There was a great example of the Suicide Phophecy in Portland Oregon not too long before Y2K (in 1998, I think).
Portland is connected to its suburbs across the Columbia River by only two bridges: those on I-5 and I-205. The I-5 one is older and is actually two adjacent bridges, each with 3 lanes. Because it’s fairly old, it has drawbridges to let boats go by.
In about May of that year, it was discovered that the bridge-raising mechanism in one of the drawbridges was broken and a major piece of its hardware would have to be replaced, necessitating the bridge be shut down for a couple weeks. They scheduled it for some time in September. Only one of the I-5 bridges was actually going to be shut down, the other was going to be split between north- and south-bound lanes, with the center one reversed twice daily to provide two lanes for the majority of traffic.
During that summer, there was a constant barrage of stories in the media about how this closure was going to cause massive traffic jams on I-5. The stories reported people scheduling vacations during that time, temporarily swapping jobs with people on the other side, and other ways of coping with the closure.
As it turned out, the stories were right to a degree, as there was a major traffic jam on the first day of the closure. But it was on I-205. The I-5 bridge had virtually no traffic that day!
My recollection from reading one of the books on the subject was that a mojor source of doomsday concern was the fact that many pieces of embedded software in electrical distribution subsystems had to be replaced by actually sending a truck out with a replacement part or system for uploading new software.
The accusation was that upper management had waited too long and that there was NO WAY it could get done on time given the time frame. That didn’t turn out to be true.
The other thing I remember is that the Federal government was far from Y2K compliant, and that many systems in many departments were not going to be compliant for another 10-15 years afterward. Most of the fed webpages of the subject seem to be gone.
I was at a medical software company at the time, and I’d agree with this. Per tomndebb, the technical people had no choice but to scream and wail and gnash their teeth to get management’s attention.
On the other hand, most embedded systems don’t care about the date. It’s not like your refrigerator is going to suddenly exclaim “Oh, no, I haven’t been invented yet!”. For most embedded applications, the most serious result would have been that the clock on the front was wrong.
At the college I worked for at the time, the techs and the programmers checked everything early and got it as ready as possible well in advance. I got one call on the helpdesk from the bookstore manager wondering if his order database was going to blow up. I suggested he copy all the files away somewhere just in case, but told him the worst I’d expect would be the 2000 dates sorting to the wrong end of the report. He thought that was no big deal. In the end, even that didn’t happen - dBase III rocks!
On the other hand, I woke up January 2 to find that my watch was hung. I didn’t think it was Y2K - the watch doesn’t even know what month it is, much less what millennium. A new battery fixed it.
I tried Googling/Wiking “year 2037 bug” and variants, but got information on specific bugs numbered 2037. Could you spare a sentence or two with the basics of the Y37 bug?
Oh, and for the guessing-impaired among us, I’ll second the request for the other non-event.
You couldn’t find anything because the bug is going to happen in 2038, not 2037. In short, at 3:14:07 AM on January 19, 2038, a lot of current computer clocks will stop working. You can read about it here.
I worked in the securities industry as a mainframe programmer from 1988 through the Y2K event. By the time the hype in the media began, the problem had largely been solved in that industry. Had nothing been done to fix Y2K problems in the securities industry, at many, many firms, the securities business would have been out of business in 2000. By the time we all started reading about this in newpapers, most IT people in the securities industry, and I believe in banking as well, were quite sure that the problem had been solved. In fact, when I was hired at the firm where I worked from early 1998 through 2000, I had already booked a big money music gig for 12/31/1999. The hiring manager had no problem assuring me that I would NOT have to be on-site for the Y2K event, so sure was he that the situation was and would be under control.
