Y2K - The Doomsday Event That Definitely Happened
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ม.ค. 2025
- On Jan 1, 2000, the world braced for chaos, but did the Y2K bug really bring disaster? Discover the truth behind the fearmongering and the costly preventive measures.
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I spent 18 months remediating Y2K in 1998 and 1999, and have to roll my eyes whenever someone goes off about Y2K being much ado about nothing. It was only “nothing” because of those of us who worked our butts off to fix it. 🤦🏻♂️
This was my father's arguement too. Tbf the way he told it, he singlehandedly solved the Millennium Bug... But he brought it up whenever Y2K stuff is mentioned...
I was never really worried about it because I knew there were tons of people working on it, including my dad.
It is nice to know people actually prevented it instead of just panicking tbh.
You ruined my apocalypse! I had my hockey pad armor, my baseball bat with nails in the end... And then I had to go to work on Jan 2nd.. Im mad at all of you. 😂
Yeah...a good friend of mine worked on the problem....
As a software engineer “drafted” into Y2K remediation, I can tell you this: for every Millennial or Gen Z’er who learned in History class that Y2K was “no big deal”, there were countless of unsung heroes working through weekends, vacations and holidays to ensure it would go down in history as “no big deal”.
Bro I'm a millenial and I was 15 when this happened, we didn't learn about it in history class it was a current event 😂 I remember the real Y2K bug: Windows ME
Hiya, Millenial here whose spouse did the work you are did we are actually old enough to have lived through & experience the issue ourselves. Especially older Millenials. My spouse literally started his 1st internship in college a year before. They had brought in tons of college students as cheap labor to address the issue. Granted my spouse was in college at 15 but the point stands people who were in their teens when it happened were certainly old enough to know what went on.
Millennials who don't remember it ha (the age group is ~1981 to ~1995)🤦♂️
I actually had a piece of scientific equipment at school which shut down due to the y2k bug 🤷
Did you remember to fill out your TPS Reports....
@@ChristinaMaternaI'm a millennial from that age range who doesn't remember it first-hand because I was just a kid who didn't watch the news.
My husband was in IT at this time. He worked long, long hours to reprogram systems . The fact that this was not a crisis is testament to the hard work of an army of IT workers
People really freaked out back then but honestly even if everything wasn't prepared on time I don't think it would have been that catastrophic
Me too... crazy fun times. Companies throwing money at people who could w2k secure their biasness. Back then I worked at Microsoft. (back then similar to Google) :D
@@demokid2000 I remember the Pre Google days....then it was all AOL still or Yahoo if you needed to search anything online
I got my first internship doing exactly this. Very few people outside the industry realized it was an all hands on deck moment that lasted like an entire year...
I very much remember this frenzy. I worked in the outside of new tech (technician for early high speed internet, bellsouth ADSL) and it was an absolute sh1t show.
My Dad was a systems analyst back then and had been in charge of the Y2K task force at his company for over two years. I think that time was the most stressful time he had at work. When nothing happened on Jan. 1, 2000, he could finally exhale again.
I wonder just how feverishly people like him were working all over the globe to get things updated...?
I spent most of 1998 and 1999 on airplanes and working 18 hour days doing Y2K remediation to stop people being billed millions of dollars on farm equipment leases. You are welcome. It is also the project that kicked off my career.
My kids stuck my “Y2K OK” stickers on everything in the house, including the coffee maker, washer, and dryer.
Is the coffee maker still ok? ( The washer and dryer would have died years ago when the warranty ran out. nothing to do with y2k )
I see lots of these. Basically, you just did your job. Thanks. But that’s really all it was.
@@alanhilder1883 Older appliances are built like tanks, probably still working when they were replaced
@@hopingforthebest1.9 50 year old washers and dryers didn't have computers in them. Anything younger are not those "older appliances" said by someone who has had to fix the appliances for the last 30 or so years.
I forgot those stickers.
I was in the military on guard duty on December 31, 1999. As a fellow with a pretty extensive background in software development at that point, I knew that the potential for utter chaos was really high. But... I also knew that almost all companies had properly invested a great deal in fixing the oversights and corner-cutting of previous generations. At the time the clock finally rolled over, I was pretty confident that the critical risks had been dealt with. I think the media hype really helped in this case... it raised an alarm and people responded. Good video Simon.
Yeah, i was going to say that.
The media alarm actually helped put investor, managers and business owners in line to listen to their engineers and tech service crews instead of just trying to gamble on the cost of a possible loss.
I remember my father installing a patch for our win3.11 computer in 1999 around middle of the year and saying we didn't have to worry because home computers didn't have the potential to cause damage.
I was a programmer who worked from 1996-1999 for various companies including banks, mostly changing how dates were stored, but also commenting the code to make certain future programmers knew what each procedure was supposed to do and when the code had been updated. A huge part of what I did was expand four letter abbreviations for commands into full words so that the computer could expand its processes.
I first hit a live Y2K bug in 1996. I was working for a car company on their prototype ordering systems. In 1996 someone started planning which prototype vehicles they'd be testing in 2000, just an outline plan (X chassis, Y engines on chassis, Z full cars etc). Next morning the system was flashing red as there was loads of stuff 96 years overdue needing to be ordered! Fortunately the automatic ordering hadn't (yet) been implemented and switched on!
The biggest impact working in IT at the time was all the retired COBOL programmers who caused this issue getting fat checks as consultants to reprogram the systems.
As an IT guy working for a military contractor in the 90s, I can say that the computers the military were using were shockingly antique.
They are still getting fat checks! I'm stuck learning that dead language in 2023 to finally stop hiring 70 year old consultants.
@@bergec0 Investment company was same. Mainframes were bought and paid for, why replace before they died? :D
Same here I worked on COBOL for y2k... made great money for the time for real almost 3 years. COBOL, DB2, CICS... wow I feel old all the sudden.
What's irritating is that, whilst some infrastructure was vulnerable, pretty much every computer made after 88 had clocks that ran 50 through 00 to 49. I was a lowly office goblin at the time, and I was initially worried, until I looked into it. I had a small network at home for my office with aabout 10 devices attached and the only thing that burped when I advanced the clock to Y2K was my server's screensaver.
