Made some decent bank working on that project for our company.

So there’s that.

Did you work for Initech?

Back in the 90s I had an old IBM XT running DOS 3.something and for giggles I set the clock to just before midnight dec 31st '99. It rolled over to 1st Jan :0. It appears no-one had added any code to check for wraparound of the tens digit so it just added 1 to the 9 and moved on up the ascii table.

He didn't, I was with him at Penetrode at the time...

"Made some decent bank"

What, is that like making peepee?

You mean you earned some good money.

It's how AI talks ...

I was paid £1000 to remotely cover helpdesk for a large financial company that night. There were no calls. The following week it was discovered that an Excel spreadsheet the payroll team used had stopped working but that was the only fallout and it was an easy fix. In this case it was due to careful planning and spending the previous year checking every line of code and updating the database date field lengths. The company spent a lot of money on that project but it worked and what choice did they have? How would investors react to failures when the government warned you about them years before in large public notices.

Personally I regret taking the shift, as it was a lot of money for me back then but I was unable to party as though it were 1999, when it was.

I've already told this (in the linked article) but I'll paste it here for your enjoyment

That fateful night I was on duty, after a year and a half working on that project, for a large bank.

At around 1AM I went to the nearest ATM and checked my balance and latest account movements (not an account from the bank I was working for). There was an interest credit of around the equivalent of 3000€. Resisting the urge to spend it there and then, I went back, showed the slip to my co-workers and pondered on what would happen from there on. At 8 AM, after an uneventful night on the job, I went down and checked my balance again. Without a trace of that earlier payment, it now showed the correct and, unfortunately, much smaller interest deposit...

Someone's night was indeed a lot more eventful than mine ;)

I mean, who’s to know if the “bomb” was ever “live” in the first place. And isn’t it funny how these the “bomb” ‘“disposal”’ “‘“experts”’” are always so quick to arrive whenever a ‘“‘“bomb”’”’ is found... but nothing ever explodes, does it?

Whole thing is a scam. Next time I dig up a WW2 munition, I’m going to give it a good shake and a rap with a hammer. That’ll show them...

Nice analogy. Almost certainly one minor reason why they do controlled detonations, even when the explosive load has been assessed at less than a fart in a jar

For those who haven't had the pleasure see youtube for Scot Squad - Murphy Williams is 76% sure he's found a potentially explosive device in his field.

It's nice of US senator John Cornyn to tell us he lacks the capacity for logical thought needed to connect all the work done before 2000 with the fact that nothing bad happened at 2000.

There's loads of idiots like this on the net. They make my blood pressure spike. Seriously, what do they think all the thousands of people working on this problem were doing?

And if you guessed “(R, Texas)” then congratulations, but don’t get too big-headed about it - it was pretty obvious.

The millenium weekend was a great payday for me.

I was paid 1/4 time to stay relatively sober from our shops closing at 4pm on the 31st until they reopened at 9am on the January 3rd, then I was paid quadruple time from the minute I left the house on the morning of New Year's Day, until I got home after checking the computers worked in the four stores in my area.

I don't think I've ever driven so slowly to eke out every minute of that quadruple time...

"I don't think I've ever driven so slowly"

Probably still a lot of drunks about that morning. Can't be too careful.

I had the enviable task of identifying every piece of equipment in the BBC World Service, discovering whether it had a computer/controller in it, and if so, confirming either that it had no date handling or that it could cope with Y2k. Most of it wasn't an issue. But I also had to sort out a couple of HP Unix boxes and it was quickly ascertained that the current OS couldn't handle it, and that the hardware couldn't handle the next OS which could. There were two suitable computers in the country, which we bought; I had to manage getting them to the site (not on the same truck!) and the new OS installed and tested.

That done, I went and spent Y2k new year on Copacabana beach with six million partying Brazilians.

Around Y2K, I worked at a teaching/research hospital. We tested everything . Hardware, software, and embedded systems. One of the systems was a minicomputer system + database which held data on patients' results from experimental drugs. The vendor assured us they had tested the system, and that it was Y2K-compliant.

During our testing, we found that on (simulated) March 1st, 2000, the system deleted the previous month's patient records.

Lying fuckers.

And that's one reason why we tested everything .

We were busy up until the end of December 1999. I had written a lot of stuff that ran under Windows, some of it was not compliant, either because the hardware it ran on wasn't; or because it needed to talk to MS Office components, that weren't. We had a couple of *NIX products that ran on older hardware that were going to fail, so they got moved to Debian on new Intel boxes.

