Comment by marcus_holmes
3 days ago
my first thought too. I've met a few people who assert that Y2K was a complete waste of money.
I earned my first house deposit helping the team fixing the water and gas company in Wales, UK. Their entire system was running off a set of COBOL programs on a mainframe, none of which had been properly documented over the years, and the whole thing used 2-digit dates. It would have caused actual deaths if not fixed; everything would have shut down, and no water and no heating in a British winter is potentially lethal. And then it would have sent everyone in Wales a bill for 100 years of water and gas.
They were bribing retired software devs to come out of retirement with huge stacks of money, because that was cheaper than training new COBOL devs and getting them familiar with the spaghetti system.
It worked, no-one died, life went on. So obviously it was all fake rolls eyes
I'm curious why things would have shut down when the system thought it was 1900. What part of the logic had the effect of "shut the system down if current date is less than (X date)?" (If you can remember the code 25+ years later, that is).
I only worked with the team making changes to the billing system (and even then, I only maintained a database of code modules, who worked on them, and what changes had been made - this was before git and we did version control painfully). As you can imagine, the billing system was definitely not going to survive the date suddenly being 99 years older than it was last month. So I don't really know why the rest of the system would fail.
But the project management team were extremely careful about only changing parts of the system that needed to be changed. Partly so that the scope was contained and second-order effects limited, and partly because the people making the changes were being paid vast sums to do this, and any reduction in work was saving real money. So when they say that it would all have stopped if the work wasn't done, I believe them ;)
> So when they say that it would all have stopped if the work wasn't done, I believe them ;)
Fair enough, they were certainly in a position to know, and their willingness to spend oodles of money on it proved that they believed it.