Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.
At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn’t support 4-digit years… But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn’t process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators’ terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.
That “outdated” programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it’s like a cockroach.
Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.
I remember a friend of mine learned some outdated programming language, and got a lucrative temp job preparing mainframes for Y2K.
Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.
At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn’t support 4-digit years… But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn’t process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators’ terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.
That “outdated” programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it’s like a cockroach.
Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.