent in Jan 2001 were actually y2000 values.

    And its a moot argument .. we'll really never know for sure, will we? Reminds me of that scarecrow joke:

    "I build this scarecrow to scare off elephants."

    "Elephants? There /are/ no elephants around here!"

    "Exactly. See, its working."

    Neither party can proove anything.
    If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
  • The reason that there is no hype this year is that the hype last year was for nothing. The turning of the so called millennium (as opposed to the real one) was anticlimatic. The y2k bug had effects to a small scale, but no major ones. The celebrations were exaggerated. Thus, tonight, when the real millennium is coming, the general attitude is "been there, done that."
  • It seems the service industry was the place where the ball was dropped. Our Heating and Air Service wants $2000+ USD to update their DOS-based controller, and our phone vendor is creating a proposal to update the i486 based voicemail system that incorrectly dates (or loses) messages.

    Still, nothing has broken more software than the dreaded W2K... Windows2000. And it's getting harder to order systems with only Win98 preinstalled.

  • Preparation prevented devastation (Score:3)

    by Bourbon Man ( 76846 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @02:04PM (#1426446) Homepage
    I think that all the preparation IT pros put in paid off. The problem with that is that maybe we did our jobs so well that the general public (and management) thinks it was all hype. I know for a fact some of our older (and mission critical) software systems would have failed, and we did have one external system fail. Fortunately we had contingency plans for nearly everything. There is really no way to know how things would have turned out, but speaking as an IT pro, I am positive we would not have liked the results of a non-Y2K compliant world.
  • The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype. Makes you really want to step in and help solve a problem before it truly manifests the next time too, huh?

    Having personally been responsible for fixing Y2K bugs that would have cost businesses real money, it's disappointing to see /. latch onto the same media bandwagon position that we've seen in other less technically savvy venues.

  • Re:Time Bomb (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They might, if the guy that diffused the bomb was the same guy that placed it in their midst to begin with...
  • well, i was watching the nightly news, or something, could have been a tv news show or something to that effect, i don't remember... anyways, they had a report on the y2k thing, and they said that it hadn't really done anything drastic. in addition to this, they had to bring up something stupid. they said that another potential problem could come up in 2038, and this was ALL based on the fact that systems were based on UNIX. this is basically a quote how can the media be sooo unreasonably biased? i was kinda pissed that they could do such a piss poor job of reporting, but i guess thats just the way it goes. just something i had to get off my chest and into the world
  • I know I'm stepping into flamebait here.. but what's wrong with Windows2000? Compared to Win98 it is practically a god-send and just about the best modern OS for the PC out there. I suppose you can use Linux/*BSD as well if you're not interested in gaming or multimedia but for general purpose desktop uses it's wonderful. Rock solid.

  • y2k bug not on the 1/1/200 but 28/2/2000 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I started working for a rather well known international megacorp this year in their unix dept in march. When I got there they had just experienced a rather significant problem with the database software they were using for a number of customers, one of which I would regard as "rather important". This happened at the turnover of feburary rather than the turnover of the year. Luckily I was not the person who had to fix this mess, however this person soon afterwards quit. I recently just quit myself, but have heard that the problems where not correctly fixed and have started to resurface causing alot of problems. I would say that there is more cases around than just this but most people would prefer not to let them be known.

  • I don't know one way or the other myself, but my father is a government worker and was really involved in the Y2K cleanup of a little over a year ago. So many people in January of this year pitched such a fit because "the Y2k bug turned out to be a Y2k dud." Let me tell you something... had such an effort to fix the problem before it came a problem not been made, the Y2k bug had the potential to wipe out entire economies. I won't pretend that I have numbers and statements to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet the farm and anything else not worth betting that the only reason the Y2k bug turned out to be a dud was the hard work put into fixing it. You people complaining about wasted attempts to fix a non-problem are, well, stupid.

    <gump>And that's all I have to say about that.</gump>

  • some *real* y2kbug : rfc850 dates (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Web sites using rfc850 dates like 31-12-99 switched
    to weird format 01-01-2000 (telnet www.google.com 80 to try) which isn't at all standard
    and many programs still don't know about it.
    Patch for wget was sent (by me :)) Dec 2000.
    Wondering how many programs still don't recognize such dates ...
  • Welp, let's all start getting ready for Y2038. You break out the diesel generators, I'll start seeding the Fast Company magazines with doom and gloom about the impending chaos that is Year 2038. With a little luck we'll generate enough stir to keep us all employed for the next 40 years.

  • Re:We'll never know. (Score:4)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @02:29PM (#1426455)
    Actually, there WERE y2k problems, but they all occured much earlier than 12/31/99. I remember when they started to report about credit cards failing to be recognized back in '98 because they had 00 or higher experiation dates. That started the concept of other possible y2k bugs, but the credit card issues were dealt with rather quickly.

    But again, it's just like computer security. If you have a well secured computer, you will never know if you needed it or not, but you prevent problems that might have if you don't have any security all together.

