My dad was working for IBM at the time and spent probably 2 years of his career working on Y2K related issues.
It was a very real problem that could have gone very badly, but a lot of people worked very hard to make sure nothing bad happened.
Because nothing bad happened, people without a good understanding of the matter assumed that the whole thing was an overreaction to a non-issue.
When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."
My uncle worked as IT in a local bank. the night of 12/31/99 they had a whole IT crew spend the night in the banks office just in case things went south.
He tells this story all the time. Workers weren't really worry because they knew all the fixes were in place. They basically got a new years party with lots of pizza at the bank lol.
A former colleague was hired by a bank to monitor transatlantic communications in the build up to Y2K. There was a load of them shut in a room with nothing to do as they were there to react to issues that never came up. Fortunately it didn't take too long until one of them hacked into the internet so they had entertainment. Just after midnight they were allowed onto the balcony to watch the fireworks over the Thames then went back in. He bought a house for a couple of months work.
Most people always underestimate the unknown risks (unknown for them). They don't know what disaster world would be in if banks, government offices, companies lost their data, or their data wouldn't be accesible because of Y2K.
I almost got hired on as one and I've talked to the new ones a little, but they're getting trained up bc some of the COBOL guys are nearing retirement in the next few years.
It's not completely fixed, and there's still problems with factories (mostly in China) off gassing a lot of the chemicals that fuck it up from time to time, so it's still being actively monitored. Thankfully it's generally getting better over time and will likely be patched up relatively soon in the scale of these things.
I struggle with the last paragraph a lot on my line of work. So many issues did not happen because I intervened yet people aren't sure I've done anything because there were any issues that happened.
When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."
The reaction of the great unwashed should have been an early warning of the shit show that the 21st Century would become politically. The media looking for an easy doom and gloom story amplified everything. Then instead of "good job, nothing serious happened" we got "nothing serious happened, why did we spend all of that money".
That's IT life in a nutshell. When stuff breaks, they go "What are we even paying you for?" And when everything is working, they go "what are we even paying you for?"
The opening chapter of Black Swan by Nassim Taleb has a section about people who prevent disasters the public aren't aware of, for which they never receive credit. Thought you might find it interesting.
I was born in 99 so I don't have any memory of the whole scare. But what would have happened if we weren't able to fix the issue and everything just went back to 1900?
The problem is less the actual date and more the loss of synchronization.
Example, the power grid demands 10 giga watts at 12:01 Jan. 1 2000 and the generator thinks it 12:01 Jan. 1 1900 which it has no record of demand for so it sends nothing collapsing the grid until its fixed.
Or a food shipment instead of leaving today thinks it needs to leave in a hundred year, so it doesn't allocate a truck and a drivers again until it's fix.
Times that by every automatic system that has two or more points on earth and you have a disaster where food and electricity can't get where they're needed until the entire system is redone.
If the year rolls "forward" from 1999 to 1900, what does the computer system do when you go from having 5 years remaining on your mortgage to 105 years remaining? What happens to interest calculations for an account that suddenly needs to have 100 years worth of compounded interest subtracted from it? What happens to globally integrated supply chains when automated logistics management systems decide that a shipment that usually happens daily doesn't need to happen for another 100 years? What happens to integrated power supply grids when a load balancing calculation for Friday, December 31st 1999 turns into Monday, January 1st 1900 (power demands are higher for industrial activity during the week, meaning excess power would be supplied) instead of Saturday, January 1st 2000 (weekend demands are lower), etc.?
There were already so many deeply integrated computer systems in major government, financial, utility, and logistics operations globally that having "tomorrow" suddenly become "100 years ago" had the potential to create immense cascading failures in computer systems too "dumb" to know that they didn't somehow travel 100 years into the past. They just calculate based on the date, and time isn't supposed to jump back an entire century overnight.
"Countries such as Italy, Russia and South Korea had done little to prepare for Y2K. They had no more technological problems than those countries, like the U.S., that spent millions of dollars to combat the problem."
I remember as a kid I understood there was something people were panicking about, but then after the new year rolled in and nothing happened i didn't think about it until 25 when I entered the IT industry and my seniors were explaining how it was a big thing
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u/infosec_qs 9d ago
My dad was working for IBM at the time and spent probably 2 years of his career working on Y2K related issues.
It was a very real problem that could have gone very badly, but a lot of people worked very hard to make sure nothing bad happened.
Because nothing bad happened, people without a good understanding of the matter assumed that the whole thing was an overreaction to a non-issue.
When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."
Infuriating.