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Comment by punk_coder | Hacker News Reader

I started work at a credit card processing company at the end of ‘96 as an assembler programmer on OS/360 IBM mainframes. The company simulated the date changing to the year 2000 and we saw everything that broke. We then worked over the next couple years fixing everything and Y2K went by without a hitch. If you were involved with it you do tend to resent the people that say it was over blown but you also understand the feeling that it was over blown by the media because it did play upon public fear to sell products and views.

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> If you were involved with it you do tend to resent the people that say it was over blown but you also understand the feeling that it was over blown by the media because it did play upon public fear to sell products and views.

I was 10 at the time. I heard about the 2yk bug on the news and they were saying how it was really a serious problem and in a worse case scenario the grid might go down and all electronics could stop working.

As everyone was excitedly counting us into the year 2,000 I remember being stood in the street terrified the world was about to blow up. I remember breathing a sigh of relief when the street lights didn't turn off at midnight, although I still went back into the house to check if the TV and other electronics were still working.

Seems silly looking back on it now, but the media scare stories about bug completely ruined my memory of that night.

Even as someone who was in high school at the time I have no doubt in what you said.

I believe that were indeed a lot of very serious issues, which if not fixed, would have resulted in a very different experience at the turn of the century.

But at the same time, I remember in about 1998 or 1999 my friend proudly professing that the new PC he bought was Y2K compliant. I'm pretty sure that all the software and PCs used by an average person for over 5 years was equally Y2K compliant making silly sticker on the box practically meaningless.

It was stuff like this which was blown out of proportion.

Your average consumer's hardware would be absolutely unaffected, but these consumers were nevertheless aggressively pulled into needlessly buying new PCs which were supposedly more Y2K compliant than their current ones.

Was that a full time effort for years? Curious as to the productivity, opportunity cost.

There was a team of analysts going through all the companies programs and finding any instance of dates, which took them quite a while to do. Once that was done it was a combo of new work and work to update the affected programs. My team was very affected as it was the collections and queuing team. Collections of course is people going into collections due to non payment. Queueing is the different queues you put accounts into: 30 days past due, 60 past due, etc. all of that broke when the date changed as all accounts were way past due and put into collections.

Counterfactual invisibility is a real bummer.

Why did I need to get vaccinated if nobody got sick?

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