A Guy Checks His Computer On New Year’s Night In 2000
Posted by chzyfiestapotates@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 103 comments
Posted by chzyfiestapotates@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 103 comments
TheBestPieIsAllPie@reddit
I don’t remember computers working that quickly and responsively.
gromit266@reddit
Funny he did it on a Mac. They were specifically called out as not requiring any "intervention."
Had that same TV is the early-90s.
468579@reddit
In fact, it's the 1999 slot-loading version. It would have been purchased within two months of this recording.
cheezballs@reddit
Id eager the actual software clock he's looking at isn't all that important to the functioning of the PC anyway.
JohnnyMnemeonic@reddit
PC shop I was working at part time was charging $100 a pop for making sure a PC was "Y2K ready".. All they were doing was changing the date in the bios to 10 or so minutes before midnight, then boot it up, the guys would then go take a smoke brake, come back in and slap a "Y2k ready" sticker on it...
None of them ever failed, a few much older models from the early 90s and late 80s just reverted to the year 1900
austin123al@reddit
Wonder what’s going to happen in 2069
PortableGeneration@reddit
I was at a Megadeth concert in a covered stadium. My parents made me take a flashlight. Fully prepared to survive the apocalypse.
468579@reddit
State-mandated Bündchen wallpaper
SunflaresAteMyLunch@reddit
A name I haven't heard since Dec 31, 1999... 😁
International-Fun-86@reddit
Aah, nostalgia. She was also very popular in Sweden. :)
Positive_Chip6198@reddit
It’s been too many years since i heard any of her music. To the gabbermobile! (My car, my kids think i like weird music, i told them thats whats on the music in the gabbermobile, dj elstak be damned!)
Laser_Krypton7000@reddit
Hahaha - YESS😄
ExpectedBehaviour@reddit
Macs were immune to the Millennium Bug.
Jaded-Bit4426@reddit
Recently found out that on an old mac the calendars dont go beyond 2019 it goes back to 1900, so maybe they had a 2020 bug not a 2000 bug?
ExpectedBehaviour@reddit
Actually they have a problem with 2040.
Classic Macs had their epoch zero point as starting at midnight on 1 January 1904, and counted time from that point as a 32-bit integer in seconds. So midnight on 1 January 2000 was no problem – it was just
10110100100100101111010110000000seconds, and they kept ticking merrily away. The problem will come when they reach11111111111111111111111111111111seconds, which will happen at 06:28:15 on 6 February 2040.Modern Macs – by which I mean anything that could run Mac OS X starting in 2001 and everything since – have switched to using a 64-bit UNIX epoch timing, which counts zero point at starting at midnight on 1 January 1970, and won't experience an integer overflow for another \~292 billion years.
Jaded-Bit4426@reddit
How come the power pc 7500 calendar only goes to end of 2019?
ExpectedBehaviour@reddit
There's a difference between the time used by the OS and firmware themselves, and that used by individual apps – which can include apps built in to the OS. This sounds more like a problem with whatever calendar app the Mac is using, because calendar apps often have "safe boundaries" hard-coded into them independent of the platform they're running on, because calendars themselves can be surprisingly changeable.
Jaded-Bit4426@reddit
Oh I see, thanks for the info
ForQ2@reddit
I'm looking forward to all the money I'm gonna make starting in about 2035. I might be able to retire quite comfortably come February 2038.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
IrregularThumb@reddit
Bit of a damp squib. The person before had all the courses on what to do. I took the job, unofficially, on 23rd December 1999. Nothing happened.
alwaus@reddit
I know basic, pascal, cobol, and fortran.
The three years leading up to y2k was some of the best money i've ever made in my working life.
TheOGTachyon@reddit
Yeah same. I made 150% my yearly income that year. I worked my ass off between September and December though. Home 3-4 days a month. Wash clothes. Paperwork. Repack. Restock. Go.
Mysterious-Alps-5186@reddit
Dude why arnt you working for nasal? Voyager needs you!
hurtz2k@reddit
I left a desktop support job to go make a ton of money on contract certifying all the Mayo clinic's software and hardware to be Y2k compliant. I had to work on a pill dispenser that ran OS/2 Warp and ate lunch with doctors and surgeons in the cafeteria. It was wild.
Independent_Shoe3523@reddit
Did you ever fix a real problem?
Music_Fan76@reddit
Do you even have a DD-214...
alwaus@reddit
Not really anything world ending, mostly patching for 3 or 4 digit or reformatting 80 character limit arrays.
HFS had a massive issue with bookings that would have cost billions if it didnt get fixed.
Your 3 day NYE hotel stay suddenly turns into a 99 year 362 day refund
Independent_Shoe3523@reddit
Oh, kewl. Great gig.
