[takinola]

> "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away from a rare success where people came together and fixed something instead of firefighting disasters.

My cynicism about Y2K comes from the fact that there were a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either. It seems like a natural experiment was conducted and the results indicate there was no correlation between good outcomes and the work done to be Y2K ready.

I have no doubt that the armies of consultants did fix real issues but anyone working in software knows there is a never ending set of things to fix. The real issue is whether that work was necessary for the ongoing functioning of business or society.

[gerdesj]

"but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either."

Bad things still happened everywhere, despite all our efforts. How bad depends on your perspective.

Several people suffered a bizarre form of resurrection, which normally, Christians would be all over it and jolly excited. Pensions suddenly started paying out, tax bills became due from people long dead. If you were not a relative of one of those people it did not affect you and if you read about it, you'd have perhaps said "typical" and got on with life.

Some devices just went a bit weird and needed turning off and on again. Who cares or even noticed? Someone did but again, you did not hear about those.

I spent quite a while patching NetWare boxes and applying some very shaky patches to Windows workstations. To be honest, back then, timezone changes were more frightening than Y2K - they happen twice a year and something would always crash or go wrong.

The sheer amount of stuff that was fixed was vast and I don't think your "countries that did and did not" thought experiment is valid. Especially as it is conducted without personal experience nor much beyond a bit of "ecce, fiat" blather.

Nowadays time is so easy to deal with. Oh, do you remember when MS fucked up certificates and Feb 29 a few years back?

[takinola]

Your examples make my point. Some bad things happened but not on a catastrophic level that warranted the level of investment that was put into Y2K projects.

[jandrewrogers]

Most of the companies I was familiar with then did not have enough time or resources to check for and resolve every problem, and these problems were very real. At some companies the engineers were given autonomy, authority, and effectively unlimited budget to do literally whatever was required to mitigate any publicly visible failures that occurred. We had a lot of backup plans to keep operations running, sometimes literally paper and pencil, when the inevitable failures occurred. A lot of companies were furiously faking it and throwing people at the problem.

I directly witnessed a few near catastrophic failures due to Y2K at different companies, literally company killers. We kept everything (barely) running long enough to shore up and address the failures without anyone noticing, partly because we had prepared to operate in the face of those failures since we knew there was no way to fix them beforehand. It was a tremendous decentralized propaganda coup. No one wanted to be the company that failed as a result, the potential liability alone was massive.

The idea that what was averted was minor is a pretty naive take. I was genuinely surprised that we actually managed to hold some of the disasters together long enough — out of sight and out of mind — to fix them without anyone noticing critical systems were offline for months. IT was a bit more glitchy, slow, and unavailable back then, so the excuses were more plausible.

[macintux]

> Some bad things happened but not on a catastrophic level that warranted the level of investment that was put into Y2K projects.

Possibly the catastrophic things were prioritized and fixed?

[DougN7]

Do you have any data at all to support your claim?

[Marazan]

When things got missed things went _badly_ wrong and that spurred businesses to take rapid action to respond.

The first "Y2K" bugs where when banks' computer systems started messing up the calculations of long date financial securities/mortgages - decades before the millennium. Closer to the time Supermarkets started junking food that had a post 1999 Best Before date. Those were company ending problems if not fixed and so got overwhelming and rapid focus.

[mcswell]

"... a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready..." I know you're talking about articles written after Jan 1, 2000. But there were a lot of articles written before then that were Jeremiah doomsday articles, so the snarky articles were reacting in part to equally wrong articles before then.

One article I recall in particular was in Scientific American some time in (IIRC) 1998 or early 1999. It prophesied (I use that word intentionally) that no matter how much money and effort was put into fixing the problem ahead of time, there would be all kinds of Bad Things happening on January 1. It called out in particular computers that were said to be unreachable, like hundreds of feet underwater on oil platforms. (Whether there actually were such computers, I don't know.) There was a sort of chart with the X-axis being effort spent on preventing the problem and the Y-axis being the scale of the resulting disaster. The graph leveled off while still in the "disaster" range, but still presented a clear message: "Give us more money and we can prevent catastrophes".

Somehow I haven't been able to find that article. Maybe SciAm suppressed it when the outcome turned out to be way short of a disaster.

There was also a TV (remember that?) news site or three that planned coverage beginning on midnight December 31 somewhere in Europe (Russia and China were off the map, I don't remember about Japan). Of course the news was that there was no news. (Yes, there were some computer programs that died or spit out junk, but nothing rising to the level of news.) I think it was an hour or two after midnight Eastern Time (US) that they ended the news cast.

Was there a Y2K problem? Of course. But it was largely taken care of before January 1, 2000, Y2K Jeremiahs notwithstanding.