20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously

Out of nostalgia i rewatched the 1999 Times Square ball drop. About five minutes after the clock struck midnight they cut to Sam Donaldson in the government’s Y2K Response Center.

He was amazed to say that nothing was happening. Planes still flew, power plants still worked, bank accounts were fine. But the fact that there was a federal response center showed they took it very seriously.

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

I was one of the folks on the ground getting things fixed. I had 600 car dealerships stretching from Texas to Guam and 60 pieces of software to get updated.

Bonus - Because of the '00 model year cars coming out before the calendar year change, it all had to be done early.

I explained the problem like this:

Imagine if the US decided to come out with a new quarter, and it's super cool, but it will not work in any coin slot currently in use.

If you have the know how, and the proper tools, changing the coin slots at your business or apartment building is not that big a deal.

Changing ALL the coin slots on your block, in your city, or in your country? Suddenly a much, much bigger deal.

Even with all the work we put in, there were still problems. A DMV in the NE started issuing vehicle registrations for '00 "Horseless Carriages". There was a cab company in Thailand whose meters rolled over to Midnight and suddenly thought it was noon.

But most likely you never heard of any real problems because we all worked our asses off.

Well we still have the 32 bit integer UTC bug to look forward to next decade.

“So I go through these lines of code changing 99 to 1999, and you know what, it doesn’t really matter, I don’t like my job and I don’t think I’m going to go in anymore”

OMG!! I still vividly remember doing Y2K patches at my old job. We used to have to dial into one of our remote offices via a 56k modem and then run the patch on each and every machine. That shit took months.

I was on one of those teams for my company, and we had simulations of various software (especially ours) to see what would break in such a scenario. When we started in earnest in 1998, it was pretty bad. It wasn't just "99 turned to 00" but how even small sub routines would start strange paths.

For example, "RNG," the random number generators, were often seeded by a date string as a cheat. If these failed, the random numbers would all be rather predictable. All at once. This affected the primitive cryptography we had in various transfers. We had to redo how that was done.

It would affect time zones. Jan 1 1900 was a Monday, but Jan 1 2000 was a Saturday. Depending on the underlying library, this could fuck up how leap year was calculated, and Feb 29 may or may not happen, so a daylight savings time call would be off by a day.

But the big one was 98 < 99, but 99 > 00 which was the core of the Y2k issues. But you know who had already fixed a lot of that? Banks. Specifically dealing with mortgages. They knew by 1970 this would be a problem with 30 year mortgages. So by 1998, there was already a lot of pre-work and some documentation by those that had worked on our backend systems.

No stone went unturned. If it could be tested, it was, and we had a shit ton of online connections in the days of dialup, so we had to test how our equipment would working it knew in was 2000, but what it connects to thought it was 1900. But believe you me, it was scary because we were an international company and knew just because the US was being vigilant, that didn't mean Japan was. Or Australia. Or China. So, when it was New Years there first, we were bracing for "you have 16 hours to fix the shit Sydney is running into before it hits the US." That was a nervous Friday, let me tell you.

Luckily, it wasn't nearly anything. There were small things, like dates on security video cameras, but that was more cosmetic.

Yep, I know a lot of people who were devs back then. It's not that it was "no big deal," but the nerds saved the day.

The hysterics were always overblown, but it would definitely have been much worse had there not been so much work done.

But first we must ask - what is computer?