Gary Varga (10/25/2016)
Jeff Moden (10/24/2016)
Rod at work (10/24/2016)
I'm old enough to have been working in the IT field during the whole Y2K "event". Major decisions were put off because of it. A lot of work preparing DR plans was done. (And that was a good thing.) But at the end of the day our systems were fine because we didn't save date/time data in text fields using YYMMDD format. Instead we depended upon our vendors (in our case, Microsoft) getting it right in their databases and applications. And we just made sure that we were up to date in everything. It was an awful lot of hype, but it was just largely hype. I remember hearing a week or so after Y2K that some military systems experienced at outage (and was kept very secret), but for the most part it was a non-event. I do think that perhaps it was a non-event in large part because so many IT folks took it seriously and fixed potential problems in their systems.Heh... I'm old enough to say that I first starting writing Y2K compatible code in 1976, which is also when I first started writing real deployable code. When 1999 came along, I had to fill out paper work to answer the PUC for 48 of the 50 states because I worked in the telephone business in 1999. One of the questions that they asked on each form (and you couldn't just staple a rote answer to the forms) was "What have you spent the most time on in your preparations for Y2K"? My answer was "Filling out these stupid forms".
As you say, except for filling out form after bloody form, it was a non-event for us.
Whilst many systems were geared up for it, many weren't. It is a credit to our industry that Y2K ended up a damp squib. It wasn't because that there wasn't an issue, it was because by Y2K there was no longer an issue.
On the other hand, we did create it ourselves.1
1 Ourselves as an industry. Not necessarily anyone here. Old enough to have had the opportunity, smart enough to have passed it by. :satisfied:
I was also in telecoms for Y2K. As you say it was basically a non-event. The only issue I encountered was a couple of years later when I worked for a ‘billing/call logging’ company who had issues with a client who had refused to have his PABX upgraded for Y2K as it was a chargeable and not free upgrade. This resulted in a century old data and the need to patch code!
As regards zombies I read something a few years ago that the concept arose in the eighteenth/nineteenth century. People with serious mental conditions, including dementia that was not recognised at the time, were often locked away. The care they received varied with what their families could afford to pay. With poor families this was nothing and the poor wretches had an awful existence. Neglect and minimal self-care meant they often had rotting teeth, sores and often worse. Sometimes they escaped but in their confused state others were terrified of them. There was no mention of how the term 'zombie' came about.
There were some issues in my area a week or so ago with numerous reports of sightings. This seemed to die down after one clown had to flee a gang of teenagers who decided to grab a clown after being jumped!