We're being short-sighted

JackbyDev

Conspiracy is probably the wrong term. What I mean is that some (keyword: some) predictions were quite extreme and apocalyptic. See the fringe group response section for examples of what I was trying to convey.

The New York Times reported in late 1999, "The Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested that Y2K would be the confirmation of Christian prophecy – God's instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation. The Y2K crisis might incite a worldwide revival that would lead to the rapture of the church. Along with many survivalists, Mr. Falwell advised stocking up on food and guns".

That's what I meant by the sort of "conspiratorial" response. Maybe I should reword my post to make it more clear?

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You're spot on. The vast majority of news coverage and "hype" from the general public relating to Y2K was all horse shit, but there were critical systems that did have issues and needed some work.

For the most part, the whole 19100 issue was a display bug, and likely wouldn't have caused problems, and the same for 1900... Those are examples that people generally saw at banks and whatnot, it would, for the most part, look weird, but for the most part, wouldn't create any actual problems. It would just be confusing for a while until the system caught up.

I think there's a few examples of companies missing the January 1st deadline and ending up with stuff marked as January 1900 for a bit. Otherwise they didn't have any significant issues.

Anything that involves a legally binding agreement would be critical though. Since the date is part of the agreement terms, it would need to be correct, and shown correctly.

Unless the "bug" literally crashed the system (which, it really should not have in most cases), like in your example, or it was connected to a legal contract, then it really wasn't that big of a problem.

The media, and people in general kept going on about it like they knew what the technical problem was, and it was always just conjecture and banter that made people worry unnecessarily.

What I'm trying to say is that Y2K was something that needed to be fixed but the likelihood that it would affect any singular person in society was very small. Those that were going to be affected, generally knew who they were and they were taking the steps required to fix the problem.

lad

You know, this is ironic

JackbyDev

I get your point, but in the same way that people "shouldn't" have been using two digits for year storage, there are certainly many parsers of ISO 8601 that don't match the spec. In 8,000 years I don't think this will be a problem though lol. I don't think we can really perceive what technology might be like that far in the future. But, hypothetically, is year 10,000 was in a few days and this was year 9,999 I would suspect we'd see at least some problems come January.

As an example, YAML 1.2 changed Boolean representation to only be case insensitive in 2009, but in [2022 people still complain about the 1.1 version]. (Caveat: I don't know if this person actually ran into a "real" problem or only a hypothetical one.)

JackbyDev

I remember reading a primary source about someone's experience fixing Y2K stuff. I wish I could find it or remember more. The funniest part was that they actually got everything to work, but on January 1st when they tried to get into work their badge didn't work! The system on their badge reader was broken due to Y2K lol.

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Time I can deal with, timezones however, fuck that shit all to hell.

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2147483,647 + 1 will also be a rough year for humanity (or whatever is left)

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dealing with time

Network engineer here, it's just as bad here. Currently trying to figure out what to do with 'gaining' a leap second.

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Y2K wasn't entirely fear mongering horse shit. There were quite a few important cogs in our digital infrastructure that were using code that would not work past 1999. It was necessary to terrify corporate ownership into paying to fix the code, otherwise there would have never done it.

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I mean, that's exactly what programmers in the '70s thought. That there would be no way in hell that their crap code would still be in use going onto 2000.

Thing is, copy/paste is always going to be easier than writing new code and that's only going to get worse as chat bots start coding for us.

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You don't have to wait that long. Programmers are already patching software for the Y2K38.

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Lmao I actively work with shortdates in a database because I have no control over how things are stored. They need to solve before 100 years have passed from the epoch, but at some point before then it'll be fun to figure out if "58" in a date of birth is 1958 or 2058.

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"Fanatical" would be a word to use there maybe.

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I first heard about the Y2K bug in about 1993 from a programmer who was working on updating systems. These were all older systems, often written in COBOL, which did not use epoch time, and in fact didn't reference system time at all. They'd be doing math on data entered by users, and since they were written back when every byte of memory was precious (and nobody expected that the program would still be in use after 30 years), they'd be doing math on two-digit years. It would certainly be a problem to calculate people's ages, loan terms, payments due, et cetera, and get negative numbers.

Heck, I remember reading a story about a government system once that marked the residents of Hartford, CT as dead, because somehow the last letter of the city name data overflowed into the next column, and marked them as 'd'eceased. Y2K was definitely a real problem.

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This is why [email protected] is a thing.

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Jibes, not jives.

If you're jiving, you're dancing.

JackbyDev

30 years is very different than 8000 lol.

LucasWaffyWaf

Insert that Numberphile video with Tom Scott being reasonably angry at time zones.

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Fun fact, lots of VW modules think it's August of 2094 for some reason.

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Gotta remember to use the proper time. Sometimes that's not proper time!