  • Re:i saw it on tv! (Score:3)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday December 31, 2000 @02:29PM (#1426456) Journal
    The UNIX clock uses a 32 bit unsigned integer to count the number of seconds starting at, I believe, Jan 1, 1970, 00:00. In 2038, I believe, that 32 bit integer will run out of seconds, and roll over.
  • No really, it was all a big plot from the Cobol programmers to make a quick buck and retire before they became really, absolutely obsolite and forgotten.. offtopic: The 'official and authoratative' beginning of the single, global third millennium (1/1/2001, 0:00 GMT) has just passed. Nobody seems to have noticed. Does anyone else care? It seemed to me that this was kind of a siginificant milestone as milestones go, and perhaps it would've been nice to celebrate it at the correct time instead of a year early..
    • First of all, it was a marketing fiasco. The Win95 family, known by a year in its version number, became WinME while the NT family, known by two letters, became 2000. On top of that, MS was very disappointed in sales.
    • Second, it moved to account based security like Unix/Posix/etc, making it a poor choice for the average consumer. The only ones benefitting from this are IT managers and server vendors... Average customers suffer a loss of time and effort in the learning curve and extra steps for installation.
    • Hardware designed for Win98 broke big time under W2K. Of course, even an upgrade from 95 to 98 made some Diamond cards like the EDGE3D break, but W2K was a whole new paradigm most engineers were not willing to keep up with.
    An interesting litmus test for W2K are the criticisms Microsoft leveled against LINUX on its Truth-dot website. 'It suffers extraordinary delays as the OS checks the disk for errors in the event of a blackout, costing valuable minutes of downtime.' Believe it or not, they were talking about Linux, which I've rearely rebooted, when it's even more applicable to W2K, which can take a half hour on a SMP Netfinity 5000 just running scandisk (and that is done upon reboot, unlike Win9x which does it online).
  • "I build this scarecrow to scare off elephants."
    "Elephants? There /are/ no elephants around here!"
    "Exactly. See, its working."

    I want to buy your scarecrow.


    Now, what how did the conversation between Lisa and Homer go?

    Lisa: (picks up a rock from the ground) Dad, by that logic this rock keeps tigers away.
    Homer: How does it work?
    Lisa: Do you see any tigers around here?
    Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
    Lisa: But dad...
    Homer: I'll give you twenty dollars.
    Lisa: (sigh) Okay.


    Well, something like that... it's been a while since I've seen that episode.
  • IT guy: "Our Y2K inititive is rolling right along, and...."
    Layman: "Y2K?" IT guy: "Yeah, it's short for 'Year 2000.'"
    Layman: "Isn't it that exact sort of short form-ing that started this whole mess in the first place?"
  • The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype. Makes you really want to step in and help solve a problem before it truly manifests the next time too, huh?

    Just wait a few more decades, though. The Unix clock will roll over and I bet that WON'T be all fixed in advance...

    (Interestingly, Amdahl fixed it in their unix a decade or so ahead of time, though there may be some legacy code out there that didn't recompile with the revised data structures...)
  • I used to help at the Lindsey Wildlife Museum. At the checking desk we tallied up visitors with an old Apple II (adults, childern, memembers, elderly, ect). One of my many little jobs was to keep a organized record of the printouts. 3 days after Newyears, just when I thought I wasn't affected by the Y2K bug, the printouts had the year as year 0. Now I had to cross that out and mark it as 2000 on every printout. It got very annoying very quickly.
  • This is one reason I like to use ISO dating. You know, the YYYY-MM-DD format.
  • [A bug] happened at the turnover of feburary rather than the turnover of the year

    Heh. The "year 2000 IS a leapyear" bug. I know one fellow who found it "broken" and "fixed" it to be really broken - because he knew about the "centuries aren't leapyears" exception but not the "every fourth century IS a leapyear" exception to the exception.

    I wonder if you were using his code. (Unix on a mainframe?)
  • I bet that the Y2K bug has an "off-by-one" error.

    Tune in tonight to find out if I'm right...
  • Um, 0:00 GMT is 15 minutes away.

  • Crying 'wolf' ... put a stop to naysayers! (Score:3)

    by ian stevens ( 5465 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @02:44PM (#1426467) Homepage

    I was at a Christmas party in rural Ontario this past week and a few, assumedly, blue-collar workers were talking about the "Y2K bug". They both agreed that it was all hype because nothing came of the impending disaster. Neither had any concerns about the coming year nor towards any scares which they might have heard.

    Although I resisted the urge to let these people know that the Y2K hype was never realised simply because dedicated people worked around the clock to fix it, I should have been a bit more vocal in defense of the computer and electronics industry. Please, do us all a favor whenever you hear this kind of talk and explain why there never was a problem when the clocks ticked towards January 1, 2000. Unless we put the Y2K fix in perspective, we will be accused of crying wolf next time a similar bug needs fixing.

    ian.

  • Don't blame the media (Score:3)

    by gunner800 ( 142959 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @02:48PM (#1426468) Homepage

    If the "hype" was too much, then it's not the media's fault. The fault would lie with the companies spreading fear to sell their products, such as code fixes or survival gear. And the capable but (hypothetically) wrong experts who told the media about the problem and the possible consequences. Even the experts didn't really know what would happen, so its unfair the expect the media to know.

    Before you start thinking "nothing happened, so the media went overboard", try this:

    If the sh*t had hit the fan, and the media had done any less hype-spreading, would you congratulate them for restraining themselves so well?


    My mom is not a Karma whore!

