I was fairly young for the Y2K "scare".
I was just wondering what tech-minded people know about this.
Was there any truth to it, or was it just a media gig?

Personally, I only remember the news media voicing concerns, and no one I knew seemed too worried about it. At that time I was a little young to be inclined for a researched analysis, but was and am still curious as to what all the fuss was about.

The fear was that computers of the time would at the turn of the year would go back to 1900. This would have been a huge problem as a lot of the world at that time (and now) depend on computers.

Yes, i understood the 1999 -> 1900, but I don't understand why that would create a major problem.

I believe the biggest concern was for financial calculations. i.e. calculate the interest accrued from Dec 31 1999 to Jan 1 2000; instead of a result of 1 day for the calculation, with a two digit year it may calculate as -100 years.

Where I worked at the time I believe we found more problems with the leap year in 2000 than the actual y2k transition. Several programs had been coded since 1996 and simply didn't account for leap years at all.

Imagine your electric service... Turn on date on record has not even happened yet. Your checking account same. Your credit cards same.

All kinds of problems could have been caused just by a start date on a account not even happening yet. Stuff shut off, no phone, cable, cell, insurance, bank account, radio, tv, internet, email on and on and on....

Could have been a huge problem!

I think the hysteria came from the fact that computers were still fairly new and mysterious to most of the non-programmer types in society. To them, every single line of code that dealt with dates was written to handle only two digits for the year instead of four because the software people never ever realized the impact this would have when the year 2000 came. And now someone would have to go through every single line to correct the probem, otherwise nobody will be able to get their money out of the bank, the power grid would shut down, planes will fall out of the sky, satellites will fall to the earth, crops will stop growing, an asteroid will hit the earth, painful hemorrhoids for everyone, a black man will be elected president, and the dog will run away!

All of a sudden Saturday (1/1/00) is a Monday. Lots of computer systems do different processing on a weekday to a weekend.

Then there's the more widely understood 2 digit year issues itself, e.g. peoples ages (Current year - Year of birth), which could cause havoc in the payroll system with peoples age going negative.


Though the Y2K issue generated a lot of extra work in code review and re-coding to find/fix these little issues, most places were ready for it well in advance. It was the Media who didn't really understand the problem all that well and in their typical "Sky is falling" melodramatic way, hyped it out of all proportion. It was mostly just another example of modern 'Journalism', just like Swine-Flu.

ugh, let's not get THAT started again.

Seriously, the other problem that did occur was that some software programs had an expiration date based on the date, SAS used to be like that, so that when a relatively old computer bios hit 1999->2000 it reverted to the start date (which wasn't 1900 on a lot of machines, but 1969 or something like that... I don't recall the details.) The date stamps on files similarly got screwed up, so that newer versions of documents looked like much older versions. As Gazl points out though, there was enough publicity that most everyone was prepared for those things and software and hardware got replaced as needed.

It was a lot of hassle if you had customers at that time.

I very matter-of-factly asked my customers to set one of their computers to "1/1/2000" and to please spend a day doing everything they normally did.

I then explained a little bit about how date/time arithmetic actually works: "pick a moment in time, any moment will do, and then count the number of days (or seconds or what have you) since that moment. It's just ordinary math. Conversion of date/time values "to" and "from" that format is easy, and, now, the math is easy too. (Otherwise, it's as trouble-besotted as Roman Numerals.)

But there were a lot of people who thought nothing at all about shystering their customers. And when the world didn't end on that day, the customers didn't forget it. I picked up several new clients in January of 2000 simply because I was honest with the ones I had.

But it's all happening again, you know ... You can buy "2012 end-of-the-world management software ..."

I sure hope no 32-bit computers are running by the time 2038 rolls around, though.

By then I think we'll have moved out of the silicon-based computing paradigm. "Bits" will probably be meaningless by then. We'll have moved on to something like quantum computing or similar.

(Or, we'll have nearly destroyed ourselves long before then and by that time we'll be barely starting to re-build modern society. But that's just another idea )

please ignore