DangKilla@reddit
I was in the Army patching single machines for motor pools with a floppy disk on an ide cable, opening up the cases to do so. I had to use fcc ids to identify the motherboards
KE3JU@reddit
Me too.
SlaveCell@reddit
Me too but with UNIX and NetWare
Patched a NetWare SFTIII pair New Year Eve for a large media company in London and bought a car with it the next year.
MostlyUnimpressed@reddit
Had the biggest New Years Eve in our lifetime ripped away by having to sit overnight in a conference room, on a a conference bridge speakerphone, with laptops LL and cell phones, monitoring and checking facilities, systems, and networks for a huge Telco. Nothing at all went sideways. Giant time waste.
All of my chums and family partied like it was 1999, something we'd all planned on doing together for at least 10 years prior. Ugh.
Jaded-Bit4426@reddit
Its just another new year though, like if they decided year 0 to be a few years earlier or later what difference?
Albos_Mum@reddit
That's why we have the year 2038 problem coming up
MostlyUnimpressed@reddit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
Jaded-Bit4426@reddit
Not talking about y2k, I mean you can party like its 1999 any year
MostlyUnimpressed@reddit
(slaps forehead) I run kind of slow these days. LOL.
wentthererecently@reddit
Our system was a specialized global network, all running on GMT. So our big moment was at 4PM Pacific time. However, I had a 6 month old baby at home, so no epic NYE party for me anyway.
Evacuation_euphoria@reddit
Hey that was me tooo! However the pay rate was around 300 gbp per hour for us overnighters so I didn’t care.
Brad303@reddit
I identify with this comment. I was in a USWEST conference room for the non-event.
At some point we made better use of the projector, and started watching movies.
grassesbecut@reddit
As someone whose family were USWEST customers at the time, thank you for your service.
MostlyUnimpressed@reddit
Yup. Was at GTE. About 2am it was obvious nothing was askew and we started mulling around outside in the smokers area longer and longer until discharged about 4a.
-- On the highway driving home at about 5a, in a company car, hit a deer. So my first workday of January 2000 was spend doing accident reports on company forms. Rounding up a digital camera at that time was easier said than done. Wound up borrowing a Sony Mavica from Engineering that saved low res pics on a floppy disc, LOL. (Engineering got all the cool toys back then. Like 21 and 24 inch CRT color monitors.. those suckers were hella expensive in 1999/2000).
maddogg42@reddit
I did the same. I was like lol at all the hype of pc scare of 99.
RCHeliguyNE@reddit
Just wait for the epoch date issue - we’re not that far from it either. It’s a doozy
_badwithcomputer@reddit
John Titor came back to warn us all about that.
Mobile_Analysis2132@reddit
Yes! The USA IRS core system and the ATC are the two biggest things I know of that are still being worked on.
The IRS is nearly 40 years and tens of billions over budget.
RCHeliguyNE@reddit
That just infuriates me. You know it’s a revolving door of management making dumb technical decisions that get derailed by the next manager and in direct conflict to several other teams working in opposite direction. All because leaders don’t hold themselves accountable for their own decisions and leadership.
Mobile_Analysis2132@reddit
Wonderful politics and budget allocations.
Here's a quick review of the issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Master_File
https://atr.org/40-years-of-failure-irs-unable-to-fix-computer-system/
And with DOGE cuts to the IRS and CISA last year, a number of people who were working on this project were fired. And the new people thought they could simply use Java, Cloud, and AI to solve the upgrade issue and complete it within just a couple of years at most.
RCHeliguyNE@reddit
Hurts thinking about how much IBM is likely getting supporting some twisted old version of VSAM for this idiotic wasteland
sputwiler@reddit
What's Mac OS 9's epoch?
MC68328@reddit
Starts at 1904, with unsigned 32 bit integer seconds, so Feb 6, 2040.
Palm OS has the same problem, as it uses the same epoch, but also uses 7 bits for the year in the DateType struct, making things break after 2031 (1904 + 127).
pseydtonne@reddit
I have a couple old Netwinders... wait, there are no new ones.
I had to flash their equivalent to BIOS and reformat partitions because an older iteration of ext2 did not comply with 64-bit Unix time values. So much software in the Linux world has assumed these states for two decades already.
