My family had to pay to have a small section of an old headstone filled and reengraved because of what we laughingly referred to as a Y2K problem.
My paternal grandfather, who I never met, died in 1948. His headstone was engraved at that time, and, as was the custom for husband / wife graves, my grandmothers name was put on the headstone at that time, as
Ethel Hedonia
1904- 19__
Grandma made it to 2002, so we had to fix that.
I work for an electric company and we did a LOT of work on the business side in preparation for Y2K. We would have had some serious business interruptions if we hadn’t. The power plant control systems needed far less, if any changes made. Fears of blackouts were quite overblown IMHO.
I remember hearing that companies ran into problems with that programming logic in the 1970’s. Age calculation routines written 10-15 years before would assume that if the two-digit birth year was less than say 75 (so for example 55) then the birth century was 19 (so 1955). Otherwise the birth century was 18. Along comes 1975, somebody records a newborn baby and it’s 100 years old. The people who had written the programs hadn’t expected them to be in use 10 or 15 years later. The same problem will probably appear in 2050,
Wow! We should have thought about fixing that back in 1999 with the rest of the Y2K issues.
Another one that showed up before 2000: In the late 1980s or early 1990s, there was a case where a 104-year-old woman got a letter from her local school board, reminding her parents to sign her up for kindergarten.
(Aside: When I first wrote this post, I had “late 80s or early 90s”. Old habits die hard.)
Yeah, probably a lot of the “Y2K fixes” that were implemented weren’t actually fixes, just temporary band-aids with the assumption that, surely, we won’t STILL be using this system XX years later. But it’s not nearly as much of a problem, for two reasons. First, I have to imagine that most of the fixes were actual fixes. Second, even of those systems that’ll fail again, they won’t all fail at the same time. The problem with Y2K wasn’t any one of the problems; it was that all of the problems were going to be happening simultaneously. There are a lot of things that aren’t a big deal if they fail, as long as they’re fixed within a few days, but some of those things can become a big deal, if they can’t be fixed for a long time because all of the software engineers are already busy fixing everything else.