  • There were 2yk problems out there. My first and only one was in 1984, OOD took over from there.

    Yup, 16 years before Y2K. That was when the pre-booking for 12-31-1999 started to hit the hotel business. Followed by pre-booking for Sydney Olympics.

    We fixed ours then, why not the rest of you?

    Could not understand the dread that world felt for looming Y2K, nor need to party for the non-millennium night. Though I saw screwed up email dates, and some bad reports dates wear programmers took shortcuts. They should have been charged back for the errors. Damn - EULA!

  • I love the one about the "conspiracy to overheat the Earth." Wow. I guess if you're a suicidal evil genius, a single 45 Magnum in the mouth doesn't cut it, you have to destroy all human life on Earth along with you.

    Derek
  • Well, how does anyone know this year is the "real" millenium? The current calendar hasn't been used for even close to two thousand years, and in fact the Gregorian calendar was based upon when the priests *thought* Jesus was born...turns out they were off by about three or four years...so the "milennium"...if there is one to celebrate...happened in 1998, because of these errors... And of course, the millenium is only good for those who celebrate Christianity...it's 5761 on the Jewish calendar, and the new year in Jewish society is celebrated in September. And it's 1421 on the Muslim Calendar which started in 622 A.D. on the Gregorian calendar and the Muslim goes faster than the Gregorian year. So all this talk about the "real milennium" is not only flawed, but matters only to devout Christians of all faiths and the media.
  • I don't know if it has anything to do with the y2k "bug" but last year Dec - March I had an inexplicable credit on my electric bill...

    Gotta love 4 months of free electricity.

    Derek
  • Most people seem to be assuming that there was no or almost no damage done by the Y2K bug. It should be noted that most places that had problems probably put a lot of effort into covering them up, just like most places do with security issues. No company would want to admit to not having fixed their problems, and so we'll never really know the extent of the damage.
  • Lyndsey Nagle: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
    Professor Frink: (looks at sarcasm detector) Are you kidding? This baby is off the charts!
    Comic Store Guy: A sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention.
    (sarcasm detector explodes on desk)
  • I remember playing with an old CP/M machine a few years ago. It didn't have a battery-backed RTC, so you had to enter the date and time every time it booted (along with some PCs/XTs and TRS-80s and others). Because I didn't feel like entering the date every time, I'd just enter all ones.

    Finally, one time when I was in DisplayWriter, I noticed that the date at the top of the screen was listed as "November 11, 2011"! So back in 1983, at least they had the foresight to put Y2K compatibilty in DisplayWriter. (I think it was DisplayWriter anyway -- or was that an IBM thing?).
  • ...predictions of missiles launching and all critical systems crashing across the globe. They almost had me frightened that my toaster wouldn't work! I think that had people not worked to fix a few Y2k issues, there would have been more incidents than there were. However, I also believe that almost NONE of what the media predicted would happen was even a possibility. I mean, what does a missile control system think to itself? "Ahhhh....its 1900! Missiles havn't even been invented yet! Must do something....must....launch randomly and take out a major city....must reach beyond the limitations of my programming..."

    Ibag
    Procrastination is like masturbation: Its great at first, but then you realize that you are only fucking yourself.
  • The company I worked for over the Y2k issue was probably the worst company one could work for; a telephone surveying company. The owner (John Stepleton) was too cheap to put money into upgrading all our non-compliant systems, so we ended up rigging a timeserver together for all the stations to retrieve their times from. That effectively solved the problem, until.... They were too cheap to buy an additional drive for their main server, at which time one of the new guys (since I'd left) decided to clear some space off the drive by removing the timeserver. Boom. No calls could be made until the timeserver was rebuilt. Quite a shame, eh? Here's to you, John Stepleton... may your life be as fruitless as last year's was!
  • Linux does quite the same. e2fsck takes a good 5 minutes on a 2GB volume. Win2k's crash check takes something like 2.
  • Having personally been responsible for fixing Y2K bugs that would have cost businesses real money, it's disappointing to see /. latch onto the same media bandwagon position that we've seen in other less technically savvy venues.

    If by /. you mean the editorial staff, you should note that Cliff emphasized that we probably would never know what could have happened without the work that was put to fix the Y2K bugs.

    If you mean the comments, then you should know better ;-).

    Happy New Year!
  • That's pretty much true on the desktop, but there are other realms of computing out there.

    There is still a lot of business software running on mainframes which has been ported over for ages. One friend of mine is an old Cobol programmer who had her best year in ages cleaning up stuff for businesses that would have to have had their custom systems completely rebuilt. I spent the spring of 99 at a company which had been clinging to a package on an IBM midrange which had been written by Xerox and had been unsupported for a decade; they rushed out and bought the first Y2K certified business package for PC networks someone offered them a deal on, and then tried to fit it to their business model. I turned down a permenant position there so they ended my contract; they were trying to inventory pounds and feet of alloy bar in a module written for inventooorying widgets.

    There were also Y2K issues in various embedded applications. At the time of the rollover I was at a company which sold and supported industrial controls and building control systems. A lot of companies were locked into data recorders which can no longer shoow the correct date, and several buildings _did_ need to have theconntrol systems reset.

    In short, altho I witnessed no potential end of the world disasters, there was a lot of serious work to be done in areas other than the CP/M derived.

