1999 throwback - the Millennium Bug

remember testing and patching loads of COBOL and some assembler .. but this was back in 97.. in prep for the 99/00 changeover.. IIRC.. we got everything patched and tested at least 6 months before the year end.. and it all went smooth as..
 
Extremely lucrative times and just before IR35 began to nobble everything. I was working on New years day performing various application testing and verification tasks on one of the major financial systems running at that time. Easiest few hours work ever and earned a mint on the 18 month run up to it all too.
 
Millwall.FC said:
The millennium bug and the hole in the ozone layer was going to wipe out humanity. :-)
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The Millennium bug got patched.

We banned CFCs that were eating the ozone layer.

Action taken, problem solved.

Although there is still a hole in the ozone layer as CFCs linger in the atmosphere for decades, but it's impact is limited to southern parts of Argentina at certain times of year.
 
throwaway4372 said:
I remember the panic about the millennium bug but it was obvious it would be fixed because it had to be and I don't recall seeing any issues.

This may be of interest:
en.wikipedia.org

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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"It was obvious it would be fixed because it had to be" is very optimistic and I feel underestimating the scope of the potential problems and how much was put into it.

It was a massive undertaking because so much hardware and software was using legacy code, and you never knew quite what needed fixing until you checked (often multiple versions), as a single computer system could have dozens of things that could have been affected by it, starting with the bios (a mess of legacy code some from the 70's), and all sorts of software ranging from the basic OS, to drivers, even to things like the games you played.

Part of the problem was that even if it only affected one minor system, with say banks or industrial equipment that one minor system could potentially feed data to other systems so your main systems might have been fine in isolation, but the bad data they got from say a flow monitoring device or the oven on the bakery production line could have shut the entire thing down, caused another system to reject everything (your cakes are 99 years past their sell by date as one system has dated them wrong and the inventory system is working correctly and saying "these need to be binned") or worse in the case of some industrial applications.

IIRC there were a few minor banks that ran into issues, and some places had issues that didn't turn up until several months or years later due to things like the natural delay in them acting on something, one of my favourite examples is an IIRC Australian woman got a letter when she was 104 in 2004 to report to the local primary school on X day and what she had to take with her.
The school system at some point was only looking at the last two digits of the birth year and because it only sends out the automatic letters and allocates the place when a "child" has hit the right age it didn't start to show the problem until nearly 5 years after the millennium

A lot of issues due to the bug almost certainly never hit the news because either they were minor, very localised or limited to specific places, or because they were caught by another system further up the line that had been fixed and set up to account for any issues (IE food processing where it might have been set to ignore an obvious date error or hold waiting for confirmation by a human rather than treating it as automatically legitimate)
 
This thread makes me realise a lot of people on here are older than me..

I would have been 15 years old, I was aware of it as I grew up with the pc age and knew what they were talking about.

Did it scare me ? No I was at a family party
 
Tom_ed1987 said:
I still play AoE2 fairly regularly.
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I thought I'd put AoE2 in my OP because it was my first online game. MSN Gaming Zone! But also all-night LANs in student digs with 6 of us fellow housemates. We would start at 9PM, pausing the game at 5AM for a bit of sleep, with 5 out of the 6 civilisations still standing :p

potatolord said:
My main memory of that new years eve is getting horribly drunk, but I don't think the millennium bug affected it.
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NYE was a bit disappointing for me as my local mate went out with a group of mates on the whim in the next town. He texted me after midnight saying he was smashed. Yeah cheers for inviting me out, while I was stuck at my parents with a load of their teacher friends! I remember NYD sunrise being really nice though so that was a positive.

DJMK4 said:
This thread makes me realise a lot of people on here are older than me..

I would have been 15 years old, I was aware of it as I grew up with the pc age and knew what they were talking about.

Did it scare me ? No I was at a family party
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I'm only a bit older than you (I was uni age), but looks like we started here in the same year and you have way more posts :D Like you said though, it was a good time to be alive as it was the PC and 90s internet age.
 
Ahh the good old Millennium bug. Worked for Manpower for BT and was told if we worked Christmas Eve, Christmas day, NYE and New years day, we would get a bonus from BT, when Januarys payslip arrived, the bug caused the bonus to be paid to Manpower but not make its way to us employees. When we complained we were all told "I could replace you tomorrow" by the nastiest POS who went on to win woman manager of the year.

