[Memories] Y2K

[aadroma]

All this talk about the new year, decades, and whatnot have conjured up memories of past new years, and in particular, New Years Eve, 1999

Comments

[ciddyguy]

I remember that all too well and recall reading or hearing that some of the older computers that predated a certain period were the most vulnerable due to the very, very tiny memories/storage they had and only did the date as the last 2 digits, instead of the four full digits, ie, really old mainframes then still in service.

I was at the time running a 486 PC running Win95, yes, you read that right and it went through the whole changeover to 2000 with nary a hitch and I DO recall not buying into the fear as it has been explicitly said by some sources that for most people, this should NOT be an issue but as you pointed out, hardly anyone heeded that and went around in fear of doom anyway.

[strongaxe]

Well, it DID turn out to be a bit anticlimactic. However, there was quite a lot of software that didn't take the century into account, and would exhibit slightly anomalous behavior (for example, one that I examined would work fine most of the time, but between Jan. 1 2000-Dec. 31 2000 it would fail to perform correct backups. It would resume doing so on Jan. 1 2001 however.) Unfortunately, without people actually looking into all that software in detail, it wasn't easy to properly gauge just how much of a problem it would cause

[gorkabear]

I also lived that night anticlimatically. In fact, 3 of use were mobilized at the bank I used to work at as system operators. Nothing happened at all!

[sctmpls]

I worked in the IT department for my current company so we were all on "high alert". Our biggest event was that someone had forgotten to change the "current year" in one of our sytems from 99 to 1999, so when the year rolled over the system thought it was January 1, 100. An easy fix.