Dates, Centuries and Y2K

Soon, when they open for business, I will make an appointment for my fourth anti-Covid 19 vaccination but that started me thinking - does anyone still have any of the Y2K spray that the snake-oil salesmen were selling in 1999 to supposedly protect us from the Millenium bug? it may help prevent Covid. :woohoo: :woohoo:

That spray worked well, Morris, did you know anybody who caught the bug?
Not sure how well it'd work against Covid, it'd be past it's use by date, now.

Got some KY spray. Might allow us to slip past the infection.

Lang wrote:

Got some KY spray. Might allow us to slip past the infection.

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Funny bugger Lang , gave me a good chuckle

Paul

Kiwis would use lanox I suppose

Bluey

Morris wrote:

..... does anyone still have any of the Y2K spray that the snake-oil salesmen were selling in 1999 to supposedly protect us from the Millenium bug? it may help prevent Covid. :woohoo: :woohoo:

As someone who was involved in Y2K long before it fashionable(presented it to the NT Government in 1995) in the public awareness it is annoying(polite word) when the great unwashed claim it was a hoax, fake or snake oil because it was such a non-event on 1st January for most people. The only reason it was such a non-event was a lot of people did a lot of work in the years leading up to 2000 making sure hardware, software and people weren't adversely affected. And yes there were business that were affected, not company bankrupting stuff that might make the news, but smaller applications that were overlooked or missed or failed due to issues and even years later you might see of Y2K related issues that slipped through the cracks. Due to reputational and insurance concerns at the time Y2K issues were mostly hidden in PR spin and internalised and many of the stories only surfaced years later when people in the industry felt safe to talk about them.

The most impressive example of Y2K spin that I like to share was when a very well known vehicle club in Victoria that offers insurance and breakdown services had a major outage over a whole weekend a few months prior to 2000 that required a full weekend of staff and past contractors like me to get called in to essentially rebuild/restore most of their IT environment. By the time we woke on the Monday the news services was reporting how said company/club had suffered a major outage as part of their Y2K preparations and testing. The issue was nothing to do with Y2K however someone very cleverly decided to blame it on Y2K because it made it look like they were being proactive with the issue, probably reverse spin for this topic, but a good example of how the truth was hidden when it needed to be at the time. For keeping the real reason to themselves, a severe software issue in a particular vendors disk drives, the affected company enjoyed many years of free hardware and support from the vendor in return for protecting their reputation.

The Y2K 'bug' was very real and is a victim of its own success, in most part due to people doing their jobs very well at the time.

stepping off soapbox now....

Terry

Gryphon,
I know the year 2K bug was a huge problem but it related ONLY to computers and computer operated stuff. The snake-oil salesmen had gullible people believing it was a disease that would affect humans.
My Wife and I flew to Tasmania on 1st January 2000. We left Melbourne at about 11am. I said that if there were any computer problems with the airline they would have struck at midnight, not after 11am.
Morris.

Terry

Was it actually a "bug" or just to do with dates and clocks in systems not understanding the change over to a new century not being catered for in their original programming?

Lang

Lang wrote:

Terry

Was it actually a "bug" or just to do with dates and clocks in systems not understanding the change over to a new century not being catered for in their original programming?

Lang

A bit of both. And it wasn't just computers it was cars, planes, telephone exchanges, telephones, medical equipment.... the computer chip was almost everywhere by then and not just on people's desks and they were all programmed somehow

There were systems written in the 1970's and 80's when storage was expensive and transmssion speeds were in bits per second not Megabits per second like today so the extra 2 digits (16 bits) would have added considerable costs (about 15 to 20%) to company's IT running costs. I remember querying a manager about it when I started work in 1985. The genuine expectation was that the systems would be completely rewritten by then.

Now most code uses "Common Use Modules". They are effectively building blocks. A common one is/was a date validation routine. Others might be for post codes, vehicle registrations numbers, addresses etc. The idea is the company has it written once then if Gryphon and I were working for the same company and needed to validate dates then we would both pass the information in a standard format to the same module which would then tell us whether the date was valid or not. Because these worked well they were used everywhere and didn't get modified for decades. Then when they needed to change them they had to change the standard format it received and returned information in requiring every system to be updated and tested. This was the big effort.

There was also a second trap. Some systems, particularly airlines, use GMT which meant their systems needed to handle the change in time for both (which was easier than anticipated).

Some operating systems recognized the potential problem in their original design. Unix is one that stores it's dates and times as the number of seconds since 1934 (I think). So it calculates from there. They have a problem in a few years time in that the number gets to big to be stored (in 2034 I think) so there are people working on that now.

Lang as far as I know it was only to do with the fact that most older programs calander went to 1999 and no further

I was working in power stations at the time and it was taken very seriously and a huge effort went into making sure we all stayed on line

The big concern was what would happen when the calendar ran out of date, i.e 12.00 am 2000

I am by no means a expert at this but do recall all the head ache quite well


Paul