Y2K

brewmeist said:
Does anyone else remember the Y2K scare?

22 years ago I sat at home on-call, waiting for Armageddon to happen with my company's mainframe. 22 years ago!

Happy New Year!
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Yes! My parents and family were stocked up in their cottages in a remote area...I was downtown counting down the new year with friends.
 
I was on call and had to report in at midnight to be released or recalled. No drinking until official release, glad it all went smooth. Funny now! I was with the wife who at the time was only my girlfriend.
 
I was negotiating commercial office leases for corporate tenants. They required lease language that the building systems had to be Y2K compliant. Nobody really knew what the heck that meant. Most landlords just agreed to the language because our clients were sought after A-rated tenants. Of course it ended up being a non-issue. But to this day I still use four digits for the year when I write a date on a document even though I don’t expect to be around for YK3.
 
Last night, for NYE, we watched the very good movie “Yesterday.” It’s the one in which a struggling British singer emerges from a worldwide 12-second blackout as the only person who knows the Beatles ever existed. That worldwide 12-second glitch is the sort of thing we all feared would happen with Y2K. Seems kind of amusing now when we look back.
 
I recall journalists struggling to hide their disappointment on January 1 2020.

The one bit of actual news that I do recall from that day is that President Yeltsin of Russia resigned on NYE and was replaced by Acting President Putin.
 
CivAU said:
I recall journalists struggling to hide their disappointment on January 1 2020.
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I'd spent the previous year and a half remediating the Y2K issue on servers at Sybase, Lucent Technologies, and Charles Schwab. I left my job that December as I had no intention of spending New Year's Eve in anyone's data center waiting for nothing to happen. No one in IT anywhere in the U.S. who really understood the issue and what had been done to fix it months and, in some cases, years before that clock rollover was at all concerned. The issue, where it would have had any serious impact, had been long resolved. By 1999, the technology concerns were all theater (see quote above). The only real issue was how human behavior (hoarding, cash withdrawals, etc.) might temporarily affect markets and that turned out to be nothing.

I stayed home with my then two-year-old for the next five of the best years of my life. What I wouldn't give to have even one of those years back.
 
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I was on a plane back home on y2k, the flight tickets were down 70% for my destination. Young and single at that time, so it was worth taking the ‘risk’ and save some money.
 
UHBlackhawk said:
Somewhat related.
I’m not in IT, but I remember seeing an IT magazine article that discussed the F-22 issue in detail as a lesson for software coders.
medium.com

How A Simple Bug Paralyzed A US Warship And A US Fighter Jet

Divide by Zero error and a dateline jump caused two of the most iconic computer bugs in US military history
medium.com medium.com
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Very poorly written by someone who does not understand very much about that which they are writing.
two planes on either side of the international dateline will not be one at midnight and the other at mid-noon, they will both be
at midnight with different dates.
The ship issue was not as severe as she suggests and did not need help to get back to port. Also, other systems that were reported to be shut down (such as CRP Propellers) were only out for a very short time.
 
We lived in Ft. Belvoir housing which is close enough to Reagan National to see planes fall out of the sky. We had a family tradition of walking out at midnight and blowing party horns and hollering "Happy New Year" so that year I paid attention to the dark sky for planes falling. I've actually seen a plane crash and had firsthand experience. It didn't happen of course so I went back in with the family and went to bed.
 
OldRetSWO said:
Very poorly written by someone who does not understand very much about that which they are writing.
two planes on either side of the international dateline will not be one at midnight and the other at mid-noon, they will both be
at midnight with different dates.
The ship issue was not as severe as she suggests and did not need help to get back to port. Also, other systems that were reported to be shut down (such as CRP Propellers) were only out for a very short time.
Click to expand...
I just picked one of the many articles about the F-22 incident. That one was pretty serious, but that’s why we do deployments. To work out bugs. Fortunately, it was peacetime conditions the first time.
 
I was up all night with my Ops O and watch section, taking check-ins by message and sat phone from ships at sea and inport to ensure their nav and other systems had not gone blind. All good.
 
My son-in-law who maintains the system that [redacted] over [redacted] for the [redacted] agency told me on that night the country lost the ability to protect itself from incoming ballistic missiles for six seconds.

I bet that happens on lots of nights for even longer periods I remember telling him.

He said yes, but you don't want to hear about it every time I assure you.
 
A slightly better article on the F-22 incident. I’m not familiar with the airframe, but it sounds like they were down to the mag compass. Probably standby airspeed, altimeter, and clock. I’m not sure how it affected fuel, but probably FMS fuel flow and management indications?
I’ve flown that route a number of times. Turning back and finding HI isn’t much of an issue with a mag compass. Fortunately, all of the islands normally aren’t instrument conditions at the same time.
I can’t find the one IT article I saw about a year ago. It was actually a very in depth write up, but more from an IT perspective. Obviously, the Air Force isn’t going to release many of the details due to OPSEC.
www.engadget.com

F-22 Raptors' systems crash mid-flight over Pacific

Lockheed's shiny new F-22 Raptor stealth fighters may have owned a few war games, but crossing the International Date Line left them as helpless as a carrot in a rabbit trap, with multiple system crashes causing an emergency detour en route from Hawaii to Okinawa, Japan. Communication, fuel...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
 
I was the CFO and head of computer operations at a financial institution.

We spent a lot of money preparing, and it ended like we all thought it would.
 
I was supporting a trading floor. The SEC had mandated Y2K compliance of the banking/financial markets several years before 2000. We knew Y2K was much ado about nothing.
 
48 hours ago my family quickly packed up everything “important” and evacuated. Was an interesting experience if you’ve ever done it before. In the end, a few degrees of wind direction ended up saving our house. Sad for friends that weren’t so lucky. Looking back, it’s wild what we chose to take and leave. I grabbed important docs, some clothes, guns, my dogs and a bottle of blanton’s. You know, I actually might be on the wrong thread here… but it felt a little like Y2K. And I still can’t find half my clothes.
 
In the late 90's I was working for a division of a major aerospace company and a couple of years prior to 1/1/2000, the government sent us a
letter listing every system they'd bought from us over the prior decades and asking us to certify the degree of Y2K compliance. The program that I was part of reviewed our "list" and we were able to identify Subject Matter Experts for less than half of them. Basically, once the job is over, unless the customer pays for support, the team gets dissolved and moves on to other things. By the time a decade or two (or three) passes, it is difficult to impossible to find people to even ask about design and software details.

In the end, we were able to tell them about the ones that we could and identified those that we couldn't. None of the ones that we could find details about had any issues with Y2K.
 
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