  • > What about 2001, weren't more problems predicted?

    I see one problem: it's that people are going to try to express the 1st of January as 01-01-01. The day after that will be 01-01-02. Or will it be 02-01-01? Or is it 01-02-01? For the next 12 years, people who like those silly date formats will confuse the heck out of the rest of the world. It's best we all start using the international standard, 2000-01-02.
  • I spent about 100 hours auditing our software for potential problems. Then I spent about 10 hours fixing the problems that were identified, along with any other non-Y2K problems that were identified during the audit. Finito!

    But the bean-counters demanded that I attend about 1,000 hours worth of meetings where I had to explain again and again and again and again how the entire problem manifested itself. To people who didn't understand the difference between a digit and a number for goodness sake. :-/

    Meanwhile, the pointy-hairs spent about a $1,000,000 to upgrade hardware that should have been changed four or five years prior anyway but they did it now since they could blame the expenditure on Y2K.....

    And occasionally consultants were flown in from overseas, paid my annual sallary for a single day, just so they could tell me that I need to make sure that the 9th of September, 1999 doesn't cause a problem. I point-blank refused until they could explain how that date was significant, and the couldn't so they went away again, but they took their fee with them....

    And there are fooooooools out there that still believe that the hoop-la was justified!
  • Blockquoth the poster:
    a big plot from the Cobol programmers to make a quick buck and retire before they became really, absolutely obsolite
    Ah, obsolite ... the mysterious compound that diffuses from keyboards into the fingers of programmers and renders them unable to keep up with changing environments... :)
  • I thought the results of certain corrections were interesting. On some cgi scripts, the year became 19100 or 20100 for some odd reason. I can only assume that this is the result of shoddy corrections. This prompts the question: which would be worse? A 16900/17900 discrepancy or a 100 year one? The fact that we saw some 19100 errors among the crowd of supposedly fixed scripts seems to suggest that there would have been an error of the archetypal form if corrections hadn't been made, but what if, in the process of fixing bugs, we disrupted things even worse?

    I still wish something big had happened. Post-Industrial apocalypse is an incredibly romantic idea. Doesn't every nerd dream of becoming a cavalier or a highway man?
  • I get mad every time I see something like this. A lot of people put a great deal of effort into fixing very real problems and getting others to fix their problems. They did a tremendous job. But instead of thanking them for their trouble and commending them for accomplishing a near-impossible task, they are now derided for doing there jobs too well and raising the alarm too effectively.

    I spent 1998 and 1999 working on Y2K bugs for a power company. I spent over a year rewriting programs that had been running on old, non-compliant hardware (a VM machine connected to a mainframe). That machine really did crash when the date rolled over. We got most of the important stuff rewritten by Dec. 1999.

    There were also quite a few problems with the hardware in substations and generating plants (although I did not personally work on those). Many of the substations had components that failed when the date rolled over. Those had to be tracked down and replaced (all of them). As it turned out, only around 0.5% of the ICs had a Y2K problem, but that would have been enough to destabilize the power grid if they had not been replaced. (BTW -- replacing was the cheap and easy part. Most of the money was spent just finding the chips.) There were also quite a few problems with generators that would shut down when the date rolled over. Some of these were not corrected until the middle of 1999!

    Please do not perpetuate the myth that there were no significant Y2K problems to be resolved. Those of us who solved those problems deserve credit for averting a disaster, not derision for getting people to act.

  • Shoot. I don't dream of that then! No, sir! I dream of... umm... booze! Booze isn't gay, right?
  • 1/1/2000 was really only an 'interesting date' as much as everything else. I was amused to observe and comment on the passing of "12:34:56 7/8/90" which is over ten years ago now although nobody else seemed to care, and you can bet I'll be waiting for "11:11:11 11/11/11" too. Dammnit, I just realised I missed "01:01:01 01/01/01", I have to kick myself now!
  • Much to the disapointment of my coworkers (mainframe developers), the vast majority of Y2K bugs were fixed, though I did see one: CompQWK, my QWK mail reader (remember the grand old days of FIDONET?), can't handle a year 2000 date, so I gave up on FIDONET. Not a serious problem, though I do miss some of the people I'd met there. The reason it doesn't work is that COMPQWK is no longer being developed. I suspect there are a number of other old freeware/shareware products with similar problems.

  • "If we did our jobs right, they will never know."

    ====

  • Normally I hate the media. But this particular hype earned me $50/hr installing Microsoft "y2k" patches for rich companies!

    PS: Have any of you installed software in the past 12 months that has a seperate "y2k" patch (e.g. win98, coreldraw)? Did the program not work until you installed the path? That's what I thought.
  • That fellow deserves a thoughrough spanking, I do say.
  • Maybe it's just my pet peeve talking, but I REALLY resent it when people use defects as an excuse for job security. I'm good enough at what I do that I can find work without needing somebody else to be bad at their job. If you're not, well, it sucks to be you.

  • Here's how things work, so that you're clear.

    Time is a man-made construct to deal with the effects of motion. Because of this, we record the cycles of motion that we see ("years", "seaons") so that we can *easily* predict when we need to do things. The idea that there is some mystical second millenium when the religious shit will hit the proverbial fan is silly.

