The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s Friday column that shares your tech support stories. Over the holiday season we’re telling tales of the Y2K bug, and readers who spent December 31, 1999 on call in case the world’s computers caused calamities. A reader we’ll Regomize as “Barb” who showed up for Y2K duty …

[Bebu sa Ware]

she eventually forgot about missing her honeymoon,…

"she eventually forgot about missing her honeymoon, before finally taking it 17 years later with a trip to Hawaii."

Bonus marks if it was with the same bloke. :)

[Neil Barnes]

I carefully arranged things

So that all my y2k work was done before the grand occasion (including upgrading a couple of HP mainframes) and took three weeks off.

New Year's Eve saw me on Copocabana beach with an estimated six million Brazilians (it's quite a big beach; 3km long), my (now) wife, and a modicum of caipirinhas.

[MiguelC]

Re: I carefully arranged things

I had to work that night (as I've already told), but pay was good. Indeed, it was enough to cover for my well earned vacations in the Maldives, 6 weeks later

[JLV]

Re: I carefully arranged things

Buddy of mine moved from Paris to Tahiti to fix the Y2K bug for a local bank. Still lives there.

(in case you wonder... French people who - like him - don't happen to be originally Parisian themselves often suffer Paris living for the professional opportunities it offers but dream of moving elsewhere ASAP)

[I Am Spartacus]

Re: I carefully arranged things

I was the one who alerted the management of the new startup telco I was working for. I alerted them several years before 2000, and was called a scaremonger, a fraud and whole lot of other things. It took one of the directors reading the Financial Times to realise what I was warning them about was a real thing.

So we rented a section of a warehouse, fenced it off with security fencing, and built an isolated mini telecoms systems: customer care, switches, network management, everything. With our own timeclock that we could wind backwards and forwards. We worked long nights to be able to set up different scenarios across all of the system. We ran endless, well documented, simultations. We had our suppliers in to fix issues.

Come the big night, of course, nothing went wrong. It all passed off without incident. So then I got a telling off for having spent too much money on a white elephant. I had to explain that the reason you have insurance is so you can claim if you need to: you don't use the argument that because you haven't needed to claim, you don't need insurance.

Oh, and it was not as if we carried anything trivial - just the live feeds for BBC1 - 4 went over our circuits from BBC Centre to the broadcase attenae. Imagine the negative publicity if we had Jools Holland counting down to midnight on the millenium: "Three.....two.....one.....Happy New Mil.....<silence and blank screens>".

[Neil Barnes]

Re: I carefully arranged things

And the BBC had been defined by the government as 'the fifth emergency service' over that period. It was very satisfying at the time, when presented with obstruction over my investigations, to be able to say "would you like to come with me to the Director General's office to explain?"...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I carefully arranged things

"I had to explain that the reason you have insurance is so you can claim if you need to: you don't use the argument that because you haven't needed to claim, you don't need insurance."

And nothing has changed :-( Bean-counters especially balk at the "cost" of back-ups, disaster management, patch schedules, system updates (hard and software) etc. all the time. There's probably 100's of stories to be told by readers coming up against this brick wall on a daily basis.

[Lee Staniforth 1]

Re: I carefully arranged things

Six million Brazillians? How many zeros is THAT?!?

[HXO]

In 1999 I had a woman friend and was in an industry that could cold start by handcrank, so keeping software up was not a concern.

I few years later in IT I saw some lab SW, that would fall over with timestamps in new data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in a school, lots of testing first (we had a floppy disk to run) everything passed except for the admin server, which was old even then, a true behemoth from Mitsubishi Apricot - https://apricot-archive.co.uk/vx-ft-server

[xyz123]

No-one' mentioning the eight billion pounds wasted by the government.

They threw vast sums at their Y2K cronies to "protect infrastructure" many of which were single individuals masquerading as businesses. (think £10 registration fee at companies house).

Then used "national security" to cover up the sheer volume of theft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are these the same cronies that went on to defraud covid schemes or were they a new generation of cronies? Please tell as you appear to have inside knowledge.

[Doctor Syntax]

Wipe the foam from your mouth and then reflect on who was in government in 199/2000 and who was in government in 2020.

[Antron Argaiv]

It's just part of the job. Government will always be, at a minimum, inefficient, and typically a bunch of self-serving wankers. Given the chance to profit from their positions, they will first carefully look around to see if anyone's watching, then give the contract to their friends in industry. It's the way of the world, unfortunately.

