Oh, the hysteria was overblown. I was in college and still writing nonsense 5-page papers for English class; I did one of mine on Y2K. I picked up one of those moronic ‘And lo, the seven seals will be opened, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse shall be loosed’ books.
It had half-a-page ‘instructions’ on how to do things like make your own latrine, for when everything collapsed and the plumbing died and was never fixed. (And nobody had porta-potties, I guess.)
Some people actually believed things like this were going to happen. That was nonsense. In that sense, it was overblown, yes. But things could have been very bad, and they only were not, because of the money that was spent.
My friends father worked for the City of Calgary electric company and according to him they didn’t even try and fix the old systems because they were so old. They just built new redundant subsystems for all the systems that they thought were prone to y2k failure. According to him, many old substations did fail at one point or another, but power was rerouted through the backup systems instantly. I have no idea how these systems worked or why they relied on the date but it was a good excuse to update 30+ year old systems IMO.
Not altogether. Very few languages make allowance for fixed-point decimal arithmetic or for the vital PICTURE attribute. (To my knowledge, COBOL, PL/I, Ada [Ada 95 and up] and RPG are the only ones that do it natively; Ruby and Java can do it by library calls.) This may change as a result of the new IEEE floating-point standard, but Intel is trying to sabotage that.
Not generally true, especially when doing decimal arithmetic.
The standard does not generally go with languages, but with cultures. Apparently French Canada and English Canada follow, respectively, the European and American rules. (The official international standard for decades has been yyyy-mm-dd, but it’s not used in America because, being an international standard, it’s obviously the work of commie atheist baby eaters.)
Amen. I can personally attest that without the months of work that I and a few others put in, most of the transactions passing through a major local banking system would have been automatically deleted before they were ever processed. That would (trust me) have been bad.
And usually for good reason. Converting from Julian to YYMMDD took more processing power, and machines back then were extremely limited. On the IBM mainframes running Cobol a lot of data was stored in Binary Coded Decimal which made it much easier to read and write than if it was stored in binray format. Think about the process of converting a julian date to YYMMDD format versus taking a BCD formatted date which was almost in character format. The IBM machines had instructions that calculated directly in BCD.
If most of your time is spend reading numeric information, doing a simple calculation on it, then writing characters to paper, a date stored in BCD with YYMMDD format is the superior choice. We were also extremely limited by storage space, so it actually did make a difference to not store two more year digits.
Plus, who in their right mind thought code from '77 would be running in in 2000 or could convice managment that it was worth the extra expense to do anything about it.
And many people who used COBOL programs in their jobs were at least aware of the problem before that. Say you worked at a bank, and used software to calculate dates for things like mortgages or certificates of deposit. If the program you were using uses calendar dates, and has space for only two digits for the year, you would have started to notice problems quite early - say, when calculating a 30-year mortgage starting in 1970!
That doesn’t mean they could start to fix it - computer memory and processing power were both scarce resources in 1970 - but it does mean that by the time the hype about Y2K was picking up steam, programmers and people working in the industries that were going to be worst affected had been aware of the problem for quite some time.
Y2K was laughably overblown and folks who credit themselves with preventing real harm by fixing it ignore the fact that there was no fundamental difference between organizations which spent millions and those which spent nothing; Cecil uses Italy as the proof type for this at a national level.
Y2K (like AGW) was a Great Cause. There is something in our nature that needs Great Causes and clings to them.
I went on public record beginning in 1998 stating that Y2K was a Great Cause and predicting, in writing, in public and to the enterprise for whose (healthcare) computers I was in charge, that it was overblown hysteria. I’m not a programmer but I do consider myself a pretty darn good judge of humans and why we behave the way we do.
I have gone on record predicting a similar demise for the AGW Great Cause, and for the same reasons, so my answer to Cecil’s rhetorical question about whether or not we should relax about AGW is “Yes.”
