Comments on: Y2K: 20 Years Later

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 14:54:21 +0000

Rob had the greatest Y2K contingency plan. He told me several times in 1999 that his Y2K contingency plan depended on Taco Bell being open. :)

By: Zeno

Zeno — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 12:51:36 +0000

Great post. A lot of IT professionals of the time put in a lot of quiet extra hours getting ahead of this thing, and no one ever wants to acknowledge that anymore. Society focuses instead only on how situation was supposedly overreacted to in proportion to the actual outcome. The deeper we get into the 21st century the more that Y2K will be remembered as our generation’s version of Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” and we’ll have to tell our grandchildren that there were, in fact, some real problems that were averted by the efforts of people who don’t take IT for granted.

By: Rich Thompson

Rich Thompson — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 12:15:08 +0000

It concerns me that some people today are discounting the issue… Conspiracy theories abound that it an made up issue. I worked in the banking industry and it was a very real problem. Code written in the 60s/70s were still in use in the late 90s and it had no clue what to do with the year 2000 other than to crash. The bank(s) spend billions on programmers (some pulled out of retirement as they were the only ones left that knew COLBOL and other ancient programming languages)

We had command centers throughout the bank rigging in the new year and nervously watching the mainframe tick over to 01/01/00 00:00, along with key people with satellite phones just in case if the phone systems had issues (who’s to say the sat phone would work…) The good thing being on the east cost of the US, we could watch the reports from the first half of the world to see what we were in for.

Anyway, there were countless hours and money spent to make Y2K pretty much a ‘non-event’. This fact has made it appear there was nothing to worry about. Far from it.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 05:33:22 +0000

Y2K was such a let down. All my debt was supposed to be wiped out Fight Club style! Ah well. :(

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 04:43:39 +0000

I still talk about Y2K a lot, because Y2K was what taught me to patch. And given the Y2K outcome, we did a far better job of patching that than we do of our Patch Tuesday updates today. One thing I tell people is to claim Y2K as the victory that it was. We can’t get those results today because no one has staffing or budget, but I made a decent career pushing patches for a living after Y2K, then went on to a much better third act coaching people on patching. It’s funny how 20 years after sitting by my phone at midnight waiting for an emergency call that never came, my career is still defined by that experience.

Back then, I was with you. On a scale of 0 to 10, I was expecting a 5. I bought an extra week’s worth of groceries, withdrew an extra 100 bucks from the ATM, and filled my bathtub with water. I didn’t expect water issues but it was such a low-effort thing to do I thought it was silly not to after I read the suggestion somewhere. But I was definitely overprepared for what I thought was going to happen.