Behold Schrödinger's Y2K, when software went all quantum Welcome to Y2K, The Register's collection of ramblings from readers tasked with dealing with what almost happened - but didn't - during those halcyon days of two decades past. Today's remembrance comes from a reader the Reg Y2K pseudoriser has elected to name "Clive". Clive had the thankless task of managing a software …
"That said... "I do confess that I had pulled a few hundred dollars out of the ATM in advance, just in case.""
I have had a couple of hundred dollars in cash available to me "just in case" since the late 1960s (a trifle more these days). It has saved me more times than I can count. Recommended.
That fateful night I was on duty, after a year and a half working on that project, for a large bank.
At around 1AM I went to the nearest ATM and checked my balance and latest account movements (not an account from the bank I was working for). There was an interest credit of around the equivalent of 3000€. Resisting the urge to spend it there and then, I went back, showed the slip to my co-workers and pondered on what would happen from there on. At 8 AM, after an uneventful night on the job, I went down and checked my balance again. Without a trace of that earlier payment, it now showed the correct and, unfortunately, much smaller interest deposit...
Someone's night was indeed a lot more eventful than mine ;)
I suspect the problem was, that although they could send an notice to their customer's last registered addresses, and probably fax it to them as well, if the customer doesn't respond you're left in the dark.
Maybe they never got the letter/fax. Maybe they received it but it was ignored, or went to the wrong people. Maybe it was read but not understood. Maybe they actually did the upgrade, maybe they didn't.
Without ringing up each customer (assuming you still have a working contact number, email wasn't very universal in those days), you had no way of knowing if they'd acted upon the warning notice.
The only solution would be to sit by the phone on the 1st (and 2nd etc.) and wait for the panicked phone call, as an oblivious customer found out their widget processing software wasn't 2k compliant.
Fuck the kids, it's not like they're our future or anything, right?
I believe they are actually
I was working as a QA on a project for a tech company a few years ago, who will remain unnamed as I don't want to embarrass Bill and Dave, which used a calendar widget from an unnamed open source software hub which was built around Git. Well I was doing my routine testing, using some manual exploratory testing to augment automated regression testing, when I put in a date in the future. The date the calendar then showed a date in the early 1900s. Imagine my amusement when I got to title the defect report "Y2K bug detected in calendar widget". Imagine the disbelief and amusement when I mentioned it at our next standup.
Which is one of many reasons I don't trust or have a high opinion of programmers.
Which is also why I sometimes feel like weeping.
Y2k and we were sick to death of management whining about the costs of "Millennium proofing" that we booted up a very old Wang word-processor (circa 1986) and dutifully photod the startup screen showing Jan 01 1900 00:00:00. Nobody ever questioned if we had replaced the BIOS battery.
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If you were a company called "Y2K Games" with a WWE games franchise and you brought out a version called "WWE 2K20" what could go wrong? https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2020/01/01/wwe-2k20-crash-2020-temporary-fix/
or your company is too young to remember Y2K:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.1/ReleaseNotes/FixDatetimexml2020
or you are a major bank (who patched the problem to be a addressed later?):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50965339
After emigrating to the US in 1999 I was besieged by weirdos asking me why I wasn't snapped up by companies panicked about the approaching apocalypse.
I remember being incredibly confused.. because while everyone in the UK had long since worked out that the worst that could happen was some obsolete kit (mostly VCRs) might get the time wrong and fail to record (or actually record) a few TV shows. Oh I think someone mentioned shop/bank doors on timers might need to be manually opened.
I tried to explain to everyone who asked that a few vcrs telling the time wrong would not cause buildings to explode, economies to collapse or planes to fall out of the sky, but they remained unconvinced. Eventually I did find employment and spent New Years Eve on-call, silently laughing inside at the huge amount of nothing I was doing while earning massive amounts of cash.
Not sure that says anything other than that the US may have been a more high tech reliant society at the time than the UK?
A power cut in 1910 isn't a big deal. A power cut to a hyper advanced sci fi civilization could result in the deaths of millions for an opener. Not sure your argument says what you want it to say. <grin>
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