Of course the dilemma is that one day we’ll be crying wolf and it will be at the door. Those of us skeptical that the boy crying wolf is wrong yet again will have our comeuppance. I’d wager, if there means to wager it, we’ll be wrong yet again (this time with AGW) but I fully admit it’s based on human nature and not “science.” I myself look for a Big Comet or perhaps a Bad Virus to blindside us while we are Great Causing elsewhere.
And there will be those AGW believers who credit themselves somehow with doing Great Good even if AGW as a Cause fizzles out, just like those who vested their lives in Y2K amelioration need to feel their Cause was not a bust. That’s part of our nature, too. Kids, Y2K was a bust. But it made the Time Bomb 2000 guy a ton of money and provided me hours of entertainment on message boards with people hiding in bunkers.
I’m kinda in the middle. There were problems that needed to be fixed and were. It forced some companies to upgrade to newer computers.
On the other hand, the potential effects were way overblown. My credulous sister refused to fly around that time (convinced airplanes would fall out of the sky) so we did not have an 80th birthday celebration for my mother.
My best friend, knowing that I was a computer geek, asked me what to do to “prepare”. I told him to take an extra $50 out of the ATM in case there was a glitch in software that couldn’t get fixed over the weekend. But, no need to buy a generator, take all your money out of the bank, buy a gun, etc.
The behavior and rhetorical style of some AGW proponents looks similar to the Y2K hysteria, but the science looks more solid.
Here is one concrete example (of many that I personally worked on) counter to your assertion:
A marina billing system I fixed calculated electrical and moorage charges by performing date arithmetic on the start and end date, many of which crossed the Y2K boundary. Without the fix, calculations would have to be done by hand for any boat with a start date prior to Y2K.
Is your post supposed to imply that there was no difference between the marinas using this software that did fix in advance vs the marinas that did not fix in advance?
Y2K fixes saved me something on the order of $60k in tuition. National Merit just wasn’t going to accept PSAT scores from the year 1900 and I honestly can’t blame them, can you imagine how much the analogies must have changed since then?
I noticed the mistake myself while I was going through my records, and boy was that fun to try to explain to various bureaucrats in the months when Y2K became a punchline. So wherever you are, programmer who had to burn the midnight oil for the College Board, I salute you.
And really, anything that encourages companies to overhaul their systems and outgrow freaking COBOL is fine by me.
Indeed, the two are quite similar, and in fact the science in the case of AGW doesn’t quite “look more solid.” Therein lies the crux. The science is more or less clearly saying temperatures will rise, but it says a lot less in regards to “… and there will be catastrophe.” It’s a lot like how programmers said clearly in regards to Y2K that serious bugs do exist, but hadn’t actually taken to the pulpits to add, “… and the world will melt.”
Chief Pedant, can you explain your comment that I highlighted above? As a person with actual knowledge about the Y2K situation I would be interested in knowing what you are were really trying to say.
Ha, come on. Chief Pedant was obviously talking out of his ass. At first he did pick up the “hype” pattern that was going on, but then got irrational himself and took his view too far. Typical human.
I was working in the Digital (remember them?) Unix O/S group and we had some major work to make our Unix systems Y2K-safe. There were major problems deep in the heart of the O/S that took us over a year to find, scope, and design fixes for. While we were in there we also fixed the 2038 problem since all the dates had to be addressed. I think we released the version of the O/S with all the fixes at the beginning of 1999, but some of the layered products weren’t fixed until closer to the deadline.
It wasn’t trivial, it wasn’t cataclysmic, but it was work that needed to be done or our O/S and many/most of the layered products would give bad results or stop working completely.
(by CP): “Y2K was laughably overblown and folks who credit themselves with preventing real harm by fixing it ignore the fact that there was no fundamental difference between organizations which spent millions and those which spent nothing; Cecil uses Italy as the proof type for this at a national level”
My apologies…have to take the occasional sidetrack from the Dope as my employer refuses to pay me unless I show up. The cruelties of Capitalism, I guess.
