How the UK coped with the millennium bug 15 years ago.

[atomic_joe2]

In the final months of 1999 concern grew into panic that the millennium bug was going to cause computers to malfunction and potentially endanger everything from tills to power stations. It didn't happen quite like that, but the public safety warnings from the time remain intriguing.

Comments

[jeliza]

Articles like this that don't mention the legions of programmers/etc that spent part of 1998 and most of 1999 making sure to *fix* things so the breakdowns (mostly) didn't happen are irresponsible as heck, imho.

[ceruleanst]

It's my favorite example of how blinkered the deterministic outlook of popular rhetoric is. The focus is always on prediction, centered on the assumption that the primary aim of a prediction is to be proven right. This is why every positive step taken on environmental concerns is going to be undone sooner or later.

[compost75]

Exactly. I worked for several years on ONE big banks system that would emphatically have failed spectacularly. The fact that it worked flawlessly was a testament to my team's work.

[tcpip]

True that. It was a very good time to be a COBOL to C programmer.

[fabrisse]

I spent the better part of three years as a contractor updating and documenting legacy code so that y2k would be a non-event, too. Shortest contract was three weeks, and the longest was 10 months, and they were mostly financial institutions or government agencies. (sigh)

[rhysande]

Yup. A major portion of my husband and sons' work through the last couple years of the 90s was writing Y2K patches/rewriting code for the aviation and rail industries. We might be reading a very different article if they and legions of others hadn't realized there was a problem and then worked to prevent it from happening.