    People are afraid of large, even numbers. Dates are arbitrary.

    And just to bring this back onto track, this is why it's relevent WRT the code rolling over w/ computers: They use the dates. It doesn't matter if these dates are the real dates, we think they are, and that's good enough.

    Everything is made up. :P

  • Even migrating from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 is far from an easy task. Incompatibilities ranging from incompatible ACPI BIOS revisions, to hardware incompatibilities to software incompatibilties. Migrating servers is even worse, because upgrading domain controllers means upgrading to Active Directory. Windows 2000 servers cannot act as BDCs, only member servers or Active Directory domain controllers, which means if you want to upgrade a BDC server to W2K, you first have to upgrade the PDC, and do all the planning that entails. To make this worse, if you want to say upgrade a Netware/NT mixed network and migrate the data from the Netware server, things get worse. Forcing you to purchase a copy of the Netware Services for Windows 5.0 package if migrating file permissions is even a little important to you, create or fix a pre-generated account mapping file. Then you get to actually migrate the data and find that it made a mess of the file permissions by preventing file permissions from being inherited where it would otherwise be possible. And after that's all done, you get to try and rewrite the login scripts using the rather stupid cmd.exe/command.com batch scripting language. I suffered through this, and had various bad things happen, including the deletion of all the Windows NT accounts (including the Administrator and Guest accounts).
  • 2000-01-02? Is that supposed to be the first of February or the January the second? Better to use 2000-1-Feb or something...
  • I work for a small credit union where the we worked our tails off to get everything compliant. While we didn't run into any major failures to speak of, our Meridian phone system has mis-labeled the dates of our voicemails ever since. Additionally, the few application specific problems encountered were swept under the rug and attributed to other causes... regardless of how obviously Y2K related they were. Perhaps this behavior is common and is the reason we never heard anything.
  • I mean year 19100. Doh

    According to the Washington State Attorney General's Office homepage [wa.gov], it is the year '100.
    I wonder what it'll say come Y19.101K?

  • I noticed a news article [ninemsn.com.au] this morning on Australia's road toll. It refers to the period 0001 December 22 to 2359 January 7. I can only assume that those dates were computer generated.

  • Meet Peter de Jager, Now-Maligned Y2K Consultant (Score:5)

    by Rahoule ( 144525 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @03:50PM (#1426499)

    Anyone who thinks Y2K was fake and we were all tricked should read this article [nationalpost.com].

    It talks about Peter de Jager, the foremost expert on the Y2K problem. In late 1998, after the industry had finally started to move on the problem, Mr. de Jager was convinced that the disaster would be averted. However, the media continued to proclaim doom and gloom, and anti-computer Luddites everywhere continued to stock up on supplies.

    When the lights stayed on at the stroke of midnight, Mr. de Jager was suddenly considered a snake-oil seller and even received death-threats.

    Y2K was beaten, well before Jan. 1, 2000, but the media had us believing otherwise.

  • Um . . . wouldn't Y2K be 2048, instead of 2000?

  • Y2K *has* had an impact, unfortunately... (Score:4)

    by fable2112 ( 46114 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @04:00PM (#1426501) Homepage

    I used to work for a major bank, and was part of the Y2K test team (a small part, but a part nonetheless).

    Because of the fears of noncompliance, some anti-trust laws were lifted and banks were actually *ordered* to accept mergers with other banks that were farther ahead in compliance. I saw this coming, and that was part of why I quit the bank job. I knew I wasn't going to want to be around for it. :)

    I don't know if this happened in other industries or not (at least for this reason), but the banking oligopoly is NOT a good thing for the end consumer (at least not unless the end consumer has lots of money). I've noticed an increase in stupid service fees and a decrease in meaningful customer service as banks got larger and automated. (I'm currently having an argument with mine because I accidentally pressed the key for the stop-payment menu when I used a touchtone phone to check my balance, and the idiots hit me with a $15 stop-payment fee even though it's not related to ANY check I wrote! And I seem to be having problems getting a human being to discuss this with me.)

    Y2K and its (non-)aftermath have also done yet more to polarize people on the issue of technology. Those of us who knew both that the problem needed to be fixed and that it *could* be fixed by a reasonable, concerted effort were (and probably still are) in a SMALL minority. Most everyone else is playing conspiracy theorist one way or another (either they think there were problems that we just weren't told about, or they think that there never was an issue).

    On a more positive note, the potential of a Y2K disaster got people thinking about disaster prep, which is just a damn good idea in any case. I live in an area that has frequent and severe snowstorms in the winter and occasional power-killing thunderstorms in the summer; other regions have their own weather-related problems to cope with. Having basic survival-related gear is ALWAYS a good idea, and if it took the possibility of a nationwide power failure followed by rioting in the streets to bring this to people's attention, so be it.

  • The predicted Y2K bugs could have been a technical catastrophe, but we would have gotten through it.

    Instead, during Y2K, we watched as the DMCA gook affect, as the DeCSS ruling came down on the side of ignorance, as the number and stupidity of software patents filed continued to accelerate, as UCITA continued to make its way towards state legislatures across the country.

    The real Y2K bugs were legal and sociological, and were assaults on individual freedom of expression. They were far more scary than the crashed-computer scenarios that two-digit dates could have caused.