Yet at work I watched consultants come in and scam the company for close to a million quid for running a bit of malware that changed the font of the clock and forced all the computers to launch a little 'Y2K Compliant!' pop up when you logged in to Windows. Most of our machines were running Windows 95 still and they chugged due to poor set up and maintenance, but that pop up added roughly 20 seconds to the login time.
I tried to bring it up with management but, being a minimum wage scrub fresh out of Uni, I was dismissed in favour of the guys getting paid more than my weekly wage, PER HOUR. I was even given a written warning.
I stole a roll of the stickers that they were slapping on everything and put them on the basement computers, (two networks used for records, back up and training as well as my XCOM command station and DOOM machine). These networks got missed entirely. They also passed Y2K without incident.
At the company where I worked in IT support at the time, we spent nearly 2 yearts on remediation, outright replacing several major systems at over 200 large hospitals, and for all of December, there were no vacations allowed; we were informed that, if anyone called out for any reason other than *being* a patient at one of our hospitals, they might as well not bother returning afterward. We were on "watch and watch" for 48 hours before and sheduled for the 48 hours after (rescinded after the remediation effort proved largely successful), with half the team working 09:00-21:30, the other half working 21:00-09:30. As it turns out, I was one of the tiny handful of people who ended up receiving an *actual* Y2K issue, a hospital that had ignored one important interface with legacy lab equipment that still ran on, of all things, Windows 3.11.... 🙄
And since Christmas Eve fell on my normal day off in the regular rotation, but leaving town was out of the question, I spent the night logged into Everquest, parked in the Heartwood Tavern in Kelethin, skilling up Fletching and making bows and arrows for fledgeling brother- and sister-Rangers. 😎
One day.. I'll be as cool as you. 😎
@Bigga Nigga damn theyre fucking onto me. The truth, my only weakness, but how did they know?
Epic? Cerner? Allscrips? Praxis wasn't actually running EMRs then right they'd only just founded. My spouse works for one of these & yeah it wasn't exactly a cake walk to get to New Years that year.
Kevin and Simon instead of having a conversation like actual human being and getting to know each other just sprinkle in life stories into the scripts and videos. This is like next leven introvert stuff. I'm impressed. All the benefits of a friendship with out any of the human interaction.
A conversation? I think the insulation of the basement will make that difficult. Simon doesn't want to hear the cries of " Let me out ".
A conversation? I think the insulation of the basement will make that difficult. Simon doesn't want to hear the cries of " Let me out ".
It’s like a first date on Groundhog Day. 😆
The team I was part of spent hundreds of hours preparing, upgrading and testing to ensure that Y2K was a non-event. Most people have no idea how much effort went into it.
Our neighbors disappeared for two weeks after Y2K. They’d spent a year building a bunker under their house. They finally emerged, guns drawn, looking for the black helicopters. They were fun.
BASED neighbors
You guys should have spent that time scattering fake skeletons and stuff all over their yard and decorating it to look like a wasteland.
I envy you SO much!
@@zachaliles LOL! You sound like fun!
😂😂😂
I was working tech support for Gateway on December 31, 1999... my shift ended at midnight. I still have my "I Survived Y2K at Gateway" shirt. It was a slow day. The handful of calls I took were people asking if their computer was going to crash... I replied "Don't you think it's a bit too late to be worried about that now?" after which I confirmed that it was going to be fine and that they should go enjoy their new years eve party.
I volunteered at a computer recycler from 2009-2022 and late 90s laptops sometimes came with a round "Y2K READY" sticker on it. Always made me smile.
It was a major selling point!
I believe it! Also, spectacular work as always Kevin!
@@NextEevolution Thanks!
I was a 16y/o teen that year and my parents decided to take us across the country to spend new years at times Square. All my dads co-workers asked him what we'd do if the world ended at midnight and his response was "I'll call and give you a 2 hour warning" he was a computer tech/electrician at work so he had helped with the problems at work and had a better understanding then most.
I'm one of your old outliers (I'm 50) and I worked clerical law jobs in the early 90s. We absolutely used typewriters. And all of our legal forms were on a DOS based word processing (Word Perfect I think) program. Some fields took a long time to catch up to technology.
We had Word Perfect too! In 1995 we gave up our IBM Selectrics for actual computers
@@thejudgmentalcat I working there around 92 or 93. We had one lawyer that was a complete Luddite and one that loved tech (he taught me to work on computer hardware and set up cabled networks). When I started we only had one computer that only ran that Word Perfect. Everything else was all done on paper.
My family were definitely early adopters of computers so I sometimes forgot the rate at which things became common, but I'm really surprised especially in a law office where you may need to make changes to documents that you'd use a typewriter
My grandma owned an office supply store in my hometown that she opened in 1992, two years before I was born. I distinctly remember typewriters still being around when I was old enough to help out around the store. Not like new models being sold, but I definitely remember her stocking all different types of ink ribbons and stuff like that. Maybe not big sellers, but there was obviously enough demand to keep it on the shelf. I even typed some of my school reports on one of the electric units they had in the back room at the store, probably in 6th grade or so.
@@ThatWriterKevinin the 90s many typewrites could correct errors in typying. You didn't need a much more expensive computer just for correction.
Supply, cost and ease of use are all reason that eventually computers took over. With much benefit to productivity and now paper saving 😅
One reason memory was so expensive back in the day is because it was literally a hand-stitched mesh of donut magnets. Each magnet was a bit. These were made on large wooden panels
I will never forget this day because it was terrifying for a few moments and then hilarious. My father is a paranoid schizophrenic and this concept was a huge trigger for him. At the stroke of midnight New Years 2000 all the power on the entire block stopped. My father sincerely thought it was the end of the world. And for a few moments… for the first time ever… I considered my father was right. Turned out a transformer had been struck by lightning and took out the electricity for several homes for a few hours. Natures cosmic joke.
Ouch! I can only imagine how horrifying that would've been for him.