Fun times
 
Efour said:
I was temping for a firm contracted to fix millennium bug nonsense for abn amro on Liverpool Street.

Was good fun. Fresh out of uni easy money.
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A lot of people made a killing out of it I think, I was still at uni so a bit before my time. I was expecting IPv4 exhaustion was going to be similar (gravy train of switching stuff to IPv6) and was giving serious consideration to training up in that space but never went through with it.
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
I'm having a nostalgia for 1999 at the moment as it's now 25 years ago. It was early internet and our 1st PCs for many of us with chat rooms, ICQ/AIM, Netscape, mp3.com, Hampsterdance, early web forums, coverage of the '99 eclipse, Age of Empires II and so on. It was before the internet got sanitised by so-called social media and the big corporations.

Somewhere amongst this in the tech world was the imminent Millennium Bug. Does anyone remember the build up to it, how it got dealt with, and any setbacks? The main thing I can remember is that some forum software rolled over from 1999 to 19100, meaning that 19 was hard-coded and only the 99 year part was a variable. This got patched pretty quickly.

I found an old gov.uk site from archive.org with an interesting read about the "dangers" of the Millennium Bug.

archive.org

What Everyone Should Know About The Millennium Bug : UK Government : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A public information leaflet produced by the UK government to inform and advise citizens about the Millennium Bug.
archive.org

There are numerous download links on there that still work on the archive site (surprisingly!) e.g. text only, JPG, PDF, ZIP etc. Here's a link to the PDF (32MB) for a bit of light Christmas reading :-) I found it interesting that the language used was a bit different in 1999 to how a gov.uk web site would be worded now. It seemed less formal and less threatening back then.

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I remember 2 things;

1) Vastly overpaid “consultants“ inserting flõppy discs in workstations and , when done, attaching a “Y2K Compliant” sticker to each machine.

2) Claims of legacy COBOL coders being offered a whole year’s salary equivalent to be on site 12 hours either side of 01-01-2000 00:00:00
 
Werewolf said:
"It was obvious it would be fixed because it had to be" is very optimistic and I feel underestimating the scope of the potential problems and how much was put into it.

It was a massive undertaking because so much hardware and software was using legacy code, and you never knew quite what needed fixing until you checked (often multiple versions), as a single computer system could have dozens of things that could have been affected by it, starting with the bios (a mess of legacy code some from the 70's), and all sorts of software ranging from the basic OS, to drivers, even to things like the games you played.

Part of the problem was that even if it only affected one minor system, with say banks or industrial equipment that one minor system could potentially feed data to other systems so your main systems might have been fine in isolation, but the bad data they got from say a flow monitoring device or the oven on the bakery production line could have shut the entire thing down, caused another system to reject everything (your cakes are 99 years past their sell by date as one system has dated them wrong and the inventory system is working correctly and saying "these need to be binned") or worse in the case of some industrial applications.

IIRC there were a few minor banks that ran into issues, and some places had issues that didn't turn up until several months or years later due to things like the natural delay in them acting on something, one of my favourite examples is an IIRC Australian woman got a letter when she was 104 in 2004 to report to the local primary school on X day and what she had to take with her.
The school system at some point was only looking at the last two digits of the birth year and because it only sends out the automatic letters and allocates the place when a "child" has hit the right age it didn't start to show the problem until nearly 5 years after the millennium

A lot of issues due to the bug almost certainly never hit the news because either they were minor, very localised or limited to specific places, or because they were caught by another system further up the line that had been fixed and set up to account for any issues (IE food processing where it might have been set to ignore an obvious date error or hold waiting for confirmation by a human rather than treating it as automatically legitimate)
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This…

Even with all the hard work and money that was poured into fixing the issue globally, several planes still ended up grounded and a Japanese nuclear reactor went offline.
 
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I remember that the EUC was for more of an issue in volume if not potential severity.
Excel only used a two digit year date until a certain version (as did Lotus which was a mainstream then as well).
So lots and lots of user created formulas were doing potentially odd things.

Yes none would have been life threatening but its surprising the number of business critical tasks that happened (and still do) on things like Excel.

I went in NYD to test the financial package for one of the largest insurers in the UK, all was good so it was a pretty quick trip. IIRC it was £300 for about 2 hours.
 
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