    To be sure, there were some bright points too-- e.g. the end of the RSA patent, the stay of execution on Europe's implementation of software patents. All in all, though, there were many more steps back than steps forward.

    -Rob

  • The real question isnt what has happened in 2000, but will happen on December 12, 2012 at 11:18 Am. This is the end of the Myan Long count, and thus the start of a new cycle. On December 12 2012 the winter solstice, will see change that hasnt happened in 5000 years. This is the real date looming above that no programmers can fix, as its a nature related problem. You can find more information about it here:

    The Final Illusion [levity.com]



  • The problem is e2fsck ALWAYS runs when a bad shutdown occured. Win2K and NT sometimes seem to have this delusion that the journalling worked and they don't need to run autochk, but you usually end up rebooting again so that chkdsk /f can run. The time they take to check the partition also directly varies depending on the number of files and how fragmented those files are. Heavily fragmented partitions tend to take a lot longer to check for errors than unfragmented partitions. And despite what Microsoft's press releases might say, journalling (or rather metadata journalling, which is the most common variety) is a rather poor defense against data corruption since it only protects the structure of the file system, not the contents of it, and it's easy to forget that in the case of a bad shutdown, especially ones that involve the crash of a system driver, even the metadata journal can't always be trusted.
  • rolled over tons of vacation time for this year, only to have the .com go tits-up....
  • The only Y2K "trouble" I heard about was from a friend of mine who, about 30 seconds before midnight, quietly slipped into the basement of his house where he was hosting a party. As he heard the partiers upstairs count down, he waited with his fingers on the master circuit breakers. As soon as they hit midnight, off went the switches. Much screaming ensued. About 15 seconds later, he switched everything back on, came upstairs, and declared the "Y2K bug" to be a hoax.
  • I purchased some home automation software in December 2000. Installed it, created a few macros to turn lights on/off, tested them - all was cool. Set up timers, waited, nothing... Played with it for a couple of hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, until I tried set up the timers for a specific date, rather than 'today'. Hmmm... 12/18/100. Web site - Y2K patch - install - enjoy.

    I understand the desire to ship all of the existing CDs before you burn new ones, but for crying out loud - include a little note next time, will ya?!?!

  • (Aside: looks like only the trolls and the sysadmins are online during New Year 2001. We should all get a life).

    Quick story: there were some DNS problems related to Y2K. Or, more accurately, related to faulty Y2K fixes. Something indeterminate happened to a domain that I purchase Web hosting for, evidently due to someone making some DNS changes a day or so before the end of the year.

    The story isn't that this was really a problem (it was a minor screw-up), but that NetworkSolutions evidently turned off their DNS updates for at least a day or two, perhaps longer. Normally, NSI does host table updates twice per day.

    Nobody ever fessed up to any of this, but I was tracerouting and whois'ing etc. for days after the new year waiting for the changes to take effect. The "last update" from NSI's DNS stayed in 1999 for several days.

    Bottom line, which I think is a common story, is that the problem (no DNS updates by NetworkSolutions) was caused by paranoia that there might be Y2K problems...

  • This [www.vg.no] story says (in norwegian) that a new type of trains, that was put into service in Norway the year 2000, couldn't manage the date 31.12.00. The trains simply stopped in their tracks. The train company had to turn the date back a month on all the trains to get them to work.
  • You are extremely wierd.
  • So *that's* what keeps him looking so young for his age.
  • I personally stick by the old time favorites like: Purple Headed Warrior, Fleshy Colored Pussy Plunger, and the ever trusty Love Wand
  • I just had a server chash real bad at exactly
    00:00 GMT Jan 1 2001. Could be a coincidence.

  • Your message seems to imply that Windows 2000 is the next step in the progression of Windows 95/98. It isn't. Windows 2000 is the successor to Windows NT 4. Windows ME is Windows 98's successor. Microsoft hasn't done a great job of making that clear, in fact, initially they were marketing Windows 2000 as bringing the two branches together, but that's the way it is.

    In any case, Windows 2000 is excellent as a business operating system, much better than NT 4 (which wasn't friendly enough) and 98 (which wasn't powerful/stable enough). Windows 2000AS does a good job as a business server. It's not as easy as it should be to upgrade a network from NT 4 to 2000, though.

    98/ME is still king for gamers, but as more drivers come out supporting the hardware on Windows 2000, games are running better. New games, like Giants, run great on 2000.

  • Just the facts.... (Score:4)