That coincidence would have been incredibly convincing
Timing is everything. 😅
Yikes! Mother Nature sure can play a mean prank. Here's to you two... may you and your father be well.
The fact that you're so comfortable with your father's illness is amazing.
But yeah, must've been wild!!
Now I feel super old! I didn't even see a personal computer until I was a senior in high school. In 1983 my high school had 1 computer, yes, only 1 computer. It was in the library and you actually had to manually connect the phone to the modem. That was only 17 years prior to Y2k. I still find it totally amazing how ubiquitous computers became in those 17 years.
Yep, I graduated in 1981 and our 1 computer was in the principle's office and only the Honor's students got to use it. Thing was huge too! We had manual typewriters but only 2 electric ones that we were allowed to use on a rotation in class
I was another IT guy who made pretty good money finding and addressing the date issues relating to this. The thing was, a lot of programming languages that had been developed much earlier didn't have a way to store dates with years larger than 1999. And even if they did, a lot of developers used programming libraries that also had this limitation. As a freelancer, this kept me busy for two-and-a-half years of high rate billing.
It was years greater than 99, the 19 was implied. computers didn't exist earlier and you didn't need more that 2 ( base 10 ) digits ment less memory needed.
I was in a team for my local government as a unpaid highschool work experience placement. Most of what I did was do research on the programs the government was using to see if the developers had already fixed the issue with a patch. If they hadn't, I would flag that program as a potential problem and move on.
I also spent time on the local call center run by the same people I was doing the research for, where people could call in and ask questions about potential issues due to Y2K. Damm some were funny, but most were companies want updates on the research we were doing, and we would sometimes send people over to help them find the issues in their systems.
The biggest non Y2K compliance issue we found was the server that controlled all of the direct wire communications and internet access for every government building in the area, and when we tested flipping the bios date to 2000, if had a major logical error and would not continue past the first bit of the boot process. They changed it back and it worked fine. So it needed a full replacement. They finished installing the new server and shut down the old one on December 30th at 4pm. 5pm that the end of the work day and the building was closed on the 31st and the 1st.
I remember my dad observing that because computers necessarily store dates in binary, Y2K wasn't any significance internally, it was really the "downstream" effects of converting a binary date value into a text (decimal) format that Y2K was all about.
For example, if you store a "year number" in a file via its native binary encoding, then Y2K wasn't a problem. (Even if byte space was a premium and you stored it in a single byte, this wouldn't cause problems until year 2156 aka. 1900 + 256, when those 8 bits overflow from 255 to zero)
BUT if you stored that same number in a file _as text,_ then Y2K definitely _was._
(year 1999 stored as "99" -> read as year 19"99")
(year 2000 stored as "00" -> read as 19"00")
But it wasn't dangerous, would have made some transactions look funny till they figured it out automatic billing wouldn't work to well that's about it.
@@frogger2011ify that's just simply not true. Most systems that hadn't been updated in a while we're going to be affected. And it's not just transactions. Dates are used for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with finances. Unless you were working in software development at the time, and actually worked on a number of these projects, you wouldn't really know the impact it was going to have.
Hi,
As an IT guy who worked on the problem.
It was not mainly about how the date was stored, many machines store the date as a number of days since... or some as the number of seconds since 1970 (or something similar) the main issue was when the date was transferred in or out.
The main reason dates were entered as 2 year digits was people did not want, or see any need, to input the century. I was first made aware of the problem in 1975, the machine I was using stored the date in number of days since 1 of January 1900, so no problem, except all the routines to convert input date to that format did so based on a 2 digit year. I had issues with the date of birth, working for London Transport, for their pension scheme, system held dates as number of days since 1/1/1900 but dates of birth could be in 1880, it was a pension system.
Most people thought the issue would raise problem on 1/1/2000, but if you are looking at forward interest of say 5 years, it would become an issue in 1995, as happened for one of my clients.
Most Banks and Insurance companies had been working on the problem since at least 1990 (in UK I assume internationally).
In the 70's the attitude was this system will be replaced before it becomes an issue, which was probably true, but when they were replace generally the tests just made sure the replacement functioned as the old system did, so retain the same issues, but without the original foresight.
When I was working on fixing this Y2K bug in the late 90s, some of what we were fixing was code that had been running since 1971.
OK, this makes far more sense now that someone is saying that the time is based off a reference point and that there are programs using that reference point to operate.
I had always had trouble figuring out why it would even matter if the computer thought it was 1900. I had assumed that time was independently calculated and that it would require more self-awareness than computers posses for a computer to even realize there was a problem. There was so much sensationalism at the time that clear answers got lost in the sea of misinformation.
I was a systems programmer for a fortune 500 insurance company when Y2K rolled around. The amount of time, effort (and therefore, dollars!) the company devoted to ensuring we were "safe" from the event was completely insane! I honestly think the PTB's weren't all that concerned there would be any real issues, so much as they wanted to be able to show did everything in their power in case they happened to be sued by anyone if some little glitch did occur!
It was nuts!
Don't feel bad, Simon. We're the same age, and I can still remember my mom using a typewriter. I must have been a little kid when she switched to using the computer exclusively, but those things were really expensive back then. She talks about how the men in her office generally didn't know how to type at all--they would write documents up by hand and give it to their secretaries to type up. I assume this sort of thing probably happened in a lot of offices, and you can imagine the inertia to keep from buying computers when the people who would be paying for them aren't the people who would be using them. Even if it would improve productivity.
21:50 I'm glad Kevin included all three rules for the calculation of Leap Year. I worked for a school district and new year's day 2000 was mostly a non-issue for me despite the fact that I managed multiple servers whose manufacturers loudly stated were not Y2K-compliant (I was only a network admin, not a programmer. My thanks to the programmers who kept our world turning). However, our bad day was 29 February when all of the classroom computers thought it was 1 March crashing several educational programs because the Macintosh operating system at the time didn't include the third leap year rule. Hopefully, Apple will get that fixed within the next 376 years.
The leap year thing is a common exercise in programming interviews. Interviewers give candidates the rules as sentences & then see how they implement them programmatically.
