“hole in the ozone layer” levels of erasure. my mom was a project manager who busted her ass for years to make sure IBM was ready for Y2K and completely succeeded, only for it to get turned into a late night joke. funny how the stories of mass collective action to avoid disaster rarely get told
Reposted from
Eric Neustadter (e)
DAMMIT NPR.
I spent nine months upgrading over TEN THOUSAND desktops at a F500 client. The grand total was over SEVENTY THOUSAND applications upgraded.
Y2K "didn't live up to the hype" because the industry busted ass to duct tape everything first.
I spent nine months upgrading over TEN THOUSAND desktops at a F500 client. The grand total was over SEVENTY THOUSAND applications upgraded.
Y2K "didn't live up to the hype" because the industry busted ass to duct tape everything first.
Comments
Dance off in the quad, I hear someone brought a refrigerator box
Us: “No, you don’t. Let’s keep it that way.”
Us: “Exactly.“
#respect
“The systems are always working, why do we pay you?”
“The systems are always failing, why are we paying you?”
False dichotomies all around.
Because the disaster was successfully avoided, it was never going to happen in the first place. 🤦
"Thankfully, Y2K didn't live up to the hype after years and billions of dollars were spent on painstaking preparation."
But yes, the article itself is about the effort that went into averting catastrophe!
It is a source of some personal pride that Y2K is described as something of a nothing-burger though.
One of the other invisible developments was the entry Y2K provided to the Indian IT service industry. They basically established their initial international client footprints through Y2K projects and grew out and up from there.
If you’ve ever experienced Oklahoma severe weather coverage, there’s an angel and devil on the shoulders of every chaser and broadcaster.
Since many of the bad things of the past are now non-issues, perhaps a critical mass of people think that dire warnings about Trump are just noise.
Click or tap below article thread ⬇️ 6 min
Next to the Ghostbusters one?!
They should have allowed one of the smaller nations to collapse before saving the rest.
I still don't see how all those brilliant execs didn't see that coming.
Some things definitely fall under F.E.A.R. as "false evidence appearing real," although certain IT assessments and 'fixes' likely did avoid concerning issues.
cc @thevowel.bsky.social @mcuban.bsky.social
Issue? Program coding allocating two digits for year.. 00 is never more than 99
Also, a time of comedy gold:
https://youtu.be/FKv563gbJbE?si=stJGzgajDfPSoTFo
I always had good bosses that recognized this. Typically they were the ones fighting the good fight. Good on you if you were one of those.
Lives are somehow cheaper.
We are all the currency of their power.
Half an hour after we arrived, he left to go to work (he worked in IT), having spent months working insane hours.
Easily one of the biggest failures of tech media.
We fixed the Ozone layer by GLOBALLY discontinuing the problem chemicals and it worked.
Y2K was a HUGE deal. Instead of everything breaking like it would have, a ton of people worked HARD to fix it and actually succeeded.
"Is this computer year 2000 ready?"
"Sir, I can guarantee you don't need to worry about that"
Click or tap below article thread ⬇️ 6 min
The late night jokes were the good outcome.
And they fixed it so thoroughly that stupid people believe it wasn't a problem in the first place.
Gore (& his Republican counterpart Newt Gingrich) did the only thing anybody in Congress can do…wrote a bill to fund the Internet when the NSF decided they didn't want to be in that business anymore.
It would have disappeared without the funding.
It says it right in the post/tagline:
"after years and billions of dollars were spent on painstaking preparation"
Not that we can prevent very bad things... But that there was never a real need.
It's also true for Y2K. The fixes were so widely successful people thought it was overhyped.
I agree modern history needs to be looked at
Y2K, Web 2.0, Live Journal, 4Chan and other popular forums, that stuff prior to 2010 which affects life now, bears research and analysis
If it was one programmer slaying the dragon of code, it'd be another story.
Covid pandemic falls along similar, worse lines
Small scale this struck me w/the 2nd Trump "assassination" attempt (poor analogy). The SS is there to stop these things, and no attempt took place.
Ppl working worked and the work worked.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
Yo bro, don't sweat it. My old man wrote some of that code and was telling me about the issue in like 83/84 when I was a kid.
I too worked in IT, and to say that there were a couple years of enterprises from Ma & Pa to Governments, scrambling to patch systems is an understatement.
My company absolutely would have shut down if they hadn't put in like 2 years of effort on making sure shit was updated. There was a ton of stuff that was going to freak out.
We have another y2k event coming in 2038, too.
In a choice between was it science or magic, they will always choose magic.
Cut to 2 years after the events of Armageddon and half the world would be sure there never was an asteroid to begin with.
I was busy too, hauling firewood to people who were afraid of freezing if it happened. 1/2 cord of birch doesn't last long though.
Then everyone updated their systems on time. Frankly I think when the insurers started to ask questions it lit a fire under everyone.
But people did finish on time. When nothing substantial went wrong, it all became a joke.
I diligently shut down my computer on 12/31/1999. Turned it back on, nothing weird happened, pretty great if you think about it.
Hell, I'mma start now.
Maybe some practice erasure of the act of programmers on Y2K but NPR did not. They literally say thankfully it didn’t live up to the hype after years of painstaking preparation.
It's also extraordinarily clear that people love to hate them no matter what they say.
It was a massive effort.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ebgqdkzdfkci7wqoinje7zvp/post/3lefg4tykuk2r