While a few shops had begun addressing the issue in the late 1980s (all the code I wrote beginning in 1984 was Y2K compliant), it was the presentation of the doomsday scenarios that finally got most management off their duffs to address the problem. (Of course, most of them couldn’t make the right choice, so billions were wasted replacing functional code with untested Client/Server nonsense–and then ripping it out at the last minute to simply fix the original code.)
As usual, the media, particularly TV, got most of it wrong and created unnecessary hysteria long after management had finally awakened to the issue and reluctantly coughed up some money to handle it. (I would be curious to see a citation from the Gartner Group subsequent to July, 1998, claiming that it would not be fixed in time.)
By the time 2000/01/01 rolled around, I was pretty sure that there would be no meltdown–but only because I had seen the efforts being expended to prevent that calamity.
I was another one of those programmers fixing Y2K bugs in 1999. The only thing I was really worried about was people going wonky, so I moved our 401K from stocks to gov’t bonds, and we did our shopping early that week, just in case there was a last minute run on T. P. We did stay up to have a glass of wine at midnight, then went off to bed. ho-hum.
I spent February 2000 enjoying the hospitality of a relative of a friend who runs a rice mill in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. He said that he had no work to do, and his machines were idle. He didn’t mind though, because this was due to his regular customers having too much rice on their hands - the stuff they’d bought from him in late '99 thinking the world would end. So he had the mill running 24/7 before the new year, got loads of cash, and spent it with me hanging around seedy bars the following year. He was cool with Y2K.
It turned out, the only problem in Australia was that a few people in Adelaide had slight difficulty with certain types of bus tickets. Not exactly the end of the world.
I was quite fascinated by the issue in 93 and 94 and thought it did have potential for big problems. By the time 98 rolled around though I didn’t expect much. My mother was one of the people in charge of the project fix at her bank and they were expecting to finish with a few months to spare. And many companies were reporting that they would be finishing ahead of time as well.
I expected a few more glitches and surprising results, like that person who got a 100 something year late fee at Blockbusters, then there were but the way things happened was well within my personally conceived error bars of the events.
We had a local “stadium” church, you know won that hold thousands for each service, actually buy up local TV time in November or December 1999 prime time on a weeknight and put on a scare fest. They brought in “experts” (people selling survival gear, etc.) to tell everyone how bad it was going to be.
I actually went on something of a mission to talk people out of the histeria after that.
The funny thing was to look at the want adds come March, April 2000. “For sale Generator, never used”, “For sale survival rations, great for camping”, “For sale 200 gallon water tank, like new”
Y2K was the greatest get rich sceme in history. Sell people on a bogus deadline and then make 'em pay through the teeth for you to “save them” from the impending disaster. I personally knew people who were pulling down more that $100k just to code COBOL. Today they make about half that.
I thought there would be unexpected potentially serious localised problems. I wasn’t particularly worried, but did get extra copies of bank statements mailed to me at the end of December as evidence of my balances. No other precautions really, but I certainly wasn’t sure it would all go fine.
balding? Nope - long brown hair and female
chain smoking? nope - never smoked
50-60 years old? nope - 29 in January
COBOL programmer? - yep
$100,000? - I wish!
We had decided to go backpacking for my birthday in January of 1999. When we mentioned it to a coworker, he honestly thought we were doing it for Y2K preparedness. Even though we were all IT people, he still thought the world would go to hell in a handbasket once Jan 1, 2000 rolled around. He was one of those buying propane tanks and so on.
What did we do? Absolutely nothing at all. We didn’t even get out more money.
I figured a few computer routines would produce incorrect data. Then the people who ran those reports would have them fixed. Maybe in 10-20 places on the planet somewhere, those routines would be connected to automated processes and therefore things that were supposed to happen wouldn’t happen. In which case the customers would call in and someone would do a manual override, report the bug, and it would be fixed.
I still have my Utne Reader guide to survival after Y2K, with its “How to Recognize Edible Plants” and “How to Start a Fire After the Matches are All Gone” and other such tips that assumed something on the order of Asimov’s “Nightfall” was gonna happen.
Didn’t believe in any disaster. Didn’t care if one occurred.