The leap year simplification logic in programs I wrote from 1994 to 1996 handled 2000 correctly, it's instead 1900, 2100, 2200, etc. that it incorrectly handles. Those were on an Unix OS. As it turns out, unless that hardware is updated or replaced it will have a date time program long before (when the unix time rolls over for those without the expanded timestamp.)
The only casualty of Y2K in my home, was a fancy universal remote that had an LCD screen and could be used to program multiple VCRs. All the programming took place on the remote, and then you just set it on your coffee table or night stand. At the required time, it would automatically switch on the correct VCR, change the channel to the one you want, then record for the length of time desired. I could also use it to automatically turn off my TV at night, and turn on my stereo in the morning, like an alarm clock. Y2K killed it.
We found a Y2K bug in the telephone systems we manufactured and resolved it before the date rolled over. Also I worked on water treatment works and I knew that the water-pump scheduling algorythm I wrote would misbehave. But I knew it wouldn't stop delivering water - but would use the wrong pumps for a day....so yes, it was real. That's why I bought a camping stove - just in case - assuming that there was a fair chance that either the gas or electricity would go off for a while.
My uncle spent like 2 years with his company going around fixing the problem so nothing would happen.
I knew nothing would happen because my uncle told us that Christmas nothing was going to happen because him and tons upon tons of people all around the world have been fixing the glitch by updating and upgrading systems.
That being said, one of my friends STILL didn't believe me, so at our be years party I snuck into the basement, listened for everyone to do the countdown, and I flipped the breaker switch right after "ONE" and relished in the sound of panic, before flipping the breaker back up after a couple seconds.. I'm sure I'm not the ONLY one who's done this.. And OMG AS I'M TYPING THIS SIMON TELLS THE STORY
Y2K was not a glitch. It was a lazy code oversight. A glitch means code running counter to intention, a malfunction. Y2K happened because the original code was lazy & by design would always eventually fail. The assumption was the code would no longer be neccessary because it would be replaced before the date of failure happening. When Dave Eddy pointed out the huge flaw in the way systems ran no one cared because they seriously underestimated just how tight can a corporation or government pinch a penny to save a buck. Why replace something that isn't broken? That's why the military still runs on C/C++ & Ada, languages written between 1969 & 1983. Kind terrifying to know the US military has code as old as the moon landing keeping us all 'safe'.
@@BusyBusyPanda correct and incorrect. The programming wasn't lazy, it was essential. The glitch was capitalism and systems still running that should have been replaced ages ago but never were because profits.
But ALSO Y2K effects themselves were and would have been glitches because it's still unintentional consequences of the programming. Glitches aren't magical anomalies, just unintentional consequences of code.
I'm glad the video wrapped up talking about the fact that the danger was real, though definitely overblown in the case of nuclear missiles and whatnot. I worked in IT in that era, and without all the effort to prevent it, it could have been pretty disastrous. Planes wouldn't necessarily have fallen out of the sky, but they wouldn't have known where they were or where to go. Nuclear power plants melting down was unlikely, but power grids failing was a real risk, especially in the US with our ridiculously frail (to this day!) power grid. The biggest dangers were probably to the financial industry, though, where the date issue could cause glitches that might take down entire computer networks and wipe out all the existing data, which in the case of finance, data = actual dollars. The problem also wasn't just that the wrong date could cause the computer to start thinking it was 1900. Some computer systems would have crashed entirely because the code would no longer have made sense. In other words, much like the hole in the ozone layer, it was a very serious issue that everybody looks back on as a nothingburger, but only because of the work of a LOT of people behind the scenes.
Exactly. And if 40 years ago when they first realized pollution was causing global changes they had done the right things like we did with Y2K and banning CFCs it could have been able to be a nothingburger too. 😔😫
I already see climate change being discussed this way if we manage to avoid the worst of it
@@SoManyRandomRamblings But they didn't do Y2K the right way. The problem was identified DECADES before it mattered, and they just assumed it wasn't really going to be a big issue. It became a huge deal because everyone put it off to the last minute. That actually makes it much more similar to climate change
My favorite Y2K story: right after midnight some people in the neighborhood were setting off small fireworks, and the dogs at the house across the street starting barking like crazy. I heard one of the teenagers who lived there scream melodramatically, "Oh no, the dogs aren't Y2K compliant!"
A lot of dogs aren't new year's compliant - 2000 or otherwise.
My grandfather was one of the people that went to businesses, hospitals, and schools and had to reprogram them to keep them from freaking out when Y2K rolled around
Long-time subscriber (5+ years). The fact that you like Boston Legal makes me so happy. Denny Crane!
The financial institutions alone paid top dollar for COBOL developers for weeks and months of work to fix the banking back-ends before Y2K hit. So many older developers came out of retirement to make big dollars and younger devs actually learned COBOL to do the same. And fix it all they did. I hate it when people tell me Y2K was a nothing event.
I worked on Y2K remediation on a (US) federal program from mid-1998-2000. It was intense and complicated and you cannot imagine the mess.
An army of IT folks worked our asses off so things didn’t go to hell.
I worked at a hospital, and I remember that certain pieces of medical equipment had to be replaced because of lack of Y2K compatibility. All of our desktop computers were replaced as well. When Y2K hit I was 41 years old, and since I've always big on preparation I was ready (now I'm 64 so I'm an outlier) and I had no issues come up. I had gotten some cash just in case stores couldn't use their cash registers, and my car didn't have chips in it so I wasn't afraid that my car wouldn't work. In fact, the only hiccup I came across was a cover sheet I got from our transcription contractor with a date of 3 January 1900.
I was an I.T. guy during that time and we did a lot of work to make sure that it didn't happen. It could have been very real.
I was working as a programmer then, and I had a small bit of work to do. All of our own code was already using four-digit years or other formats that weren't affected, but some of our customers had two digit dates in their databases. I think everything was fixed several months before the end of the year.
On the night of Y2K, two people stayed at work in case any customers had any problems (and were able to reach them, assuming the phone network didn't fail) but there were no calls and they just stayed up watching movies on the projector in the conference room.
Watching Simon's internal debate with himself about digging the Jamaica hole deeper and deeper is probably the best thing I've ever seen on any of his channels or videos. Good Christ, thank you for that.
