Tag Archives: y2k

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Netstalgia: Y2K

Gather around while I tell the story of the great Y2K bug, how close we came to societal collapse until we were saved by Deloitte consultants who selflessly worked night and day to stave off this peril!

In fact, the Y2K episode should serve as a reminder of the peril of “viral” thinking, panic and paranoia, and lack of accountability due to aforementioned “experts” patting themselves on the back for saving the world when in reality they did nothing.  Sounds vaguely like some other recent events in our history, but I guess I shouldn’t go there.

You all know the story.  To save on memory, computers used to store years in a two-digit format.  1987 was simply stored as “87”.  After all, if you were writing software in 1987, you didn’t expect anyone to be running it in 2000.  But now, when the year 2000 happened, the date would be stored as “00” and the computer would assume you meant “1900”.

It was a legitimate problem, particularly for banks which tended to run antiquated software.  The algorithms would get confused by the new dates and potentially make significant computational errors.  For those of you alive at the time, you’ll remember that there was a lot of concern about bank systems behaving unreliably in the new millennium, to the point where correcting it even featured as the job of the hapless Innotek worker in the classic movie Office Space.

Whipped up by the media, the concern expanded from bank software to, basically, all computers.  We were told that stoplights, phones, ovens, cars, and pretty much anything with a computer in would melt down come January 1, 2000.  Nike even made a hilarious ad parodying what people thought would happen.  Nonetheless, people were scared, with preppers stocking up food and ammunition for the coming chaos.

The big consulting companies were not ready to let a good crisis go to waste.  They sent armies of young MBAs in slick suits to solve the problem.  They showed up at companies and meticulously inventoried everything with a computer in it, documenting software versions and coordinating deployments of Y2K-related updates.

I took a more laissez-faire approach to the whole thing.  At the time I was operating as an independent consultant.  My largest customer was an ad agency in San Francisco.  The head of IT asked me to certify everything as Y2K compliant, including the network gear.

I couldn’t see, for the life of me, how a two-digit date code would impact traffic forwarding through a network switch.  We had 3Com switches, and since we had just moved into the office they weren’t even that old.  Even if they did have the date issue, at most I thought it might affect date/time stamps in the logs, a minor inconvenience since we used those only for troubleshooting and if we had an issue, we’d know exactly what “January 1, 1900” meant.  That said, these things were built in the 1980’s and I didn’t think that would even happen.

I told my client not to worry about it.  Nothing was going to happen.  He was an easygoing advertising agency guy, so he was fine with it.  We didn’t do anything at all to prep for Y2K.

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, most people I knew stayed home, convinced going out would be dangerous.  I grabbed a few friends and partied like it was, well, 1999.  The next day nothing was wrong except the hangover.

Of course, the consultants all patted themselves on the back.  They had saved the world from disaster.  I’m sure some of them helped with a handful of older critical systems.  But as we saw at my client, most of their work mattered not at all.  The vast majority of systems would be working just fine.

In late 2000 I took a job at the San Francisco Chronicle.  All of the switches, phones, copier machines, computers, servers, etc., had little stickers on them saying “Y2K compliant.”  I was told the entire IT department stayed at the office on New Years Eve.  They had a war room.  Afterwards, they all got a trip to Hawaii.

Viral paranoia is not a new phenomenon.  Usually it latches onto something real, but then explodes into fear of the totally unreasonable.  Our media culture whips up the frenzy, and then corporations realize they can profit from it.

I saved my client a heck of a lot of billable hours.  And I never even got a trip to Hawaii for it.

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Y2K

In 1998 I left my job as a computer “consultant” to pursue a master’s degree in Telecommunications Management.  I was stuck in my job, tired of troubleshooting people’s email clients and installing Word on their desktops, and was looking for a way to make a leap into bigger and better things.  That did happen–although not how I expected–but meanwhile for two years I needed to support myself while achieving my degree.  I took the easy path and stole a client from my previous employer.  This was at the height of the dotcom boom, and he was frankly too busy to even notice.  For a couple years I worked part-time at my advertising agency client, setting up computers, managing the servers, running the fairly simple network they had implemented.  It was a good deal for both of us, as the office manager had responsibility for IT and little inclination to work on technology.

Anyone who was around back then will remember the “Y2K” scare.  As we approached the year 2000, someone realized that many computers had been storing the year part of dates with only the last two digits.  For example, a program would store “98” instead of “1998.”  This meant that, as we moved into the new millennium, the year 2001 would be interpreted by these systems to be “1901”.  A legitimate problem, to be sure.  Some software, such as banking programs running on mainframes, could act unexpectedly and potentially lead to serious consequences.

However, the panic that followed was completely out of proportion to the threat.  Instead of focusing on the limited systems that would likely experience problems, a paranoia built up fueled by newspeople who had no idea what they were talking about.  People became concerned that, on January 1, 2000, our entire society would melt down and we would descend into chaos as the financial system melted down, stoplights stopped working, water and power systems crashed, and millions prepared to regress to living like cavemen.  A brilliant ad from Nike from just before the millennium captured the overall belief of what would happen come New Year’s Day.  (Sadly, the ad looks more realistic for 2020 than it did for 2000).

The ad agency I was working was told by their parent company that every single piece of electronic equipment they had needed to be Y2K-certified.  The downside of capitalism is that armies of opportunists arise (sound familiar?) to take advantage of social panics like these.  In fact, for such opportunists, exacerbating the panic is in their best interests.  Thus were spawned legions of “Y2K consultants”, non-technical business-types telling us that even our smoke alarms needed to be Y2K-certified and receive a literal sticker of approval.

When my office manager boss told me I needed to certify every piece of equipment I controlled my response was as follows:  “It doesn’t matter whether a network switch has the Y2K problem or not.  Most of the network gear was built recently and doesn’t even have this issue.  But if the vendor did make the mistake of storing the date with two digits instead of four, the worst that will happen is the time stamp on the log will be off.  Everything will still work.  So, rather than bill out hours and hours of me doing the certification, I’m going to do nothing.  And if I’m wrong, you can personally sue me for negligence.”

My boss didn’t care much about corporate HQ and took my advice.  New Year’s Eve, 2000, came and went.  A lot of people, expecting the worst, stayed home.  I went out and partied, well…like it was 1999.  And nothing happened.  Of course, the Y2k consultants patted themselves on the back for a job well done.  If the army of MBA’s hadn’t saved the day with their stickers, life would have ground to a halt.  I, on the other hand, knew the reality.  A panic was whipped up by the media, a bunch of opportunists swooped in to make a buck of the crisis, and helped to whip it up further, and life would have gone on either way.