22 years ago this month I started working on the Y2K bug. Cannot believe it was that long ago. People still tell me what a waste of time as nothing happened. Nothing happened because lots of money, time and effort went into making sure nothing happened. Computers generally stored dates at YYMMDD format for sorting purposes. 31 Dec 1999 was 991231 and 1 Jan 2000 was 000101 which caused issues very early in the 1990s when do forecasting into the 21st century. Dates were modified to be CCYYMMDD or some other system of relative dates. eg. days since 1 Jan 1900 (-ve if before).
Yes they were busy times indeed. In my case, I managed a small team and we did pretty much all the work auditing and upgrading system. We recieved no real extra funding dispute the workloads and software changes required .... until Apple announced it was no longer supporting the CEO's favourite piece of software and it work never be Y2K compliant (it was only a crappy messaging system and I thought we were better off without it anyway). Cash flowed readily all of a sudden. After the dust settled and everyone claimed it was all fakery, we then started on GST compliance. At least the CFO pushed funding for that exercise. Still it was worth the effort for me as after a year or so hard slog, my team knew far more about our systems and our overall productivity increased dramatically. We were still the unwashed, unloved department though.
I remember having to be at work at midnight just in case the computer system went down when the clock ticked over to the new millennium. Whether we managed to avoid trouble by spending heaps of money and time prior to the event or nothing was going to happen anyway is debatable. I know that worldwide there was an estimated A$440billion spent trying to avoid the predicted disaster. I also know that Italy and South Korea spent nothing on preparing for it and experienced the same amount of problems as all the other countries who had spent billions. Wikipedia actually has a good read on the millennium bug (Y2K) and has listed the arguments both for and against whether it was as big an issue as it was made out to be.
I also had to babysit over midnight. A chap who sat with me had just had a pacemaker put in. He was hoping it was Y2K compliant
First business day into the new year the auditors has a field day. There was heaps of unapproved desktop systems that had never ever been audited (the source of the mainframe data had been audited). I was in charge of all the mainframe systems and I'd been the IT auditor years before and was still the ISO900 for certain IT areas so I was the first point of contact. None of the IT people, IT auditor or the internal finance auditor knew anything about these systems - until they all went belly up with invalid dates. The desktop data was used for reporting and forecasting (not $) and as such hadn't come under much scrutiny. These systems had all appeared since the last major audit a few years prior.
I spent nearly 12 months preparing for the Y2K. We used very data intensive software and if we could not use the computers it was worth over $1 mill a day. We had to change to new software as we found our old software was not compliant and crashed as soon as we installed on a computer with a date in 2000.
We changed over with no problems accept some of the house written stuff was not ready and was not prepared to re write as the new software could handle , just some lazy people had to learn some new tricks.
First 2000 management meeting we got heaps if **** from management for wasting their money as IT was an unnecessary cost to them. After much harassment we told them we would change back to the old systems overnight for them. When asked if we could guarantee we said YES we guarantee you will not start production and will not be able to load any product out and after spending all night changing it back we were going to have the day off so if they liked we could convene for another meeting when we came back so at least two days loss of production. They soon changed their minds.
They were not happy when I handed my resignation to take effect at the end of the week LOL. They lasted till the Wednesday and they went down. See were not important part of production after all. Took two days for a tech to come and press button A to reset the server and away they went but had major problems from then on as they had to pay someone to fly from Brisbane when ever they had problems. They folded within three months. It was bad luck I went to work for the software supplier and I was their service contact .
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11 Mtr house Boat based at Mannum hoping to travel up the Murray as far as I can get then drift back again
It really is hard to believe its all that long ago. I was working for a gaming software company at the time and there was a lot of testing both of our own products and of the other software we used. Unlike many it seems had no problem with getting the company boss to approve the manhours and spending on it as he was originally a programmer. Because the rest of the company was based in the UK and USA with just me in Australia there were lots of others online sitting around waiting for my clock to click over to see if Australia exploded :) Of course, nothing happened except some wishing of Happy New Year.
When they test a new drug on humans they give some of the people involved a placebo so that they can accurately gauge the effects of the real thing - in the Y2K crisis South Korea and Italy acted like a placebo. Apparently they did very little if anything to prepare for Y2K, the clock ticked over and the results they got there were the same as everywhere else (wikipedia). No doubt we probably managed to avoid issues like accounting or production hiccups etc. but by spending $440 billion did we actually avert a major melt down of all our computer systems ? Looking at Japan and Korea's experience maybe that money could have been better spent on far more productive things but what company or government of the time would have been prepared to take the risk of doing nothing ?
No doubt we probably managed to avoid issues like accounting or production hiccups etc. but by spending $440 billion did we actually avert a major melt down of all our computer systems ? Looking at Japan and Korea's experience maybe that money could have been better spent on far more productive things but what company or government of the time would have been prepared to take the risk of doing nothing ?