The light out prank was hilarious.
Reminds me of an event as an teen, we was watching The Exorcist and drinking homemade wine his parents had forgot they made for good reasons :)
One guy was down in the basement looking for more to drink and he turned off the power, a second after the girl projectile vomited at the priest.
Perfect timing but he probably heard sounds from the crowd above and thought an power out would help.
And an benefit with the VHS is that it just continued playing then power got back on.
Yay! I believe I mentioned this topic to Kevin over on Decoding the Unknown on the Bit Flips video. Really glad to see this done in the Brain Blaze style. No mention of the upcoming Year 2038 Problem though ;)
WHAT'S THE 2038 PROBLEM?! 😕
@@tatchik77 It relates Unix time which is the number of seconds passed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. In systems where time is stored in a 32 bit unsigned integer (often various embedded systems) in the year 2038 an overflow error could occur (if no precautions are taken) because that is when Unix time for 32 bit unsigned integers run out of space basically. 64 bit isn't until after the lifespan of the earth and our sun so we don't need to really worry about that one. Probably.
That video was a long time ago, so if I saw the comment there I sadly don't remember it. I thought about including 2038 and other various dates, but the script was already really close to the word cap
Y2K had a long run up. I started work in 1987 and several projects I worked on in the late 80s and early 90s were converting our finance, manufacturing and personnel systems to cope with 4 digit dates and allow sliding-window 2-digit date input. By the time 2000 actually came around, we'd been testing most of the systems for nearly a decade.
My ex worked crazy overtime to work on fixes for this, and so did every other IT professional we knew. It was a big deal. Until about October of that year, that's when all of them just seemed to realise it was probably going to be fine. Still worked their butts off until the deadline, and even after. I don't remember much of that New Year's, our first baby was 6 weeks old, so I really appreciated that my ex had to work and never got any paternal leave at all.
Thank you, Kevin, for another entertaining script. I'm around your age and experienced the y2k phenomenon . I was mostly an angsty emo teen who was rebelling against my family making me stay in on New Year's Eve instead of being with friends. Definitely frustrated that nothing happened but my boyfriend at the time was studying computer programming and explained how real a threat it could have been.
April 1st, 2013; the day that Microsuck released the last ever update to XP. An operating system that still remained in widespread use for YEARS after, despite lack of updates because the OS itself was just that good!
POSReady 2009 kept it alive all the way to 2019
as a programmer around that time this annoys me, the reason there were few problems is that we'd been preparing for it since at least 1983.
it wasn't a non-event, it was a event-manged-by-people-quietly-in-server-rooms-whilst-the-rest-were-at-the-dooms-day-party
I snuck down to the basement with my girlfriend a few minutes before midnight on new years eve 1999/2000, (i was 16) and as my family upstairs were doing their countdown to the ball drop, as soon as they said "1", and started to say "happy new year" I pulled the main breaker on the breaker box in the basement. Needless to say, it was an absolute riot upstairs, while I got my new years eve kiss from my girlfriend
Legend
@@brandenaguilar2962 lmfao, like 3 years later at the same house, someone hit a telephone pole down the road from the house, and it had a transformer on it, and when they hit the pole, it shut down power for the whole neighborhood, and as soon as the lights went out, the whole family started yelling my name, thinking I went and pulled the same prank again...... I was upstairs in my old bedroom on a quarter ounce of mushrooms, there was no way I was pulling any pranks that year! Hahahaha
I’m right smack dab in the middle of this channel’s viewership range, young 20s, and I really hope a 106 year old is also watching. Something nice about the idea of us watching the same thing…
Also so many questions. Did you really stand up and turn a TV on and off manually? No remote? Wild
I'm 47 and hope I don't live to 100! Yes, we absolutely stood up and walked over to change the TV channel and there were only a handful of channels (in Aus)... good viewing, though! The shit they got away with showing then was wild. I had that TV at home until 1998 but we had bought a VCR and digital set-top box a few years earlier and that had a remote control so as long as the TV was on a certain channel we could play TV through the box and control it all through the VCR. So yeah, I didn't have a remote controlled TV or computer at home until I was 20.
Once you hit bytes for memory sizes everything then goes to a base 2 and once the exponent reaches 10 it steps up in size. So 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes. 1 megabyte is 1024 kilobytes which equals 1,048,576 bytes.
didn't they retcon it so that 1000 = kilo/mega/etc while 1024 = kibi/mebi/etc
@CrashM - You can not change the mathematics of how a computer works. The rounding to 1000 is a marketing tool made by people who have limited to no understanding of mathematics, computer science or engineering to help sell products to those who only understand base 10 mathematics... and even that understanding is debatable.
Yeah, I didn't say that a megabyte cost $1 million, I wrote the real number but Simon just rounded it.
@@CrashM85In the popular consciousness yes, but not in reality
I feel you on the garden thing, Simon. Something similar happened to us, too.
We had a small patch of land rented from the city to extend the garden behind our house (very common here). It had been going on for decades, the rent was not much, but it's not like it was useful to the city for anything else, because it was sandwiched between a house and an retirement home...
And then they decided to put a small park behind our house and that they needed one more path to lead there (they had 4 already, but who's counting?). So we and all our neighbors lost parts of their gardens. We actually lost the most, because it's where the plot was bending around the houses. They only needed a small slice of the property for the path, though, so we asked if we couldn't just buy off the rest. They said, sure, but it was an insane amount of money for property that was of no use for much of anything. 5 figures for maybe 20m², I think.
And then we even had to build our own fence, because they said, since they are putting an "apple grove" between the path and our property, that counts as a barrier. The apple grove was about one young apple tree near every garden. A total barrier.
I feel like YYYY-MM-DD is the proper order for dates, especially when used in the beginning of file names because it allows you to sort by date more easily, from a programming perspective. Obviously, if you're in a file browser GUI then you can just sort by the date field, but having it in the name is useful when writing programs just because it allows you to sort the files without any additional metadata.
