Yet another article under playing the impact of Y2K, suggesting millions were wasted on the work, it was the money spent and the enormous effort that ensured that things did work as planned www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024... - ThreadSky

benlindgreen.bsky.social • 54 days ago

Yet another article under playing the impact of Y2K, suggesting millions were wasted on the work, it was the money spent and the enormous effort that ensured that things did work as planned https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/31/how-a-batch-of-tinned-meat-fostered-fears-of-the-millennium-bug

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vmyths.bsky.social•54 days ago

Do you have *primary* source documents to buttress this claim?

I ask because I accessioned what I believe was every available primary source document in U.S. Air Force archives for the 20th anniversary of #Y2K.

They revealed without exception that Y2K was a banal bureaucratic event across USAF.

vmyths.bsky.social•54 days ago

Mind you, I'm NOT saying it was a "waste" of work.

I'm saying it was over-hyped to the Nth degree as a global catastrophy hurtling toward us like a meteor the size of Texas set to abolish all mammal life in what can only be described as a "cybergeddon."

benlindgreen.bsky.social•54 days ago

The global catastrophe bit I'll readily concede, but from my experience in updating the COBOL in use by one of the biggest life and non-life insurance firms in the UK if they hadn't have put in the considerable effort they did then their whole mainframe platform would have stopped working.

benlindgreen.bsky.social•54 days ago

The oldest code I updated in 1997 had originally been written in 1968 and was still in daily use. Would it have been catastrophic to the UK as a whole? No. Would it have prevented people from successfully interacting with insurance firms at an already stressful time for them? Absolutely.

benlindgreen.bsky.social•54 days ago

I think my point on this article (which I'll readily concede perhaps wasn't obvious) was more about the assumption that because nothing major happened it was due to the fact that it was never going to happen.

benlindgreen.bsky.social•54 days ago

from the code I worked on that wasn't the case, and I'm sure was the same in many other organisations, it was one of the few occasions in my career where organisations actually planned properly to fix things in a timely manner.

vmyths.bsky.social•54 days ago

I still appear to be the only person on Earth who researched still-classified and declassified military archives for the 20th anniversary of #Y2K

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