(Although, every now and then, you find an honest one -- see prosecuter Jack Smith in the US -- and his lack of success prosecuting The Orange Menace)

[H in The Hague]

"Government will always be, at a minimum, inefficient, and typically a bunch of self-serving wankers."

Depends where you live. On the whole I've been v happy with the efficiency of the council services here in The Hague, the Netherlands. A while ago I spotted some broken glass on the road here, reported it through their portal and asked them to sweep it up (was too much for me to do myself), got a response two or three hours later confirming that it'd been sorted. Went to check, and yes the road was clean again. Some more recently, spotted a loose branch in a tree, went to the portal, picked the tree out on the street plan, got a response the same day that the tree was due to be felled anyway. Not really had such interactions with central government but their online tax portal certainly works well.

Guess you get the public services you vote, and pay, for.

[Dan 55]

The Netherlands is also the country where if an ambulance needs to get to hospital as fast as possible, the police escort it and close each and every junction or intersection leading to hospital before the ambulance goes through it.

[dmesg]

The town up the road has municipally-owned power. The service and reliability is the equal or better of other towns in the vicinity. And significantly less costly.

[Anonymous Coward]

> who was in government in 199/2000

Some red incompetents

> and who was in government in 2020.

Some blue incompetents

And?

[Simon Harris]

Remind me how that Who song goes

“Meet the new boss, same as…”

[Dan 55]

Contemporary report:

Millennium bug fails to bite

The government has spent about £430 million while private industry is thought to have spent about £20 billion fixing the bug and preparing contingency plans in case the worst happened.

£430m - chump change when compared to present-day government IT projects.

Also it failed to bite because a lot of programmers like myself searched for and fixed bugs in the 90s so Y2K turned out to be largely a non-event, although as you can see in the report some hospital equipment did fail.

[Giles C]

This is always the problem we face in our line of work.

I need to do a change which will take 10 minutes, but to do it I will have spent 2 or 3 days going through all the configurations to make sure everything has been checked and double checked to ensure it goes to plan.

If I didn’t do that all hell would break loose and that is where the money disappears to.

It cost 3 man days to prep say £1200 a day if you are paying a contractor to do the change prep work, but if you didn’t spend the money planning you could be down for a day and lose millions.

I used to work for an animal advertised insurance site and left about 9 years ago, if we lost card payments for an hour that was at least 60k in cash not taken back then I don’t know how much they take these days…

So yes you will pay a lot but as others have said it is insurance, because nothing went wrong doesn’t mean we didn’t do the work…

[Doctor Syntax]

Although my clients' beancounters had opted to experience the MB (see my post in a previous thread) by postponing the planned mitigation until mid-January and as the plant was shut down over New Year SWMBO went to my cousin and his wife as usual for New Year. We went outside to view the spectacular collection of firework displays up and down the valley as seen from the top of their garden. It was an unforgettable spectacle. We later discovered that my daughter and her then partner just stayed in the pub and missed it all. What a miserable pair!

[frabbledeklatter]

Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

The big deal with Y2K was number of days between dates. The finance types solved that in the1980s and 90s. What a lot of places got away with was the fact that the year 2000 was a leap year because it was a century year evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, the software which was still testing for a remainder after dividing by 4 appeared to work. 2100 will be much more interesting. It is evenly divisible by 4, but is NOT a leap year because it is not evenly divisible by 400. Good luck to my great-great grandchildren's generation.

[MJB7]

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

Any grandchildren I have might still be working in Y2.1K, great-grand children certainly will be. Great-great-grandchildren will probably still be at school. I suppose you might get to great-great- if you were older than me, and your children reproduced faster,

[frabbledeklatter]

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

I'm 80 years old. Greats are mostly preschool, but a couple of teenagers. One great-great who is 3. Few of them are likely to be around for Y2.1K, and will be well past retirement age if so.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

What do you think the retirement age will be 2100? The 3 year old might still be working all hours to pay off the mortgage at 77 :-) But at least they might have self driving flying cars powered by "Mr Fusion" and useful AI will still be 20 years away.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

I think the Epochalypse is going to be of more interest at this point in time. How many embedded 32 bit systems are there out there, churning day in and day out, running infrastructure and logistics that haven't been updated and will still be running in 2038. At least I'll be retired and due to where I live, having two months of supplies on-hand is closer to normal than prepper.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

Future generations of course will be using[telling] AI to fix the problem. Job done. It'll be alright on the night.

