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
 
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