Remember the doom and gloom of Y2K?

T

TennVet

Member
Our company audit was in progress in November of '99. The managing partner of Deloitte & Touche was giving me a hard time about a plan of action to deal with Y2K. He wasn't paying much attention to what was on my desk that morning. After hearing enough about the forthcoming disaster, I slid the yellow legal pad and box of pencils across the to him. "That's our plan of action!" Less said better said.
 

Gardenlover said:
I was in the thick of it. Over a year of coding changes by a dedicated team of programmers. Everyone in IT was on hand when the clock struck midnight and...


Not a single problem was encountered.
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That was my exact point with the auditor. Early on in my career I wrote a lot of programs in RPGII and Cobol. A IBM business consultant told me, you would be wise to make all your date fields packed numeric. That was in the mid 70's, he went on to tell me that if the program remained in use till 2000 I would be glad I listened. Pretty smart cookie way before time to worry.
 

TennVet said:
That was my exact point with the auditor. Early on in my career I wrote a lot of programs in RPGII and Cobol. A IBM business consultant told me, you would be wise to make all your date fields packed numeric. That was in the mid 70's, he went on to tell me that if the program remained in use till 2000 I would be glad I listened. Pretty smart cookie way before time to worry.
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I'll say, back in the day programmers tried to code as tight as possible to use less computer resources. In our shop it was a badge of honor to write the tightest code. That consultant was ahead of his time or wanted to sell you more resources. I actually loved the IBM guys, they were sharp.
 
I was working in dialysis at the time (registered dietitian). Had to counsel all patients on how to minimize fluid and potassium even more so than usual on a renal diet. We also had educational handouts for emergency items to have on hand including a minimum two week supply of meds. The company bought huge generators that could be trucked in and some units were selected to run 24/7 should there be outages so there were schedules created and handed out to patients about which shift at the 24/7 units they were assigned to. Thank goodness none of that was needed but my employer took it seriously.
 
The millennium Dome London ( 02 centre)... opened to great fanfare on New years eve 2019 ready for the Millennium.. and we had several Tv crews up on the freezing roof filming everything.. for the New year celebrations and the opening of the Dome... , and my soon2Bex was one of the film crew... he nearly froze to death on that roof.. that night..
 
I was on Swing shift (3-11pm) at our flagship detention facility. There was concern that the computer controlled security doors would all "pop" open at midnight. Had to stay on overtime, by 2 or 3am nothing happened...got to go home..."happy New Years". šŸŽ‰
 
I remember the guy that bought our previous house in 1987 was convinced there were going to be huge problems as result of Y2K and that the entire electrical grid would be down for some time. Being the greedy entrepreneur that he thought he was, he bought up a garage full of gasoline powered electrical generators that the intended to sell for huge profits. Stores were selling generators pre Y2K with a "No Return" policy. Of course the guy ended up with a garage full of generators he could not sell.
 
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I remember all the lists of things we should stock up on, and the only thing that managed to worry me was running out of toilet paper, so I had a whole cabinet full of that to pack when we moved from Georgia to Ohio in November of1999.
 
I just sat in the living room starting at 11:30 wondering if everything was going to go dark as the clock flipped over to midnight and the year 2000. Kinda funny thinking back on it... assuming nothing would happen but then that sneaky "but what if it does?" thought came in once in a while. By 12:02, the thought was replaced with "THAT is what all the media fear mongering was about?!" :rolleyes:
 
Well at least two hilarious shows came out of it. An episode of "My Name is Earl," where the main cast got locked in a store that night and assumed it must be Y2K and started a whole new society by morning. Also an episode of "King of the Hill," where we got to see Dale Gribble's basement stash of Mountain Dew and cigarettes, plus one hamster and one gerbil he was planning to mate for the meat.
 
That was new years day of 2000 right? All the computers were in trouble right? The world as we knew it, could be over, right? Well New Years eve was really a messed up deal, right? How do you party like it's 1999 when your all gonna die? right? :)
 
I think the Y2K panic was the first real internet led "conspiracy" type hoax. Planes were supposed to fall out of the sky, the power grids would fail, elevators in skyscrapers wouldn't work, people would be stuck in subways, starvation and roving gangs of thieves, murder, rape, and mayhem etc., etc.
When I was a little kid, I promised myself that I'd be in Times Square, NYC for the year 2000. And I was. ;)
 
Paco Dennis said:
That was new years day of 2000 right? All the computers were in trouble right? The world as we knew it, could be over, right? Well New Years eve was really a messed up deal, right? How do you party like it's 1999 when your all gonna die? right? :)
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šŸ˜ Well yeah, that's pretty much it... the entire world was going to go dark at the stroke of midnight when the grid wouldn't know what to do when there was no longer a "19" to start the date. That's actually the only thing I was a li'l bit concerned about... I didn't hoard food... I didn't hoard toilet paper... and I didn't build a bunker. :) But I did live relatively close to a nuclear plant, so it *was* a little scary and I *did* have Potassium iodide (KI) tablets on hand. I'd always been fascinated with Pripyat/Chernobyl, so the "fear" was already implanted.
 
Awful years.

Spent so much of it trying to mediate between D&T and the rote coders who were totally clueless about proper code remediation and had an intractable uncooperative attitude. You'd think they were from Missouri because reading was a lost art to them and "Ya gots tuh shows me, hee-yuk!" was their only learning style. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Tutorial, tutorial, tutorial sessions. Mentoring, mentoring, mentoring. Meanwhile management received the bad reports and down came "The beatings will continue until things are whipped into shape."

Spent many nights and weekends for several years running test suites against their code. I think we uncovered as many general flaws and ludicrous performance problems in their pidgin-Cobol as we did Y2K failings. A set of fairly simple changes cut a weekly set of jobs from 28 hours of run time down to a mere 3 hours!

Be afraid! If you knew how much marginal, slipshod, barely working code is out there in the wild you might never get into an airplane again.

Somehow we got through it. Very weary after it was over. Offer from D&T but I had no interest in relocating to Toronto or dealing with the constant travel. Same with IBM and Poughkeepsie or D.C. Don't get me started on the U.S. Navy, knocking on my door again after being left alone since the 1970s.

Made some very good friends though. Pretty intense people. I almost wish I'd kept up with some of them. We moved mountains, and to today nobody appreciates it.
 
My memory is that, in the lead-up, the computer-dependent world had received a big splash of cold water in the face. The transition point was, in fact, critical. Much effort had to go into making for digitally accommodating a smooth transition.

Personally, I didn't know what to expect, and was at friends' place when midnight came and passed.

It's was clear that creating unnecessary froth had been some hustlers' method to make money, through public panic tactics of various sorts.

But the practical preparation for the 1999/2000 transition wasn't cheap. Within a short time, some experts had attempted a close calculation of the cost of the technical effort to avoid a dead stop in countless computer systems in government, banks, industry, commercial enterprises, etc. I remember reading an estimate figure of $7 billion (in the Western World?). Anyhow, I was glad this money had been spent on managing an ominous situation.
 
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I was hoping I could use Wayback to find archived AOL chatrooms discussing Y2K but came out empty. I did find this transcript from February of 1999 which is an interesting read. I do know that the IRC chats and AOL Chat Rooms were filled with talk of doom and gloom at that time. The "World is Coming to an End" type of chats ;)

https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/y2k-chat-on-aol-718710
 

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