this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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I wasn't working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it'd most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.
Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive π
That's a pretty good description. And most software back then didn't use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who's not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.
And computer networking, especially the ability to remote into a system and make changes or deliver updates en masse, was nowhere near as robust as it is today meaning a lot of those fixes were done manually.
And that modem was handling the nuke codes, right?
Most of the y2k problem was custom software, and really old embedded stuff. In my case, all our systems were fine at the OS, and I donβt remember any commercial software we had trouble with, but we had a lot of custom software with problems, as did our partners