[JohnnyS777]

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

2038 may be interesting. That's when the 32-bit clock in UNIX rolls over. Will there be any 32-bit UNIX systems running then? Probably very few, but if there is one old system doing something important that has been forgotten...

[disgruntled yank]

January 1, 2000

I was not at work or on call on New Year's Eve then. I was comfortably seated in view of a TV showing happy crowds here and there as midnight moved west. After enough such scenes, we decided to drive down to the area between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, in hopes of seeing fireworks comparable to what we had seen on TV. It was very cold, though not cold enough to keep one hefty man from shedding his clothes and running towards the Reflecting Pool. The cops got him before he reached the water (and I suppose locked him up for the night to reflect on his decision). At midnight, what appeared to be a screen of fireworks went off to the west, lasting less than thirty seconds. We waited a bit for more fireworks, grumbled, and went home.

A co-worker at the office not for work but for the view said that the real firework show started about 12:30, and was quite good. Was it delayed by a Y2K bug? I never heard.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: January 1, 2000

"and I suppose locked him up for the night to reflect on his decision"

If they'd let him get in first his reflections might have been deeper.

[ColinPa]

What goes up ... must come down

I had to fly to the US on Jan 2nd to support a very large customer in case they had any problems.

I heard people had been taken to hospital, because to celebrate the new century people fired their guns into the air.

What goes up... comes down, and there were a few cases of people being hit by the descending bullets

___________________

Over the century change, one problem we experienced was the coffee machines stopped work, so people working through the night could not get their dose of caffeine. The boss brought in his coffee maker.

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: What goes up ... must come down

Over the century change, one problem we experienced was the coffee machines stopped work, so people working through the night could not get their dose of caffeine. The boss brought in his coffee maker.

Good on the Boss. Never trust a computer-controlled coffee maker.

[PRR]

Re: What goes up ... must come down

> people being hit by the descending bullets

"A dangerous tradition: retrospective analysis of celebratory gunfire-related injuries in three tertiary hospitals"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11065979/

A Turkish study with some US data.

[Zakspade]

VCR

Like many in IT, I worked over Y2K and eyes were peeled in case hard work had missed something.

Our company was fine. We were an IT company that supplied support to clients. Guess what! They were fine as well - because we had managed their Y2K transition.

All was good.

Many (non-IT friends) said in the days after, that it was all hokum and nothing. And a few days after that I realised my 14-day programable VCR couldn't be set because it couldn't handle 2000...

Yes, Y2K bit me - but not where I thought or how.

[Dan 55]

Re: VCR

You could have probably set the year to 1990-something to match the day, month, and day of the week unless you were using Video+ codes to program it.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Animal experimentation

“I had to join the overall site Y2K team planning for all departments across multiple major buildings, including the animal experimentation block,” he said, then added the following rather scary observation: “You don't want to hear the plans that were in place there in the event of a total power failure across the region as a consequence of Y2K!”

It's always good advice to always mount a scratch monkey.

[volsano]

One Y2K remediation I worked on had systems from the 1960s -- crucial systems that ran the whole show.

We easily (for some definitions of the word) fixed their 1980s and 1990s stuff that used 2-digit years.

But we did not touch the 1960s and 1970s stuff that had a specialised date storage format. It was 16-bit dates. 7 bits for year. 9 bits for day of year.

It was too assemblery, too unstructured, too ancient.

And, anyway, 9-bit year counting from 1900 (as they did) was good until the unimaginably far future.

The unimaginably far future is nearly with us: 1900 + 127 = 2027.

I am waiting for the phone to ring so I can apologise, - and quote them an unimaginably large number to finish the job.

[Claptrap314]

Hey, that sounds like fun! And...I need the work, so if you could pass that call along...

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

"Hey, that sounds like fun!"

Only for certain values of "fun"?

[Claptrap314]

Yes. What counts as "fun" for me. :P

Seriously, I like the hard problems, especially if solving them is a big help to people.

[cosmodrome]

"assemblery". Great neologism. I've got to steal that word. If only for my cruisade against these quiche-eaters' increasing use of "assembly" instead of "assembler". "Assembly" - honestly, who in the world would deliberately chose a name like that for a programming langue?! "Assembly"... tsss!