I think MM/DD/YYYY was chosen because someone thought "Oh, month only goes up to 12 so that should be first, day goes up to 31 so that can go second, and year goes up to 6969 so that can go last". That's about as far as I'm willing to speculate on it, I'm lazy and I don't have a basement dungeon full of writers who can do the research for me. That sounds like a TIFO topic for fact boi.
I've always felt the American format was better, not because of me being American, but I feel like foremost information that requires all three parts of information, the month aspect of it seems to be the most immediately crucial in most circumstances
You shouldn't put the date first. It goes at the end. That way you get file names, which ostensibly describe what's in the file and then the revision date for files that are updated regularly.
Yeah and they should have called 7 of 9 commander 7 in star Trek Packard god that pissed me off
Imo American style is better because it's how we speak it. Nobody says, "8 June 2023." We literally say, "June 8, 2023."
If you're using dates on a computer it's probably in unix time, which just counts seconds since the start of 1970 GMT.
So, this was the late 60's to mid 70's...not sure of the exact dates, because I was just a little kid. My Dad was a Master of Computer Science, a "Systems Analyst"...which was the fancy term "Coders" were called back then, in the days of Cobol and Fortran. He came home from work one day very proud of himself, because he had had an idea at work which was saving an incredible amount of memory space, which at the time was unbelievably precious, as it was all on magnetic tape. You see, the company he worked for had contracts with the USPS, and other large government and private agencies, like major insurance carriers and such, who needed compression systems for the huge amounts of data they had to process on a daily basis. His company was tasked with this issue...and his grand idea was to drop the "19" from every year in a date, to save HALF THE STORAGE NEEDED FOR THAT INFORMATION!
Wow! Great idea, I mean, EVERYONE knew that 70 meant *1970*, RIGHT?
I remember it so well, because, for this awesome idea, he got a great bonus! And with that bonus, we got to go to DISNEY WORLD! Incredible for a little kid, seriously unforgettable! I still remember getting to meet Donald and Goofy, and the Teacup Ride, and "It's a Small World"...who could forget something that massive as a kid? A week in Orlando Florida, at the Happiest Place on Earth, and all it cost was...
THE Y2K "BUG" REQUIRING MILLIONS OF HOURS OF REWRITING OBSOLETE CODE 25 YEARS LATER SO THE ANTIQUATED SYSTEMS THAT RAN IT DIDN'T SHIT THEMSELVES, WHICH WAS ESTIMATED TO COST AROUND $600 BILLION WORLDWIDE.
Sorry about that y'all, but hey, I got a Mouse-ear hat with MY OWN NAME ON IT!
🤩
13:30 - Chapter 1 - Media sensationalism
18:35 - Chapter 2 - It really did happen
22:30 - Chapter 3 - Final thoughts
when I smoke weed I just end up binge watching a bunch of your videos across all your various channels, you got interesting content for every type of stoner.
Y2K was a non-issue, because people like me worked our asses off patching software in the late '90s. It was actually a huge success for the IT industry that nothing happened.
Over the course of 2 to 3 years, I personally fixed around 5000 programs. No infrastructure would have failed, but a few companies probably would have gone out of business when they wouldn't be able to build their customers.
While are you still perpetuating the lie? Anyone with half a brain knows it was not going to be a big deal. 99 to 100. Only input for dates beginning 01/01/2000 was a problem because you couldn't enter 100 for 2000. The year field only took two digits.
@@toddnolastname4485 because most mainframe programs crashed hard or behaved badly, with no new input. Since dates were two digits, date calculations often returned negative timespans. As I said, this would never affect a power plant providing electricity, but it would definitely cause an insurance company's nightly run to abend.
@@toddnolastname4485 it's not just the current date, it's also calculating the future date.
If you think the day after 12/31/1999 is 1/1/2000 and the clock shows 1/1/1900 (or vis a versa,) something will fail.
If it's an air traffic control computer, that's a problem.
@@JamesPotts I worked in defense when this happened. You would be surprised how many things where affected. It definitely could have affected electric power. I'm actually amazed air travel and power weren't affected.
It took a massive effort from a lot of people to keep Y2K from being an issue.
Edit: spelling
I was in the Canadian Army for Y2K, working as a lineman, we spent two years upgrading bases and running back up analogue phone networks. When the big day happened I was in Ontario (middle of Canada sort of) and we watched as the east coast and Quebec rolled over with nothing happening. So all the brass stood down and went out to celebrate prior to midnight in our head quarters, leaving me (lowly M/Cpl) in charge. Massive build up for very little pay out. But it kept me gainfully employed!
I'm not in your demo, either, but I
As all right thinking people should. 😆
@@fabrisseterbrugghe8567 #eldermillenial
Glad you like it! While I learned to type on a computer, I did actually have a typewriter. It was a fancy one that actually even had a backspace key, which absolutely blew my fucking mind as a kid
I was one of the people responsible for my then company's Y2K readiness preparation and validation. We had about 4 systems that if we hadn't taken steps for would have not been cheap to deal with the effects (In our case, we just needed to shut down the system and then bring it back up after midnight).
We opted to stay home for New Year in 1999, rather than traveling to visit family like we usually did. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck at my in-laws house if the gas pumps quit working.
...but...but why couldn't you just fill your gas tank when you were almost to your in-law's house instead of waiting until it was time to leave?
YES!!!! I was the random guy commenting on the video mentioned in the introduction!!! Thank You for this script Kevin!!! Thank You Simon!! I've been waiting sooooooooo long for this video.
Simon's rant at 9:00 is SPOT ON... as someone who codes and has to fill out paperwork for an international company, I have no idea why we do Medium, Small, Large instead of Small, Medium, Large... makes calculations harder than they have to be and 90% of the time you need to convert to a NON US date format, do the math, then convert back to our dumbass format because the rest of the people in our country are dumb and can't read a proper and sensible format.
Here's the thing. .. .. We Are America. .. .. if you don't like it, you can go away .. but you won't .. because .. We Are AWESOME!!
😂
@ChurchNietzsche God, I hope for your sake that was satire and you were intentionally trying to prove my point on purpose... though I guess it's funnier if you weren't lol
@xeroterragoth1866 No. I'm completely serious. . . . We are America. The score is 1776-0.