Software needs fixing. Buggy software with a bad mechanism to account for dates which are critical for the software to work is…buggy software that needs fixing.
That’s not what Y2K was. Y2K was taking that absolute truth and expanding it out into a Great Cause. Not just whole programs and government initiatives and budgetary considerations sidetracking every other need for the Great Cause, but books and mindsets and competetions among the Knowledgeable to show that the obvious and unavoidable Consequence of doing nothing was The End of the World as We Know It. Any healthcare enterprise (my expertise) not addressing Y2K with some sort of formal program, for example, would be considered completely irresponsible, even if their patients were dying because of lack of money in some other area…
It’s that TEOTWAWKI component that I am referring to. There is an enormous difference between bad software generating an incorrect electrical bill, fixed a priori or fixed after the first set of bad bills, and the entire electrical grid failing. Y2K was the hysteria that not only the Grid, but any and every other system remotely connected with a computer would fail, fail catastrophically and fail simultaneously.
It was that hysteria which drove organizations to squander enormous resources consulting, analyzing and “fixing” their “Y2K” problem. At a public level, it was that sort of hysteria which drove people into such anxiety.
While I am sure your marina billing system fix was important for that bill cycle, you’d need a better proof case, I think, for the world to say “Wow; that was a close one.” And at a national level the resources spent were substantially disproportionate to the issues avoided, with no noticeable difference between those who turned it into a Great Cause and spent a fortune, and those who muddled along.
That’s exactly what Y2K was. Problems in software and hardware due to date mechanisms not properly handling the year 2000 and beyond. Primarily due to storing dates as 2 digit years which results in sorting and comparison problems.
This is a bizarre claim that this was not what Y2K was.
Yes, there was hype as well as reality.
Why would I need a better proof case? That was one simple little example because you ridiculously used the words “no noticeable difference”. Most organizations (that one included) had many, many of these types of things. What it all adds up to is an inability to use the computer to perform a substantial portion of it’s duties requiring substantial manual labor to work around it.
Here is a question for you: If you were the president of a medium sized manufacturing company around Y2K and you were told the following problem areas existed, would you pay to have them fixed or not?
Order Entry - can’t place new orders due to date validations
A/R - Aging will be wrong until all open items from before Y2K are closed (could be years)
Fixed Assets - Depreciation calculations will be incorrect
MRP - Those dates that get used to put demand and supply in various buckets are going to put them in the wrong buckets - you will have incorrect shop orders and purchase orders created. The impact is that you will create the wrong quantity of product and at the wrong time, also your available to promise (used during Order Entry) will be incorrect
Chief Pedant is making a distinction between the fact of code issues, which may have been legitimate and potential for lots of expenditures to deal with the repurcussions if not fixed, and the level and extent of hysteria and media attention for the presumed repercussions. Realizing that your billing system is going to be wrong, your inventory control system is going to be wrong, your cost projection system is going to be wrong, and that the cost of trying to sort that out on the fly and manually adjust all those computations will be severe is a legitimate concern, and a real problem that cannot be ignored. But that level of attention for Y2K was not what got attention. What got attention was the idea that the power grid would go down and not be resurrectable, that airplanes would fall out of the sky because they couldn’t fly anymore, that the banking system would collapse and all bank accounts would suddenly lose all records so you would suddenly have $0 balances that you could never recover. That was the hysteria of Y2K that Chief Pedant is talking about.
Now for the record, I don’t recall seeing that much about that level of concern. A few passing remarks in the media, but nothing to the level of attention of, say, Michael Jackson’s death. But when the Powers That Be won’t accept “we looked and embedded dates won’t make a difference to our systems” as an answer, and require you to fix something that isn’t broken, that is a bit much. And when they expect you to spend millions fixing something that will have zero effect instead of spending that money on something that is a known problem with real, measurable effects, that is hysteria.