[John Brown (no body)]

But Shirley you use an assembler to assemble the assembly of instructions written in assembly language? We may need to assemble a committee to discuss this. Are the Assembly Rooms fully booked? Closed assembly, of course. No dissemblers allowed.

[Already?]

Good Times…

We’d worked our way through our client's array of source code and completed our fixes and tests before handing it back for their reintegration, so by the big night of Y2K we’d mentally moved on and treated it almost like every other Christmas and NY break. The Y2K bonus payment that was due was quite generous, and the fact that it was all effectively done and dusted made it quite a relaxing break, so relaxing in fact that at about 3 in the morning on NYD I asked my then lady friend if perhaps she’d like to get married. She answered correctly it seems, given that we’re still together with me now retired and her stopping at the end of this school year.

It’s still frustrating to read articles in the press that claim Y2K was a non event, primarily it seems because toasters continued to work and there were no plane crashes. Drives me nuts.

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Good Times…

And the reason there were no plane crashes is that all planes were grounded. I don't know about other airports but Schiphol (Amsterdam Airport) had several runways converted to airplane parking lots and it was maxed out.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Good Times…

There's even idiots in these comments claiming it was a scam to enrich cronies

[DS999]

People claiming Y2K was a nothingburger in hindsight

Because they ignored all the prep work are kind of like vaccine deniers who skip their kids' polio vaccination because they say "polio isn't a problem anymore", and as a result there have been a handful of polio cases in the last few years after more than three decades with zero.

It is easy for people to sit from their easy chair and say Y2K was just an excuse for consulting companies to bill a lot of money, but that's only because they are ignorant of all the work many of us did to prepare. Did we go overboard fixing stuff that we knew wouldn't really matter, because of edicts from on high to fix "every" Y2K issue? Sure, there was some of that, but it is better than we were too prepared than to risk being not prepared enough. And it irks me to no end that I still hear people claiming it was all a big con job by the tech industry!

[LessWileyCoyote]

One of the areas where code *had* to be rewritten to use 4 digit years was banking and insurance - because there were customers with 19th century birthdates, 20th century account opening dates, and 21st century policy renewal dates. Not a lot, but enough to render old methods of guesstimating the century completely invalid.

Also there were a lot of one-man companies involved in Y2K work because in the 1990s that was the standard way of operating as a contractor. Most clients wouldn't engage you unless you operated as a limited company.

[Annihilator]

To be fair, those examples actually show you where the Y2K problem was forced to be solved well *before* the year 2000. There were plenty of people born in 18xx opening or operating bank accounts in 19xx, similarly there were plenty of mortgages opened in the 1980s which would close in the 2000s. Same with pension calculators, leaseholds, freeholds, investments etc.

[gnasher729]

I read of one pension company who didn't make any software changes, but just found that they had a total of 14 customers affected by this (born 1899 or earlier, still getting pension in 2000), so they removed them from the automated system and passed them to one employee who handled them manually.

[ButlerInstitute]

During university summer breaks (early to mid 1980s) I worked in the Pension Payroll office of one of the big UK breweries.

The main job was moving them to an IBM system from something else (I forget what).

As this was pensions, there were quite a few pensioners, mainly widows, who had a birth-date before 1900 (I think this task may have included adding the century, so even back then remediating a Y2K issue).

I also found another category that I've not seen since (and will no longer exist in full, for fairly obvious reasons), which is people who had no NI number as they had not had employment since the NI number system came into use. There was a special way of setting up a special NI number, incorporating the birth date, for these people. Codes may have begun with Z, (but not all Z numbers as my parents both had codes with Z).

[Annihilator]

Pretty sure it's not Y2K, but Richard Herring often brings up the most depressing New Years Eve he's ever had - home alone watching himself on the (purportedly live but actually) pre-recorded Jools Holland Hootenanny.

[BartyFartsLast]

Hah, yes, I got tickets to a Hootenanny recording a few years back, I think it was in September.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in college at the time, I remember the school put stickers on all of the computers that said Y2K OK. I kept saying at the time it was a joke, nothing was going to happen. I was right, nothing happened. Such a waste of time and effort and money for nothing. So many people in a panic, it was ridiculous.

[Ace2]

Did you read any of the comments above yours? Or maybe you’re drunk or something. One can hope.

[Annihilator]

Or maybe... MAYBE... the time effort and money was spent to ensure nothing DID happen (in most instances).