We Are:: The Best There Is. The Best There Was ... The BEST There Ever Will Be!!
I said what I said
@@ChurchNietzsche well then I hope that if you ever go to space, you do it in a ship designed entirely using English measurements instead of metric because 'murica ... (and don't look it up at all first either like one of those dirty liberal science nerds)
@xeroterragoth1866 there is only ONE WAY I would ever go to space. ... ... #MarsFirst
Wow, this one hit home. I was an IT intern at a local business in '99 and had to keep track of & update the OS and software on ~100 computers, coordinating with people when they'd go on lunch break/vacation, etc. Actually kinda cool 'cause I never would've met as many people or seen as much of the company otherwise. Wasn't surprised when human civilization failed to collapse.
I was a Nurse on a medium secure forensic Psychiatric unit on Y2K. Normal manning was 4 staff. We had 12 staff on that night as we thought all the magnetic door would fail. Yes, I'm an outlier 😂
Our CEO wouldn’t let us shut down the badge system (relying only on mechanical locks) for the night, or move the server to a secure server closet with a 100% mechanical path, so we had to create a plan to break into the CEO’s office (yes, he kept it in his office, which was badge only, yes he was that stupid) if that computer failed.
My first project as a professional computer programmer was a bug fix in a business report that turned out to be caused by a y2k bug fix that added 1 day to the date. this was in about may of 2000, and it hadn't been noticed for a few months.
My father worked as head engineer for multiple Television stations across the US. He had to hire a ton of IT workers to update systems. For the last few years before Y2K he was traveling replacing hardware and updating software. I was in high school during that time and was able to travel with him during the summer from station to station. Currently he is one of the only people here that can fix broadcast towers. Crazy as it sounds, most still uses Tubes.
I worked in a factory when I was younger and a lot of the older machine had a y2k compliant stickers on
y2k was intresting, I wonder if we will see something like this again in 2038, wheb the 32 bit time will stop working
We learned our lesson. Don't bother, let the world burn.
yea. we did lots of testing and rollout and now the 2038 is like oh well. I guess we will define the first half of the number range as past 2038.
I was a part of a Y2K team in my company and absolutely everyone knew it was bullsh*t but we had to support our customers, and mostly we told our customers typically: "your equipment do not even have a clock" and that kind of replies, prior to new year eve a "task-team" was organised, where some stayed in the office and others just stayed sober, i was part of the team staying sober though the night and got equally US 1500,0$ and those staying in the office got US 3.200,0$
Nothing at all happened and a couple of years later nobody remembered Y2K anymore, i barely remember either even if i investigated Y2K issues for months
The real doomsday event no one saw coming was seven years ago last week. That's right, when Harambe sacrificed his life to save the life of that little baby. We've learned nothing since.
DO4H
Mines out, how about yours?
@@reshpeck never put him away
I also seem to remember being told about a water treatment plant in Australia which would have tried to dump a years worth of cleaning chemicals into the water on Jan 1st 2000. Obviously they didn't keep a years worth of chemicals on site, but it would have dumped what they did have in the failure. The fix was also simple, they just drained the chemical tanks and waited until Jan 2nd and everything reset back to normal operations. Is apocryphal, so no idea if it is true.
Yes, this really was a thing. I worked on this changing the date fields for dozens of programs for dozens of installed sites for more than a year. Unfortunately, I missed one particular location in a program.
This didn't affect things right away. But as time went on every new additional record was added to the beginning of a file. So the file had to be resorted when each new record was added. About March 2000 things began to grind to a halt. I had to make a retrofit change by adding an alpha date to fix this. Hopefully that had been upgraded by now. Oh, yeah this was government emergency service software. If it took 20 minutes to respond to your 911 call,. Well.
BTW, the solution to not changing the storage for the 6-character date like YYMMD is for the YY to use A0-A9 for 2000-2009, B0-B9 for 2010-2019, etc.
So then 2259 is the end
@@zackcash4941 Ha ha, I don't think they will keep the same software until 2259. It only had to work until 2029. That is way past my retirement.
This is honestly my favorite channel of yours Simon. Let your comedic juices flow
Writing the date as mm/dd/yy is great for when you're working with a filing system for billing or mail. You can group your paperwork or computer files by year and month and easily index everything by month with separate days. If everything is labeled by dd/mm/yy, everything begins with a different number and it's extremely confusing.
We also verbally say dates as April 27th rather than 27 April, which sounds stilted to a lot of us.
You aren't using MM/DD/YYYY for organising your files though, you're using the most logical format(YYYY-MM-DD). That's not a point in favour of the weird way north america does it's dates, it's a point in favour of moving to an even more logical system.
And the way you say dates is pretty meaningless, saying "4th of July" vs "July 4" is also just risking confusion(if you were talking about July 2004 most people shorthand that to July 04; but now you can't tell if they mean July 2004 or 4th of July as obviously).
@@scragargo drown your Heinz beans in brown sauce and leave us alone. 😂
I was 10 during Y2K, and yeah, for the longest time we all saw it as "freaking out over nothing." It honestly took me until this video to realize what actually happened and why Y2K was "no big deal in the end."
Much, much respect to the many people who had to toil in this mess to keep it from becoming more than a footnote in the history books.
Stop posting so many shorts for casual criminalist 😅
It's like spoilers but he just teasing us. But I agree, stop the short spoilers. We will watch the full video Simon, No need to spoil yourself.
Such a tease!!
All TH-cam channels are having to make them otherwise they will not turn up in people's recommended feeds as much as they already did.
TH-cam wants to become like Thick Tok with crappy less than a minute videos.
My dad and I were long-haul truck drivers in the late '90s and heard about Y2K from truly credible guests on late-night talk radio. These weren't the usual nut jobs, but people with serious reputations in the tech industry. We did the whole prepper thing, to the tune of several thousand dollars. The biggest thing we worried about was the large, maximum-security prison just a few miles away. What would happen if the systems designed to keep those prisoners locked up failed? We were cheerfully relieved when it turned out to be a non-event.