I made the decision to go away to a really nice hotel with no mobile phone coverage on the 30th (just in case). All of our customers were OK, so when I was back at work, I heard a bit of "Nothing happened!" - I reminded them about how much effort and cash was spent over the previous 2 years.

It went a little quiet with our existing customers, but we did mostly bespoke software so we were OK as we picked up new business. A number of the hardware and bog-standard software business suppliers really struggled until ~2003 as "everything was replaced".

Alongside the good work done by techies to ensure that nothing went wrong in system critical/important computer networks and stuff there were another bunch of Y2K people doing very nicely out of unthinking, unnecessary work without any risk assessment..

For us it meant we had to use our meagre budget to have all our work laptops Y2K tested. All of which were standalone machines doing little more than running WORD to write reports and create teaching resources. The worst case scenario would have been that they failed to boot in January- at which point the work could still have been done.

Indeed to save money we hid a few away. A year or so later when we no longer had laptops I needed a basic computer to take with me somewhere - so I grabbed one of these out of its storage- and after charging it worked perfectly. Of course it did. Because the Y2K bug had no relevance to getting it to boot, it wasn't connected to any networks and WORD wasn't affected in any noticeable way.

OTOH sometimes you have to test to be sure - but you only need to test a representative sample if there are multiple similar systems.

It was a few years earlier then Y2K but Sun was reported to find a problem one year turnover which is rather odd given the way Unix kept time.

About the year after that a routine in a system I was looking after started screwing up in January. A boss-written page and a half of C I couldn't understand (not surprising as it was wrong) could no longer decide whether it was being run on a Friday. I replaced it with a one-liner.

Sometime the unexpected happens so testing wasn't wrong.

The HBO movie documentary "Time Bomb Y2K" was released in the UK on 31 December 2023 and used archived footage of the time from interviews, news reports and tv programmes. It was fairly interesting from an historical aspect, but it barely touched on what Y2K was and how people around the world were investigating/fixing it. Instead, it seemed to focus on the naysayers, doom merchants and bunker dwellers - including a few self-proclaimed programmers who stated "I know what's going to happen and I'm going to hide away" - so all in all, it was quite a negative and unbalanced film. Still worth a watch, though, if you have a spare 90 minutes and don't mind an increase in blood pressure every so often when viewing some of the "rational" arguments used by certain participants against the Y2K concept.

On a similar note, my boss and I had an argument a few years back with someone who claimed that Y2K was a big hoax, waste of time and money etc. Oh, and the person we had an argument with worked in IT at the time and by his own admission did Y2K checking. Go figure.

First time I saw it in anger? 1991(!) 99 months in Duration field is considered permanent (don't ask, just remember the monkeys, bananas and fire hose). Purge process calculated duration in months between start date and now, if greater than Duration, it goes. New Purge, written by ex-colleague calculated the end date as start date + duration......(!) I rang him up at his new company to congratulate him on being the first person to exploit the Y2K bug.

Daftest moment? With Old Father Time breathing down our necks we're in a race to roll out the compliant versions before, er, Y2K. A business unit stalls the entire process by stating that their methodology required a Feasibility Study before any changes and there wasn't one for the new software versions so they wouldn't put it in. We countered with the fact that the 1st of January 2000 wasn't going to move or change so we had had to do it, feasible or not, so we weren't going to waste valuable time on meaningless bollocks. As "get stuffed" trumps wankword bullshit, they fell into line.

Most visible cockup? The US Naval Observatory clock on the web proudly showing the date as 1/1/100. Hooray for ctime . This really cheered up the manager of one of our development teams, who'd been upset to find all their report headers doing the same thing and had asked me to find out why.

As "get stuffed" trumps wankword bullshit, they fell into line

I had the opposite. New Unix boxes replacing two where the application wasn't Y2K compatible.* The pair were replaced by shiny new, acceptance tested and everything. All ready to cut over in the week before Christmas and the New Year. The users - finance - suddenly said no, they weren't taking the risk (hah!) of doing that before they'd closed the year off which would take them until mid-January. We had the vendors dialling in on at least a daily basis fixing errors until we could make the move.

* Actually the version on the old production box was but that on the even older hot standby wasn't. That's the hot standby which wasn't' really that hot as the overnight update had been failing, by running out of time and unnoticed, possibly for a year or more.

I spent numerous weekends in the run up to the end of 1999 walking around the offices I worked in patching the crap out of anything and everything that looked like a computer. Those were the Compaq days, so I walked around with a box of trusty Softpaqs on floppy-disk, running through a set procedure to ensure BIOS, OS, et al, were all ready to go. As I came from an Electronic Engineering background, I said to the IT manager (who had arrived in simlar circumstances to Jen on the IT Crowd) that I would leave the servers and network all running, and deal with any issues on our return in January.

