Oddly, I have never seen a book or article looking back on the Y2K Bug. After much hype, it was a major non-event.
Did we dodge the bullet, or was it just massively over-sold? What was the worst thing that happened due to the bug?
(I was thinking about another over-sold non-event in the Dope today, and that got me thinking. Want to goes what it it?)
It was both massively over-sold and a bullet-dodge. There was (and is) a lot of non-compliant code in the world. Most of the important stuff was fixed way ahead of time. The stuff that did fail did so in such spectacularly uninteresting ways that nobody cared.
The US government and private industry started getting ready long before and possibly spent hundreds of millions of dollars. It was probably overkill.
As I recall, the major TV networks followed the non-event live and really had to scramble to fill the time, mostly saying, well, nothing happened here.
All the programing and data bases did need to be fixed. The same with date critical devices that required a valid date to collect or process data. Had the world went about their business like usual it would not have been a smooth transition. The media dooms day hype was way out there though.
A university in the USA had an old computer that had drives the size of wardrobe cabinets They powered it up before dismantling it. At that time only one drive worked anymore. They set it to work and let it cycle to the new year, and the whole system came to a halt. It would be dramatic in that all that mechanical equipment stopped spining and clicking away.
It was way over-hyped but it was also well handled.
I speak as a Programmer/Analyst who helped to ensure 2 companies were Y2K prepared. In both cases, if we did nothing our Business systems would have failed in many interesting ways. In the case of one company, our phones would have stopped working. (That was some stupid code, no excuse)
Jim
I think this was a case of over-hyping that actuallly helped solve the problem. CEO’s and board members actually listened when their managers needed money to fix the problem and they already understood what it was. There was some waste. There was some side benefits too caused by people analyzing old code.
Y2K was a great example of a s"Suicidal Prophecy". The fact that it was so hyped caused it to not come true (and that is a good thing).
You are right. There was a lot of code improvement.
There was also the nightmare scenario of ISO9000 meets Y2K compliance. The great bureaucratic horror story I have ever witnessed. (Hyperbole please don’t jump on me)
Jim
The other thing the hype-mongers tended to gloss over is that the Y2K problem started getting fixed in the late 1960s. Anybody in the financial business in 1970 was dealing with 30-year mortages and 30-year Treasuries whose last payment was due in Jan 2000. So they had to at least start resolving that problem way back then and any systems they built in the 70s and 80s were already Y2K-aware where it mattered. Any HR system that tracks pensions needed to be able to deal with people whose retirement date was projected after Y2K too. What about insurance policies? If I bought a 20-year term policy in 1981 the software had to deal correctly then with the fact that the policy would expire in 2001.
Certainy there were a lot of later systems in other industries that didn’t have to deal with the far future. And they got fixed as that future arrived. But the idea that no programmer on Earth had ever thought about the rollover until maybe 1997 when the media noticed it is ludicrous.
I’m still curious to see how we deal with the 2037 bug. Presumably the OS’es will change (have changed) to a 64-bit internal counter. It’s the rest of the middle layers & appware I wonder about.
To the OP: Wich other oversold nonevent would that be???
The company I was working for at the time prepared so well the actual event was a bit of a disappointment. They elected to phase out a noncompliant mainframe rather than fit its bugs and put massive effort into identifying all noncompliant code. As a last precaution a doomsday team stayed locked in the corporate headquarters to shut down systems before midnight fell in Europe and not turn them on again until after mignight on the west coast of the US. The final result was no more than a few scales at mine sites printing a wrong date.
On another forum I visit, a guy from Slovenia thinks the stress of Y2K gave him Crohn’s Disease. The poor guy worried himself sick.
In one way, it’s hard to blame the programmers who, 40 years prior, figured the two digits for the year would be fine, as there was no way the same programs would still be used in 2000! In most cases, that was the case for PCs, but many mainframes still used the old code.
Ironically, many of these same programmers, then retired, were hired to go through all the code to make the changes. Others, like my son who was an independent mainframe programmer, got some really juicy contracts with banks to fix things.
IMHO, there was a lot of re-programming done, unknown to most people, that aleviated some major problems. However, the others are right that the media blew it all up way out of proprotion to the actual scope of the problem.
What really bothers me is that when they changed the year from two digits to four, they totally failed to prepare for the upcoming Year 10K Bug! OMG, we’ll have to go though this all over again in Year 10,000! 