This episode is the first time in a long time I've seen anyone acknowledge the billions of dollars and millions of labor hours that went into *making* it a non-event.
my favorite Y2K story was one where a technician worked rapidly to update systems, and then came into work to see his boss keeling over laughing. The big computerized sign said "HAPPY 19070!"
I remember that City of Calgary had a super cheap solution for their traffic light systems, they just set the computer dates to 13 years earlier so the days would match, giving them plenty of time to replace the computers on an already established schedule. And it worked, because it was a protected system on an intranet. Big brains in Cow Town!
It's good to see another perspective on the issue, as I was working in IT at the consumer level with contemporary operating systems at the time, which had no problems whatsoever. It's the legacy systems that needed to be rebuilt to be functional past 1999. As for me, it was no big deal, Windows at the time had no issues with it, as a Gateway tech, I got an extra day's pay to sit around and do nothing. 👍
Simon, drinking and driving in rural America is awesome. A lot of us drive for a living and we will do 200-300 miles (400-600 kilometers) a day and usually on the same roads within an hour radius of where we liver or our work is based out of. Drinking a few or 6 beers over the course of a couple hours before or during a long distance haul on empty but driver input intensive roads not only is perfectly safe for the majority that can handle it, but is usually safer because it gives us something to do that doesn’t involve a distracting electronic to help us keep active and alert at the wheel
Awww Simon you always seem to remind me how young you are. I'm 41 and in the early 90s many places did still have typewriters but they were more electronic typewriters. We had one in my house and I remember thinking it was so neat and modern because it wasn't an old school typewriter. There were also word processors which was a computer that only let you process documents. The olden days.
As one of the people working hard to avert this, I've always felt dissed by folks who said, "It was a false alarm." No.
A friend and I drove from South Carolina to New York Times Square for Y2K. I had hardly even been out of the little town that I was from. No GPS no cell phone a map and about $300
My father worked for a gas and electric company in the States. All of the power plants they used and every computer in the company had been updated not to crash since the eighties. So maybe a few small companies may have overlooked Y2K, large companies were fully prepared.
One of my clients realised the huge expense. Their solution was to close their business on 15 dec 1999. And open a completely new company on 6 January 2000. Saved them millions and kept using same software.
Hi Folks,
Just a small update there is a similar issue due in 2038.
It affect Unix based systems, (which is quite a lot now), probably also affects imbedded processors.
Should happen on Jan 19th, not sure of the time, also not sure if it is local time?
The issue only affect 32bit machines, many are currently moving to 64bit.
It is caused by the imbedded date/time which is based on number of seconds since 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UCT.
At that time the date/time will exceed the 32 bit limit.
Have fun with that one. 😊😊
When I worked on Y2K, we tested out to 2038 because of that. It has been fixed in the vast majority of computers, now.
Great episode, nice introduction, awesome editing/ memes.
Agreed Simon.
Boston legal was one of the best shows ever made.
I did filmmaking and screenwriting at uni, and the lecturer for one of the classes often used it as an example of excellent work.
I’m another one of your outliers (58yo) who worked in a hospital in 1999. Yes- Hard working folks inspecting and fixing all the equipment. Toward the end maybe got punchy-mechanical desk staplers were marked as Y2K compliant!
Happy birthday, Simon! Love all of your channels content! I remember y2k scare and I wad 19 then.
I worked on a Y2K tech support line for a BIOS company from Dec. 1999 to Feb. 2000 and it was the best job I ever had. We never got a single phone call so we spent 3 months playing computer games, drinking booze, smoking weed (it was in Amsterdam) and watching movies. I still laugh when I think of how much I got paid for that job.
My dad was working as a CO (correction officer) at the time. Y2K meant he was mandatoried for New Years, they had every officer on hand just in case the power failed and the prisonera rioted.
I was a network admin for a cable company in Mass. We thought we had everything done and just like you at the 4:37 mark, we had a joker that worked in the sever room… so while everyone was in the large confrence room watching the networks, right at midnight, the joker unplugs the power for the main routers…. all networks dead.
Most of us run to the sever room only to see the joker right by the routers laughing his butt off while holding 3 power cords.
My Y2K story, in 2008 when my grandma would have been 4yo I got an early education advertisement addressed 'To her Parent or Gaurdian'. Can only assume it was Y2K related.
7:51 The reason early computers couldn't have spaces in filenames was because the "space" character was used to separate the components in the command line. so having a space would indicate that the filename ends there, and the part that follows the space is the next 'argument' of the command.
For example: the command line entry of:
MORE READEME.TXT -P
Has three components:
* the command name MORE
* the first argument, the file to be fed into the command: README.TXT
* the second argument, setting a 'control switch' inside the command: -P ( Pause after each screenfull (39 lines) of text )
100% with you on the date format. And let’s throw in metric units while we are at it.
"Pepperage Farm remembers"
So many banks were changing names, and so frequently, back then, we were just calling them "Velcro Bank". I did alot of ATM upgrades and such. Many banks were calling asking about their alarm panels, which is understandable, but thise were minimally if at all affected.
The ones I laughed about were the ones calling about their vault door timelocks.
Happy birthday Simon! It was my 32nd birthday recently and it was only a few days before that I realised I was only just turning 32, and was not in fact already 32…. Haha also, got a beard in common, keep up the great work! :D
Month-day-year: 12 months, 28-31 days, thousands of years. You narrow down the month first and you immediately know the season, how close holidays are, if it's earlier or later than key dates throughout the year. That's how I see it when taking a macro look at dates ("I'm going on a trip on October 3rd" you know immediately that it's going to be autumn and not very close to a major travel holiday). Within a micro view, I tend to say it like "the tenth of June ("I'm going to pay the water bill on the tenth of June").
The most common fix to the code, when the data could not support a 4 digit year, is something called windowing: if the 2 digit year is greater than 50 then move 19 to the century field else move 20. This had to be surrounded by warning comments; because if the program and data had not been fixed, then there would be another big problem around New Year's Eve of 2049.
1:23 "... and were about to pay the price for our hubris." omg Kevin the OG LOL