this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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You need to qualify your statement about Y2K being fear mongering. People saying all technology would stop (think planes crashing out of the sky) were clearly fear mongering or conspiracy theorists. People saying certain financial systems needed to be updated so loans didn't suddenly go from the year 1,999 to 19,100 or back to 1900 were not fear mongering. It's only because of a significant amount of work done by IT folks that we have the luxury of looking back and saying it was fear mongering.
Look at this Wikipedia page for documented errors. One in particular was at a nuclear power plant. They were testing their fix but accidentally applied the new date to the actual equipment. It caused the system to crash. It took seven hours to get back up and they had to use obsolete equipment to monitor conditions until then. Presumably if the patch wasn't applied this would happen at midnight on January 1st 2000 too.
Y2K was a real problem that needed real fixes. It just wasn't an apocalyptic scenario.
Planes crashing out of the sky wouldn't have been inconceivable. Say you have two air traffic control systems that are synchronizing - one handles dates with a modulo 100 (00-99, i.e. 1900-1999), another handles them in epoch time. All of a sudden the two reported time + positions of two different planes don't match up by a century, and collision projection software doesn't work right. I've seen nastier bugs than that, in terms of conceptual failure.
At no point is that a theory about a "conspiracy" either, IDK why you're bandying that term around.
Conspiracy is probably the wrong term. What I mean is that some (keyword: some) predictions were quite extreme and apocalyptic. See the fringe group response section for examples of what I was trying to convey.
That's what I meant by the sort of "conspiratorial" response. Maybe I should reword my post to make it more clear?
"Fanatical" would be a word to use there maybe.
You're spot on. The vast majority of news coverage and "hype" from the general public relating to Y2K was all horse shit, but there were critical systems that did have issues and needed some work.
For the most part, the whole 19100 issue was a display bug, and likely wouldn't have caused problems, and the same for 1900... Those are examples that people generally saw at banks and whatnot, it would, for the most part, look weird, but for the most part, wouldn't create any actual problems. It would just be confusing for a while until the system caught up.
I think there's a few examples of companies missing the January 1st deadline and ending up with stuff marked as January 1900 for a bit. Otherwise they didn't have any significant issues.
Anything that involves a legally binding agreement would be critical though. Since the date is part of the agreement terms, it would need to be correct, and shown correctly.
Unless the "bug" literally crashed the system (which, it really should not have in most cases), like in your example, or it was connected to a legal contract, then it really wasn't that big of a problem.
The media, and people in general kept going on about it like they knew what the technical problem was, and it was always just conjecture and banter that made people worry unnecessarily.
What I'm trying to say is that Y2K was something that needed to be fixed but the likelihood that it would affect any singular person in society was very small. Those that were going to be affected, generally knew who they were and they were taking the steps required to fix the problem.
I remember reading a primary source about someone's experience fixing Y2K stuff. I wish I could find it or remember more. The funniest part was that they actually got everything to work, but on January 1st when they tried to get into work their badge didn't work! The system on their badge reader was broken due to Y2K lol.