The "clever" people over at the York Street site in Cambridge, decided to power-off their AS/400 - just in case! On our return to the office, I was glad to see everything ticking away as before. We had no issues. The IT Manager receives a phone call from York Street. An announcement will have to be made to all of the AS/400 users on our site stating it will be down for a couple of days. The "clever" people had thrown the breakers, in came a lovely wave of 240 Vac, and the stone-cold power-supplies promptly puked their innards! IBM were, so I heard, run off their feet, as quite a few people around the UK had done the same thing.

The place I worked during Y2K decided that the Christmas break of two weeks wasn't long enough incase things did go pear shaped. They opted for 3 weeks, it's still a thing... Now everybody gets the week between x-mas and New year off, paid!

I spent a year working as a contractor for a major UK bank on the Y2K "problem". Yes, nothing happened at 00:01 and, for the next two months nothing happened except I collected a good pay cheque.

...if the powers-that-be had decided to roll out the Euro on 1/1/2000 instead of a year later.

Given I was working for a fund manager at the time, that meant two New Year's Eves in a row being on call... just in case...

At 2000-01-01 I worked for a well-known European telecommunications manufacturer, and I was asked to be alert around midnight (moderate alcohol was allowed). I had to be able to reach the office in 10 minutes on foot, so that was no big deal. A phone company from a neighboring country paid some extra premium for all this. My mobile phone number was assigned to the priority list of my country (phone company was a customer too), to guarantee that I could be reached.

So at midnight I was in the city center in front of the castle, toasting with friends. Like every year, everybody tried to text/call their family, but the network was TITSUP (as happened every year in the pre-smartphone days). Everybody immediately claimed that it must be the Y2K, and looked at me, telling me that we didn't do a good job fixing the problems. At that very moment (00:03 !!), my phone rang, and it was the only one in the crowd that actually worked. Obviously, it worked because I was on the priority list ; a couple of years later I helped to program one myself, and in such a case your call would terminate another random call in progress to make room. "Hey, I work for the phone company" was my defense.

It turned out that it was the customer itself who decided to test our service immediately after midnight, since they paid a good sum for it.

Then obviously everybody used my phone to call their family, since it was the only one that worked for the next 15 minutes or so :-)

I had the same. I worked for a local radio station at the time, and as there was no BBC station in the area, we were part of the emergency broadcast network. As I was the on call engineer, my phone was placed on the priority register.

For several years after 2000 until I changed my provider, I never ever had any problems phoning or texting anyone - never got a network busy notification :)

The mobile base sites treat emergency calls the same way - if the local cell can't service an emergency call, it will drop one of its in-progress calls to allow it to process the emergency call.

I wonder how much of a problem the POSIX timestamp overrun is going to be. I honestly have no idea.

Or 2036 for NTP. And there's also one in 2028. At least the pain should be spread out over a few years.

It was always the first edge case set of date tests that were dropped if things were running late, given the absolute Y2K date couldn't shift, because everyone's goto mitigation was well we'll have replaced all this tech and be using newer software by then that will fix it for us and promptly erected a someone else's problem field around it.

Maybe just don't book a flight on a commercial plane around that date ;)

When I feel optimistic, I think that, because of Y2K, most systems that deal with dates have been revised shortly before 2000 - a time when 64-bit timestamps were already available. Given that everyone's mind was focused on date problems, a decent amount of those reworks probably switched to 64-bit timestamps directly. The rest were probably decades-old systems already, and many of them are unlikely to have survived 30 more years. It's true that we tend to keep things going way longer than they should, but, even so, a 50-years lifetime can't be too common. Also, system turnaround has gotten somewhat faster; a good bunch of latent 2038 bugs probably got wiped away in shifting to 64-bits architectures.

When I feel pessimistic, I think that, because of the sheer exponential growth of computer systems around the turn of the millennium, and the comparatively limited supply of skilled programmers, there has to be an enormous amount of systems that have been coded by monkeys. Each decade, way more software has been made than the decade before. How much more software has time_t fields, compared to the amount of software that had 2-digit year fields? An order of magnitude more? Two? Even if a pretty large majority of those time_ts were 64-bits, there would still be way more 2038 latent bugs out there than there ever have been Y2K bugs. Also, because of the generally slower turnaround and older architectures, I bet a whole bunch of those are in industrial automation.

