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Y2K / Year 2000 / Millennium Panic & Preparation

Floyd

Floyd

Antediluvian
Joined
Apr 2, 2019
Messages
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Trevp666 said:
Considering that across the countries of europe, they have filled their gas reserves now to 92% of their capacity, and wholesale 'day ahead' gas prices (which have varied considerably higher than usual throughout the year) have now been dropping for several weeks, and are continuing to fall (due to lack of demand caused by reserves being filled up).
The current 'day ahead' wholesale price is now below that which it was this time last year, and there are a glut of LNG tankers sitting outside ports around the coasts of Europe, waiting for unloading because the terminals can only process so much at a time.
I don't think here in the UK we are really likely to have a problem.
IMO it's just yet another 'scare-mongering' exercise being carried out, like only a couple of months ago when we were being told that extreme heat was going to kill thousands of people in the UK (it didn't), and previous to that when we had some quite heavy rain for a few days and we were basically all told that the UK was going to sink (or some extreme nonsense like that), and of course claims that the NHS is about to collapse due to being over-run in a winter crisis.
Like our newspapers and the BBC tell us it will EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.
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You've got to admit though that the 'millennium bug' actually did occur- traffic lights failed and planes fell out of the sky...., er no, wait that didn't happen either....
 
Pfft...millenium bug...what are they going to do in the year 9,999 when they realise that their ZX Spectrums only have space in their code for a year with only 4 digits instead of the five that they're about to need? What are they going to do then? Huh? Huh??
 
Trevp666 said:
Pfft...millenium bug...what are they going to do in the year 9,999 when they realise that their ZX Spectrums only have space in their code for a year with only 4 digits instead of the five that they're about to need? What are they going to do then? Huh? Huh??
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Time Travellers will return to 2000 and recruit Cobol analysts and programmers.
 
This was the closest thing to a computer I had when I was a teenager.
1666187467726.png
 
Floyd1 said:
You've got to admit though that the 'millennium bug' actually did occur- traffic lights failed and planes fell out of the sky...., er no, wait that didn't happen either....
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Can echo @ramonmercado - my company spent virtually the whole of 1998/9 upgrading our own software and alerting customers to likely problems. Sadly some of them thought us pressing them to upgrade was a scam and they did have (fortunately fairly minor) problems.
 
Cochise said:
oooh me me me I can do C/C++ too :)

But I guess since I'm still here it didn't happen ...
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The time travel allows them to put you back at exactly the same time as they took you from, and deleting your memory of the intervening period. You've been to the year 9,999 mate.
(Not much has changed but they live underwater)
 
I wasn't. There were quite a few companies making calculator watches by then.
I remember the first digital watch that I was amazed by, which had a red display on it, but you had to press and hold a button on the side to see the time. That would have been Darren Gray who had that in about 1977, at Chandos middle school.
I don't think they had the computing power to be affected by the Y2K bug.
I think they were quite severely affected by water though, even the ones that claimed to be waterproof.
1666191475851.png
 
I was surprised, when the whole Y2K problem came up that computer programmers from just a few decades before couldn't have seen that the century would change and computers would have to include 2000 into calculations.

I still suspect that it is was a grand conspiracy of planned obsolescence.
 
Trevp666 said:
My biggest surprise of today is that we didn't already have a thread about the Y2K thing.
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I initially thought the same thing, but ... There are posts alluding to the Y2K panic, but they're scattered all over the place and few really focus on the Y2K stuff directly. One also needs to bear in mind this Web forum didn't launch until summer 2001, by which time most folks understood we'd survived.
 
As a software test specialist I recall getting a shedload of overtime pay out of it, including an overnight stay at a local office, but the number of programs that experienced Y2k issues was negligible.
Another good example of grossly irresponsible media attempting to panic the populace over nothing of significance.
If anything, in recent years, the media has become even worse.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
As a software test specialist I recall getting a shedload of overtime pay out of it, including an overnight stay at a local office, but the number of programs that experienced Y2k issues was negligible.
Another good example of grossly irresponsible media attempting to panic the populace over nothing of significance.
If anything, in recent years, the media has become even worse.
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A significant number of programmes across the Department of Social & Family affairs payments and records systems had to be amended. In some cases user management were looking for extra functionality (surprise!) so that added to the workload. The existing systems had to be kept running and maintained as well. There was some annoyance among those who had to keep the shoe on the road so they (including me) were given small amounts of Y2K work to carry out so that we'd qualify for a reduced Y2K bonus.
 
ramonmercado said:
That didn't happen because of the Trojan work by analysts and programmers. I was one of them!
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Me too! I have to point out that we did find out that IMS would sail through into 2000 with no bother and then fall flat on its face on 2nd Jan so it was well worth doing the testing. In the ‘old days’ i.e. before about 2000 we all had to save storage, so if you could use 2 bytes instead of 4 for a year field then you would do that. Code was checked to make sure you were using efficient coding instructions and there were to be no unused storage fields. We all knew all those systems would be replaced by newer, better ones well before 2000 so it would be no problem having a two figure year field (amongst other things , but let’s not go there). And then, bugger me if they didn’t just carry on using them as they worked fine, and new systems are just so expensive…… I do remember watching the 2000 new year celebrations in Oz on the telly and noticing that it didn’t go dark just after midnight so I think at that point we knew it would all be OK.
 
Y2K was a pain as people thought the money machines would stop and the fuel pumps would stop.

My place of work at that time were worried about their cash registers would stop working.

People were frightened about the unknown.

Nothing but nothing as far as I can remember happened, nothing !
 
Weren't there stories at the time about people which found their details had slipped through the net - people who were (eg) 104 years old suddenly finding that some places/companies thought they were only 4?
 
Trevp666 said:
Weren't there stories at the time about people which found their details had slipped through the net - people who were (eg) 104 years old suddenly finding that some places/companies thought they were only 4?
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Wouldn't surprise me. Around 2010 my bank wrote to me informing me that they had my birthday down as January 1900 (which they suspected wasn't correct) and I had to send them all sorts of documents to prove who I was.

I'd only been with them for around 20 years at that point so you can understand their incompetence mistake.
 
Floyd1 said:
Wouldn't surprise me. Around 2010 my bank wrote to me informing me that they had my birthday down as January 1900 (which they suspected wasn't correct) and I had to send them all sorts of documents to prove who I was.

I'd only been with them for around 20 years at that point so you can understand their incompetence mistake.
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Never be surprised by the incompetence of big organisations, I worked for the Department of Social Protection* for 20 years, when I finally took early retirement from another department they claimed not to have proof of my date of birth. Had to get a birth certificate to send to the DSP,

*Present title, gone through several name changes.
 
charliebrown said:
Y2K was a pain as people thought the money machines would stop and the fuel pumps would stop.

My place of work at that time were worried about their cash registers would stop working.

People were frightened about the unknown.

Nothing but nothing as far as I can remember happened, nothing !
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I worked in IT for the government (Crown Prosecution Service) and was placed in charge of our Y2K project in 1998. The reason that nothing happened, in general, as the year 2000 dawned was that an awful lot of work had been done in the intervening years to remove potential problems. My Department had many local systems that would have been affected (this I was able to demonstrate to senior management). Now I know nobody would have died (possibly!) if our Court systems failed but it proves that there were inherent problems in our legacy IT systems and the supposed panic was due to the fact that nobody could be sure how these issues would manifest themselves, hence the scenario of planes falling from the skies, etc.
 
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