    by codegen ( 103601 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @04:48PM (#1426519) Journal
    Speaking as one directly involved, the Y2K was definitely not a hoax.
    1. The infrastrcture was never really at risk. Of the approximately 400 Billion spent on Y2K, less than 1% was spent on infrastructure. Our local Hydro utility spent a litte more than a few 100M$, mostly in the billing department.
    2. The biggest problem was in IT departments. It is important to note that other than embarassment, reporting incorrect dates on screens and on statements is not critical, and was never considered critical. The only critical points are where dates are used as keys (sorts, etc), compared, or used in arithmetic (subtracted, incremented, etc). This is typically less than 4% of the code, in less than 40% of the files in a typical COBOL application. But there's the rub. Which 40% of the files and which 4% of the code? If I give you a declaration of ACCTPSTD with a picture of 9(6) [a 6 digit number], would you recognize it as a account posting date?
    3. I know I have personally seen code that would not function correctly after Y2K. It would not have crashed, it would not have printed reports with wierd dates, it would just produce subtly incorrect results. This is the worst kind of error.
    4. Sandbox testing (simulated Y2K testing on an isolated machine) turned up many problems.
    5. One of the state goverments left an uncorrected system running, anticipating the very real posibility that they might have to account for the Y2K money. The uncorrected system failed rather spectacularly.
    6. Our company never pushed the fear aspect of it (we never needed to with our clientelle). We did see some of the outrageous letters written by other firms. When contacted by media, we gave a middle of the road response(I.E. there may be some problems, but in all everthing will be fine). We never seemed to get any of our quotes in anything other than the local media for some reason. I wonder why? (sarcasm intended)
    7. How would the media or anyone else know if a company had Y2K problems. As long as the problem is small enough that it can be solved behind the scene, (probably because enough had been done ahead of time), how would you or anyone else know? Do you expect them to call a press conference and announce to the world that they had a problem? Good-bye stock options! (Yeesh!!) For that matter, would you recognize if your paycheck was correct, what if an extra $1 was deducted on one of the line items (tax, employment insurance, etc.)? On your pension statements (for those with pensions) would you recognize a reporting error? Think about it.
    All in all, I've grown rather tolerant of the idiots claiming that it was all a hoax. All of our clients were satisified with our work, and have told us so as we kept in touch with them after the big day. They knew the problem that they had, and knew what service that we gave them. In the end, that's all that really matters.
  • I run trade shows for a living, so I got to hear a lot of the behind-the-scenes noise in a lot of industries. For example, most power plants would have shut down or had "issues." A lot of those little "service" computers would have detected a too-long elapse in their maintenance records, and shut down the offending systems.

    We were lucky there was enough time to correct those issues, as well as a slew of others. There was also a problem with some of the big intertie lines, which would have killed power for a big chunk of the US not affected by the local blackouts. It *was* a big issue. Fortunately, it went away.
  • 2000-01-02 means year-month-day (2000-January-2nd), I believe. This way if you have a bunch of dates in this format and list them numerically, then the list will also be chronological. If it were year-day-month or if the month were spelled out it would not work this way. So you can see, it's more convienient as year-month-day (each one represented by a number).

    --

  • I recently received a notice asking me to report for jury duty on "January 10, 1901". I kind of doubt this is a Y2000 related problem, as they had a full year to fix it. Is there some Y2001 specific bug which could cause this?
  • I don't know whether to call it hysteria or what. Some very intelligent people really over-reacted. Yes, there were very real Y2K problems. It might well have been worse if there had been no big debugging effort. But I'm convinced that the Apocalyptic scenario so many people were concerned about was never a possiblity.

    I actually came to disbelieve in mid 1999. At the time, I was contracting to write documentation for a certain mid-sized system manufacturer. Part of my job was to document all their Y2K bugs, where "Y2K bug" was defined pretty loosely: any bug qualified if it might cause the wrong date to be entered or reported.

    In the course of this job, I researched a lot of date-related bugs. I was astonished to find how many different kinds there were. Leap-year miscalculations. Inconsistent clock epoch assumptions. Complicated date formatting routines that did unpredictable things. Nasty kludges meant to patch other date-related bugs. I could go on and on.

    To me, the conclusion was inescapable. Y2K bugs represented just a fraction of the date-related bugs present in computer systems. My company, and many other companies like it, had been dealing with this kind of problem for years. The problem might peak when the 00 digits overflowed. But even that was unlikely, given all the attention being paid.

    __________________

  • I have a student loan through the US Dept of Education that I'm paying back... my bill for january 2000 was never printed and I got a statement halfway through january notifying me of the problem. It also asked me to send in my payment ASAP and that they wouldn't charge a late fee for it.
  • I know that we had two minor failures on live systems where I work. No big deal.

    The BIG news is/was that we kept some of the old systems (Non Y2K) up for the roll over, just to see what would happen - We would have been in BIG trouble - a lot of the systems that were replaced crashed big time
  • Norewegian much hyped 'signature' trains stopped due to a computer malfuction due to intolerance of the date 31-12-2000 (that is 12-31-2000 for you guys over on the other side of the pond)...

    Poetic justice?
  • I feel like sending him a thank-you note.

    +1, gracious. Not a bad idea at all.

    His email appears to be: pdejager@year2000.com

    Yeah, it seems a little superfluous and sappy,
    but it sort of balances out the uncalled for
    hate mail and death threats. Sheesh.



    --
  • I dunno if it's a Y2K1 problem, or they decided to put a new look on the site tonight (really doubt it), or just a system problem, but after midnight I have been unable to connect to the US Government HTTP time server at http://www.time.gov [time.gov]

    Is this just a localized network problem on my connection, or can anyone else hit it?

  • It's the code in the programs that was largely at fault.

    If your date comparison code was simply snipping the last two figures off of the system date (or whereever) it didn't matter if you were running on DOS, Windows, Unix or Macintosh.
    _____
  • I used to work for a major bank, and was part of the Y2K test team (a small part, but a part nonetheless).

    Did this bank loan money? For years, decades? If they hadn't sorted out their systems long before wouldn't that entire side of their business be in mess?
  • Hey,

    The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype.