Either way, I am slightly worried that nobody seems to be making a serious attempt at figuring out whether there is a problem, and how big it is.

>I wonder how much of a problem the POSIX timestamp overrun is going to be

Potentially much more. Not a lot of embedded systems cared about the year. A lot of control systems care about the difference in two times, a lot of them just use time_t, a lot of them are embedded in places you wouldn't have thought there was a computer and a lot of them are going to be impossible to update.

We'll find out before 2038, when (eg) a poorly programmed system in 20 2 8 tries to schedule an event in ten years time and runs out of bits.

It's the anti-lock brakes and process control stuff that takes two measurements and divide by time.now()-time_prev that is the worry, they don't plan stuff 10 years in advance

This reminds me (again) of hearing the local bowling alley's back office system still [1]ran on a PDP-11 as the millennium approached.

Presumably -maybe I was unofficially told- their solution to [2]existing date rollover problems (while waiting for the upgrade to the Boss scoring system, running under Windows NT) was setting the system date to a year with 1st January on the right day of the week and the right number of 29th Februarys a bit later.

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/01/16/opinion_column/#c_4604897

[2] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2010/06/21/vintage_computer_fair/#c_796554

For anybody on ICL 1900 systems Y2K was obviously a non-issue since dates were held as 'days since 31 Dec 1899' in a 24 bit word, so the 1900 rollover date is somewhere around 24881 AD and this kit has always come with a set of standard subroutines for dealing with dates, including converting the 'days since' figure into dd/mm/yyyy and vice versa.

When I started to use UNIX and its relatives and discovered that they stored dates in seconds since 1 Jan 1970 I thought that they'd made a good decision to store dates as seconds and then screwed it up by storing dates in short integers having as few as 16 bits. Still, at least the *nix crowd woke up and switched to a 32 bit time value comfortably before 2038 rolled around.

Ah, the GIVE extracode... Can't remember the parameter, it's a while back, and it wasn't available in Gin, which I mainly used.

Thank you for the memories.

I've always said that the main reason why so many people nowadays think "nothing happened" is because large companies at the time - particularly financial institutions - were very keen to downplay problems when they occurred.

As an example: I clearly remember a national newspaper article in 1999 which highlighted a problem with newly-issued Barclaycards. The problem was exactly what you'd expect: the new cards weren't working because their expiry date was two digits - say, "03" - and the system read that as "1903". A classic Y2K problem, of course, except that when approached by the paper for comment, Barclaycard double-down: it was NOT a "Y2K" problem, they insisted, but an "End of Century" issue...

Nothing to see here: please go away...

The expiry marked on my current Visa card has a two-digit year. Could this be a sign that an increasing proportion of the workforce doesn't remember the twentieth century?

-A.

Or they are confident that you will replace your card before 2124

I had one so-called expert warn that you needed to air-gap the compliant and non-compliant systems, because otherwise the millenium bug would spread back onto the computers that had already been fixed.

Sure there were some genuine problems that needed to be fixed, but it was mostly doomsday cultists trying to make money from snakeoil fixes.

I was working in the computer time sharing industry - pre PC. I had 2 UK banks doing 25 year country economic forecasts using a product we had called TSAM (Time Series Analysis ?).

In 1975 the 2 banks complained that their forecasts were crashing in TSAM. We realised the problem and it got fixed.

I was stupid by not realising what a gold mine this could be back then in 1975.

I'm to old to bother now but who is getting ready to make money on the 2038 problem. Only 14 years away!

It was complicated... I was confident all the systems I was responsible for stored dates in suitable fields, and the worst I was going to run into were display problems, but there's always the niggling concern: suppose I tell the management there's absolutely nothing to worry about and something comes out of left field. So we did a lot of what turned out to be unnecessary stuff. But you know, it was insurance, and that's the nature of insurance. You pay a lot of premiums and seem to get nothing in return.

First thing I did when I came home at 1AM was to boot the PC, it did a false start and then completed OK. Then again, it was Windows 98, so that could have been anything.

Wish I could be around for 1 March 2100. A lot of software got lucky in the fact that 2000 was a century year which was also a leap year because 2000 is evenly divisible by 400 as well as 4. There's an awful lot of software which only tests for year modulo 4 = 0. 2100 will pass that test, but is NOT a leap year.

Excel thinks 29th February 1900 is a valid date, because Microsoft wanted it to be bug-compatible with Lotus 123 in that respect.

However =DATE(2100,2,29) does return 1st March 2100, so they thought about that one.

>Excel thinks 29th February 1900 is a valid date,

Which is a major problem for doing wages timesheets for time travellers