I spent the summer of 1999 sitting in a family friend’s office searching for “ddmmyy” and replacing it with “ddmmyyyy” on a system that was coded in the early eighties. It was a huge medical distribution company located all over the country, and had nothing been done, millions of dollars of inventory would have been kicked to the dumpsters instead of sent to hospitals by the automated warehousing system. Y2K definately could have been a disaster, but as others have said, it was hyped quite a bit as well. Either way, it was taken care of, and Y2K paid for my first car 
In the end, it was over hyped. It could have been bad, but was caught early enough. I believe that the problem was never as extreme as it was portrayed. I caught a show on ABC or CBS that interviewed people looking for the collapse of civilization. One woman was stockpiling bicycles to use as barter when all that we knew collapsed. I would love to see a special where they revisted those kooks.
I actually knew people - intelligent people who should have known better - who thought that every thing would come crashing down. One is an electrical engineer who built fail-safe systems into all his own designs, but didn’t believe that the electric company could have had the foresight to do so with theirs. He bought a generator and was stock piling canned goods and stuff. I still tease him about it.
But we can’t claim that there was never any danger. Many many systems needed to be fixed and were. Would they have been without the hype? I dunno. I think so, but who can say?
I agree with what **Shagnasty ** said, on a personal note, I was involved on a Y2K awareness project at UC Berkeley. Since already many computers and systems were dealing with issues and databases for the year 2000 and beyond, 6 months after the event I made the point that the price for attending one of the meetings (a disaster survival kit) was more likely to be used after an earthquake than for Y2k. Meetings like that were useful to reduce the fears.
After all the preparations, only one office computer on campus suffered a failure due the Y2K bug, and indeed it was a computer that was due for upgrade but we miss it.
AFAIK the biggest snafu was reported on a series of spy satellites that suddenly refused to work properly, but it seems that was corrected, hard to get a straight answer from the intelligence community you know.
I was one of those kooks, but only very marginally.
On my last visit to the supermarket, I bought up on tinned food. Not stockpiling by any means, just about double or three times what I’d normally buy. I definitely wasn’t into the locked-down-in-a-bunker-in-the-forest mentality, but I thought to myself, “99% chance nothing will happen. 0.9% chance there will be some very short term logistical problems with supply of food and other goods (a matter of only days), 0.1% chance we’re all fucked, and then it will not matter anyway what I do. When it doesn’t happen, I’ll just buy less beans and such on the next couple of trips to the supermarket. No biggie.”
So, I can look back on it without embarrassment. In fact, my local supermarket had signs saying (or words to this effect): “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we think it will be nothing. If you want to buy a bit extra, it’s up to you, but we’re not pushing you to do it, m’kay?”
Contrary voice: I do not believe it was overhyped within the pertinent industries. Recall Dennis’s Principles of Management by Crisis:
[ol][li] To get action out of management, it is necessary to create the illusion of a crisis in the hope it will be acted on.[/li][li] Management will select actions or events and convert them to crises. It will then over-react.[/li][li] Management is incapable of recognizing a true crisis.[/ol]Despite the billions wasted on unnecessary conversions to client/server applications and the panic-in-the-streets mentality that overflowed into newsrooms and survivalist groups, I suspect that we would have run right down the rapids, tumbling over a succession of ultimately disastrous falls, if upper management had not been stampeded into doing something.[/li]
There was never a chance that the civilized world was going to crumple in 23 successive disasters as midnight, January 1, 2000 made its way around the globe. However, we could easily have seen ERP and manufacturing systems fail throughout the late 1990s as durable goods orders crashed the systems with schedules that extended months or years into the future. Following January 1, we could have seen a lot of accounting systems get trashed as Accounts Payables and Accounts Receivables systems began to incorrectly age outstanding debts and obligations.
The data center where I worked instituted a “no two-digit date” policy in the 1980s and we instituted a policy around 1990 that any program that was modified for any reason had to become Y2K compliant as a part of the change. We suffered through several years of abuse for “overcharging” and “featherbedding” until the news media began hyping the problem. As we faced the deadline with the systems that no one had had to touch in the late 1990s, we still were accused of inventing a crisis for the purpose of “shaking down” the company until the hype finally got the attention of management.
Another thing to consider is that the US has about 18 hours to see the effects of Y2K and make neccesary preparations. The situation in New Zealand and to a lesser extent, Australia was much less certain.
If the news media can’t find a few hours of news on the freaking end of the millenium then someone is doing something very wrong.
One relatively trivial Y2K bug that’s still not fixed everywhere is applications displaying a 2 digit-year from a function that delivers not “last 2 digits of the year” (as the application’s designers assumed) but “year minus 1900”. This can be found on the Web by googling e.g. for “October 30, 105” - see e.g. the date displayed on this site.
That and back then, computer memories were small and every bit counted. If you could save room by leaving out unnecessary code (i.e., two superfluous digits) you’d be nuts not to.
And as a tangent, I’ve been reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. An interesting take on the subject:
I’ve got a couple programs that do that. The first that comes to mind is Master of Orion II. The game timestamps saved games and so right now it’s saying that it is the year 105.