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

There were two disjunct things, though. One was the small proportion of systems with potentially serious problems, where people got in ahead of time and fixed them. Then there was the vast majority of it, which was hype and scamming, aimed at businesses (and non-commercial enterprises) that could quite easily have dealt with any minor problems after they cropped up, if they ever did.

I worked for an it company a few years later where the extraordinarily cunty bosses boasted of having made over a million quid selling pointless 'y2k audits' to places that only used mass-market off the shelf software (which was obviously sorted by whoever published it), and kept a sucker list of the y2k marks they'd call whenever they had some new line of shit to peddle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of things went wrong, or would have gone wrong, from the mundane (video rental late fees of 100 years or more) to the pretty serious (a test showed 15 nuclear reactors would shutdown):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/31/millennium-bug-face-fears-y2k-it-systems

[zappahey]

a test showed 15 nuclear reactors would shutdown

I did see a senior manager report that his nuclear-qualified crane was Y2K-compliant up to 31/12/99.

[BartyFartsLast]

D'ya think (probably not) that, just maybe the people putting those stickers on PCs had been testing, updating and patching affected machines to ensure nothing happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor 'Mitch'...

...was likely left-pondian since at this end you need 90 days consultation before a 'round of lay-offs' and HR makes sure you get paid for holidays you did not take.

Anon, coz 'Muricans will likely point out that this is precisely the kind of stifling regulation that would have prevented Mr Altman et al to borrow trillions to build a massive gun for their feet only to hit the bubble their floating on.

[gnasher729]

My company didn't have a year 2000 problem. They had a Feb 2nd, 2000 problem. On that day, the current date was rejected as invalid. It turned out that the date validation was done by some absolutely brain damaged Perl code that effectively checked if you date contained the digit 1. Feb 2nd, 2000 was the first date in over 1000 years that didn't contain the digit 1.

And one British supermarket got their first warning in 1996. When they took a delivery of tins of baked beans with a sell by date in January 2000, and the beans were rejected. So quite obviously, if they hadn't used the three years to make some changes, in January 2000 there would have been a total disaster.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

"if they hadn't used the three years to make some changes, in January 2000 there would have been a total disaster."

No, there'd have been a fairly minor admin problem, growing over the months leading up to y2k, solvable by pencils and paper until the systems were fixed and the data could be entered.

[Yes Me]

It was real back in Year 100...

"“Mark” told us he spent Y2K eve in New Zealand, and was supposed to inform his boss in Australia – where the time was two hours in the past – of any problems."

Hmm. If he'd been trying to check on a flight to Oz early on January 1st, the Auckland Airport web site at http://www.auckland-airport.co.nz would have told him it was "1 Jan 100". I have documentary proof but only on paper.

Similarly, http://www.hp.com/year2000/index.html said "January 1, *** DATE INVALID ***" just above "HP ready to Assist Customers Through Y2K Rollover"

It wasn't really a non-event. I'm looking forward to the Unix date rollover... only 12 years to go.

[Diogenes]

Penalised for not spending budget

I was then working as a PM for a large IT outsourcer. I had a portfolio of 35 small systems that had been developed by users to solve particular problems they had, and which were while not corporate mission critical, were section mission critical .

My team of 3 had the task of reverse engineering them, documenting and then making them maintainable. As part of that process we had started changing dates to 4 digits from 1995, so come the great panic of 1999 we had already done 9

9% of the work.

1999 roles around, I request a 150k budget for Y2K, mainly so I could charge the meetings and travel to meetings, and to pay my team time to prepare information for the numerous audits. To my surprise I was given $5 million solely for Y2K remediation. Some beancounter saw I was managing n klocs of code and his formula said X $ per kloc and I ended up with $5million, which was twice my normal annual budget.

We passed every audit, turning around requests for information usually same day , but always within 24 hours instead of 5 working days that was rwquested, we were ready and could easily prove it, and didn't have a single issue.

Come to my performance review at the end of January, every millstone and performance objectives hit, except that pesky budget +- 10%. My team only billed $148 K for Y2K remediation, and I had only spent 95% of my normal budget, so spot on what I had estimated, but no I had underspent by 4.8million Arguing that I never requested 5 million, and only requested 150k , with documentation, fell on deaf ears. So I missed out out on quite a substantial bonus.

I spent the rollover in a "war room" , ran the tests I had to run, and left for home at 1am. Was up at 4am to take favourite no1 son to to where his choir was performing I still call Australia home to greet the dawn on tv.