    The problem with blaming hype is that much of it is.

    The majority of the public do not know the technical reasons for the y2k problem. Equally, many press writers do not funnly appreciate the problem. Resultantly, the press people assume the worst, because 'Good News is No News', and sensational stories about power cuts, water and food shortages sell more newspapers.

    Let's outline the problem for anyone who doesn't:

    I am a mojor telecoms company. My billing database records every call like this:

    Call start: 13:15 10/12/99

    Call end: 13:35 10/12/99

    We have to record the date of start and ending in case someone is on the phone over midnight. When it's billing time, we turn the subtract the start date from the end date to get the call length, twenty minutes, then we multiply by the call charge per time unit, which gives us the call cost.

    Now, it's five minutes from new year. I decide to make an international call to, say, France, so I can wish my French buddies a happy new millenium as it happens. Here's the entry:

    Call start: 23:50 31/12/99

    Call end: 00:10 01/01/00

    Then we subtract the start date from the end date. Instead of getting positive-20 minutes, we get negative-100 years. Then we multiply our negative-100 years by the international call cost and pop it on someone's bill, and direct-debit it from thier account.

    Basically, instead of someone paying for a twenty min. call, they get the money for a 100-year international call. This costs my telephone company a lot of money.

    As you can see, this would be a large problem for my telephone company if they didn't notice. And so they update thier databases.

    And they tell people about the danger of giving customers big, negative bills. Someone from an industry magazine picks up on it, and 'Billing Database Developer Quaterly' runs an article on the problem. This allows the problem to be fixed on most systems. But it also allows the problem to be read about by people who don't understand the problem. These people tell people, and they tell people, and so on. The technical details don't get passed on, but the "OHMYGOD!! THIS COULD BE A DISASTER!!!" does. Then it gets to partially-knowledgable people, like technology correspondants for major newspapers. They look at the hype, and try to trace it back to the things that cause the problem: two-digit year records. And our journalist attempts to compose a list of things that could be affected, and produces a list of every thing that uses a two-digit date. Video Recorders, for instance.

    Yes, there was a risk of date-dependent things going wrong. A telephone system, for example. And resultantly, they were repaired. What there isn't is a risk of date-independent things stopping working. Food delivery systems, for example. And resultantly, they didn't go wrong.

    Paranoia, over-emphasis, ignorance and sensationalism over-expanded the problem. In conclusion, I would say that yes, there was a problem, but it was not as bad as non-knowledgable people made out.

    That's my take, anyway.

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • One thing that the Y2K problem did do was to force companies to rid themselves of un-maintained software.

    I worked with one financial institution who used a lot of really old DOS software for day to day tasks, some dating back to the late 1980s. Generally no support was available, but I still had to get it working. We had problems due to network API changes, fast CPUs and other aspects of software rot. As no-one had maintained the software for years, no Y2K compliance statements could be obtained, and this software was junked.

    It is unlikely that another excuse to junk software will occur until 2038 - and by then I won't care.

  • An obscure bug in Novell Netware 3.22 causes Backup Exec to miscalculate the day of the week after 1 March 2000 (the day after the "extra" leap day), so all scheduled weekday backups start on Sunday instead of Monday, and end on Thursday instead of Friday.
  • Does the Y2K "effects" fall on a bell curve, or something else?

    If it falls on a bell curve, then why are we not asking why nothing happened (which is just as improbable on a bell curve as "things went to hell")?

    I haven't seen any discussion on this. I have only been able to surmise that it doesn't fall on a bell curve, because it was a known thing (and not a random event), or because programming and preparation was actively done to avert anything.

    I mean, the SEC required companies to give Y2K preparedness statements monthly (or quarterly) in 1999 - but arcording to Yardini (or was it Yourdon? - whoever the securities specialist was - not the Y2K doomsayer), no major company was prepared! So why didn't anything happen?

    Can anyone answer this for me? It has bugged me all year. I wonder if things did fall apart, and a lot of CYA was covertly done - of course, we didn't hear about that, or anything - so that is probably just paranoia...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • but they're suspecting leap year trouble.

    I guess no one saw that one coming. ;-)

    I did. One of the entries on my Y2K look-for list was anything that tested day-of-year for >365 or >366.

  • Seems like those christian goths see the hypocracy at work, but don't mind. By their own account, churches are uneasy at their presence.

    Anyways,

    And, umm, how could you overlook the little distinction of Jesus being the Son of God and Koresh not?
    ...
    my display of "arrogance"

    You obviously are aware of it when you do it. What about Ba'hai (sp?) for instance? And about Waco being some kind of punishment raining down from the Lord? That's original. Of course, it was Reno's fsckup but you knew that.

    But if we're going to indulge in fundamentalism, I have to wonder why don't we use the Jewish calendar, which purports to count from the 7 day creation? Isn't it much more logical to count from the beginning of time? (you probably believe that the universe is about 4000 years old and that the Jewish calendar does indeed start at the beginning of time)

    My point is that there is nothing logical about the calendar system we use. We just use it because it is so entrenched, just like we still haven't gone metric.
  • Some ftp sites were also taken down over the period. I believe one of the machines that resolves to ftp.uk.kenel.org was one such machine.

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