Y2K

Yep, much to my astonishment, I didn't hear of any real problems either.

I guess this was the first real "computer age" crisis and the powers-that-be took it extra seriously.

Most business and medical programs have dates as central to their application, and a lot of those had screen input dates for the more modern sites.

But I also know there are places that accidently LOST the source code for key applications that couldn't be changed without reverse engineering source code for it. And if you think that those precious tape backups are reliable enough to do that, not exactly. Been there and done that nightmare for one company. And a super programmer contractor friend actually encountered a program he couldn't work on because it was spaghetti coded to the max. I was really shocked to hear such a tale but a couple years later, one contract I worked on cell phone 36K line switch program where I was instructed to add spaghetti code to "make it work" on the cheap rather than take 2 months to rewrite and test it thoroughly. Suffice it to say, all these circumstances would have taken an unexpected investment to fix and I'm sure these aren't the only examples.

So yes, as many old machines and/or old code that could be thrown out around Y2K was thrown out.

I had most of my contracts with a multi-state hospital or the software house they used around that time, and they had critical date fields on screens, servers, databases, utilities and reports and the effort was large scale and tedious. I was a special project troubleshooter contractor that had helped solve crisis issues for this client since day 1, and I was working on another one, so I wasn't really part of the Y2K project...yet they got desperate enough to take me off a high priority billing program to join the other 20 contractors. That's pretty desperate ! This hospital was notable for having over 100 million records in its main database and over 3K input terminals live every day. Naturally they had several different mainframes, servers, and languages and operating systems passing information around in often strange ways. And as the goto guy for strange programming projects...I sure got some doozies !

But my part of the contract was done at the same time I completed the Y2K stuff I got, and over strong objections I left because I was moving to another city.
Did they have Y2K problems after Y2K ? With 20 other contractors ? I doubt it. And I too didn't hear of any Y2K either. And I was surprised too. It was like it was all a hoax. But...I've seen and worked on a LOT of code in my time. And I was aware of some extremely bad code in aerospace and airline and military applications that must have been a bear to modify and test. And I'm quite aware of stories where key programs are running that no longer have known program code. From that and more possibilities, surely there were issues ?

But then, things can, and are, often hushed up. So we don't really know what happened everywhere, and every country.

And the idea that planes would be falling from the sky is definitely ridiculous. However, the idea that a whole Airline companies planes would be stuck on the airport tarmac due to some glitch in the software handling flight schedules and billing due to date issues was a serious threat indeed.

All one has to do is look how many flights have been canceled just from "illnesses" lately.

And for sure, with all the dates used by insurance companies, well, most of their business is all about dates isn't it ?

And my multi-state hospital would have come to a screeching halt. Just having the insurance companies frozen up would have done that too !

And our State government with all their different mainframes and "social payment systems". No one would get their foodstamps, unemployment checks, disability, etc...and worst of all worst...TAXES could not be collected and used etc. Heaven forbid.

So stuff could have broken, but it didn't.

I've seen broken. One of the weirdest challenges at the multi-state hospital I got was when I walked in one day(which was rare because I only worked for 6 months every 6 months) and the senior programmer and supervisor slammed a couple feet of printouts on my desk and said I had to figure out what happened to push the daily 24 hour processing to 27 hours IMMEDIATELY. In short, the hospital WAS broken indeed. Not much different than if bad dates had stopped the daily processing. Obviously the senior staff didn't have a clue, and I didn't either. But I lit into researching the whole freaking system performance info for 7 straight hours until it was clear that it wasn't any of the current programs or database causing the problem. At that point I had been the recipient of the loving scrutiny from an uncomfortable number of higherups and I hadn't had any lunch. So I took a short break in the men's room. It was there that I remembered a past job where I was coding applications in C and somewhere unknown, there was a system group that had the source code to the operating system and were making changes to the actual programming code statements without telling us or me. This of course, pissed me and my co-workers off tremendously because each time they did that, often 3 times a week...none of my group's carefully coded application code worked anymore. But nobody had the source to the operating system in the hospital, but...the hardware company did. So I asked my supervisor to find out if they did a sysgen lately. Yep..the night before. But what could be causing this ? My memory went back again to my fabulous C job and remembered what the system guys often did to us was change or add undocumented parameters to the basic commands, which of course our compiler knew nothing about. Then I asked the senior programmer if they had recompiled all the programs to pick up the new system version already. Yep, yesterday. Any problems ? No. Huh. Luckily, I had been shadowing a temp performance expert and I had programmed all sorts of tests of language speed, and command speed experiment programs, and we had used, out of my curiousity, a very obscure parameter from my manual studies that I never thought I'd use...a way to expand commands into their underlying machine code. This wasn't particularly interesting to him, but it was to me from my C days, so he had a full expanded Cobol program compiled under the previous Sysgen version. I needed that to compare to whatever I'd find from the new sysgen. It was pretty near time to go home and I wouldn't be going home if this didn't show me something, so I jammed the required special compiler parameter into the code to pick up the new sysgen and recompiled one of the programs to see if something popped out. Sure enough, the new sysgen had added an extra parameter to the Read command ! And this was slowing down the 24 hour processing cycle hitting our 100 million plus database to push it past the 24 hour processing window...a data DISASTER. I told the supervisor to have them go back to the old version and recompile everything and I called the sysgen guys in California and explained what happened. As we were one of the heaviest users in the USA it affected us, but not the smaller users that much. They said they'd fix it and I went home only a half hour late ! And it took over a WEEK for the whole teams in several departments to clean up all the system data mess...just from one DAY of being down.
If the dates had not been fixed, that multi state hospital would have been down for WEEKS, and the cleanup might have lasted MONTHS.

Dang good thing THAT didn't happen !

But then, I was home trying to figure what end was up... on my first electric guitar, thanks to contracting fees...when Y2K went down.

I slept like a baby during Y2K, but I bet a big bunch of computer pros didn't !

In short, Y2K could've done some real damage...but didn't.

Judging from the misadventures seen in the glorious year of 2020, we all probably dodged a bullet.

Somehow...

Coming next, the crash of the internet.

I plan to sit out that one too....