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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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At the time I ran a large campus network where we spent all of December laying in contingency plans and doing tabletop drills just in case some Y2K bug hit and took us out.
I hosted a party that New Year's Eve, but stayed sober(-ish) so I could assess and deal with any fallout. Midnight approaches, we do the countdown. Clock hits zero and I smooch a couple of the ladies attending. I disappear to my home office upstairs to assess....
2 devices down, same location. 1 more device down, next door. Everything else us up and fine. Odd.
The devices all went down about 20 minutes prior to midnight. Not Y2K. Not critical sites, it can wait til next business day.
I close up shop about 0015 hours 2000-01-01 and go back downstairs to rejoin my party, aiming to catch up with the other drunks. Shenanigans ensue.
Reason For Outage: there was a frat house next door to the two buildings that went down, and they had a house fire that burned the tree out front, which scorched our aerial fiber runs into the next two buildings down. Ridiculous coincides are ridiculous.
So yeah. Y2K was a non-event.
It's worth mentioning that it was a non-event thanks to the tireless efforts of millions of programmers reviewing billions of lines of code. The problem was real, and the threat of total financial meltdown was real, and we prevented it because we all agreed that there was a problem that needed fixing.
It's also worth keeping in mind that the problem had been fixed for months, if not years, before the media turned it into a frenzy. Most of the work had been done, and it was only the slim chance that something critical had been overlooked. The panic and fearmongering was massively overblown. It's like being in a plane that lands, and then they announce the engine had fallen off in mid flight. Yes, it could have been bad, and the plane might still present a risk to everyone onboard, but the worst of the danger has passed.
Oh, I don't mean to downplay the magnitude of the challenge! That it was a non-event is a minor miracle easily a decade in the making thanks entirely to the efforts of people way smarter than me. While I didn't sit in on code reviews myself, there were a couple of Old Programmers who came back from retirement to review some of our own COBOL code, and older. They were happy ro share. It was a formative event for me as a young buck.
The UNIX epoch rollover in 2038 is going to be more of the same. Many systems haven't yet been converted over to 64-bit time, and there are a LOT of embedded systems out there. Hopefully attrition will take them, but we all know the IT lore of that one old NT server sealed up in the wall, and still serving files somehow.....
Remeber in the 90s when 2038 seemed like the very distant future?