Elementary2@reddit
I was a VISA employee for a minute... I walked in on my 4th week on the job, and they said "Your boss is on travel/vacation and we need that Y2K remediation report.". I said, "what?". They said "Your boss was supposed to deliver a complete assessment and plan of action for the thousands of computers we run... it was due today". So I said "give me a day.". I came back with the whole thing, every computer, everything needed. They thanked me. When my boss came back from vacation, I said, "you know that whole Y2K thing landed on my desk while you were away. you know it would have been nice if you warned me about that deliverable". And I could see the bitch's face smiling, laughing inside... like she was thinking 'good, I don't even like men'. So then I said "I did it in a single day, and the management wants me to take your job. grats. ". And I walked away
Cwc2413@reddit
The amount of time invested was incredible. Everybody really chipped in to minimize the potential impact. Crazy but great experience.
swalabr@reddit
Wasn’t this the big break for India’s coding and tech support industry?
cristobaldelicia@reddit
India's software exports surged from $1 billion in 1997 to $6.2 billion by 2001, That's just one stat I got, I'm not going post anything else, 'coz maybe you're just looking for a confirmation: yes
dpdxguy@reddit
And, because of that investment, there were very few problems due to Y2K. And because there were few problems, the general public assumed the investment was a waste of time and money. :(
big_red__man@reddit
The classic IT paradox.
mikegalos@reddit
Yes. Many, many people worked long, hard hours to make that disaster not happen.
WyoGeek@reddit
I spent that night sitting in our datacenter making sure everything rolled over ok. We spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting ready. We only found one old obscure application that had an issue.
Win_with_Math@reddit
IIRC, only windows had the Y2K bug, not Macs
EkriirkE@reddit
Classic Macs have a 2020 bug
AlternativeFood8764@reddit
At the stroke of midnight I was in the WTC working for Morgan Stanley’s IT department. The Port Authority issued us flashlights as a precautionary measure.
EkriirkE@reddit
What happened 9 months later?
AlternativeFood8764@reddit
I was in the South Tower on 9/11. Correction eight months later.
EkriirkE@reddit
I can't find anything on this, what happened to it?
trollofzog@reddit
You mean a year and 9 months, this was NYE 1999.
AlternativeFood8764@reddit
This is what happens when you get old. Thanks for the update.
Hjalfi@reddit
...you might be amused to know that in James Blish's The Seedling Stars books, written in the 1950s, the New York Port Authority somehow becomes the Big Bad tyrannical world government.
FlyByPC@reddit
Nobody knew if it would be Armageddon or a nothingburger. I was a PC/network tech, and signed a contract to be available that night to go onsite and look like I was doing something important. No idea what I would have done (I'm a coder but would have had to teach myself COBOL.)
conrat4567@reddit
From what I remember reading, the only things that went wrong where some vending machines, digital clocks and older software that was abandoned by the developers
berrmal64@reddit
The part of the story people usually aren't aware of is the incredible amount of time and effort that went in to getting everything ready in time.
It really was a problem, but it's a problem that was actually foreseen and solved before it became a crisis, which is so rare in our civilization it's hard for people to even believe there was a problem at all.
Summer_Moon2@reddit
This. A ton of people think it wasn't a big deal because nothing happened (actually there some things that went wrong). But this is a classic example of we actually prepared and fixed it before the issue happened. And instead of everyone congratulating the people who worked so hard to fix they instead say it was all a conspiracy. It's like we need something bad to happen to prove it was a problem.
daecrist@reddit
It drives me crazy when people use Y2K as an example of people getting upset over nothing. That's not the story at all. The story is that there was a real problem, we identified it with enough time to do something about it, spent a lot of time and money fixing it, and by the time Y2K rolled around everything was fine because of all that hard work.
But I remember people taking the wrong lesson from it even the day after. "lol the world didn't blow up after all!"
IngresABF@reddit
My job at the time did statement printing for banks, back when they’d get posted out every month. Of the four banks we did work for, two were fine; one couldn’t print for a few days; and the fourth was down for over a week. People with that bank could withdraw any amount they wanted from an ATM as they couldn’t run balances or record transactions. They had to use the ATM network logs to reconcile once their mainframe system was back up. Never saw any of this on the news at the time. So yes preparations were made and succeeded using multiple strategies
SlaveCell@reddit
In my experience , lots of SMBs had programs that only supported two digit dates were affected, but it was easily patchable in Jan without any drama or data loss, we had manufacturing customers that had to junk large machines, printing presses, paint mills, CNC stuff etc. And a helicopter company had to bin an expensive DOS based operations tool. The succes was most of these were analysed beforehand
Oxam@reddit
this video is “fake”, you can see the clear cut when moving from tv to computer. anachronistic os version release on computer too.
trollofzog@reddit
Looks like MacOS 8 or 9... accurate for the time
cheezballs@reddit
I thought it was funny how many people though their literal Windows clock was the issue.
VK4055@reddit
El Efecto 2000 es mi evento favorito de toda la historia. Ojalá la tecnología se hubiera quedado en ese punto.
thesimp@reddit
I worked in industrial automation at the time, mainly oil and gas, refineries and such. We spent most of 1998 and 1999 upgrading software, testing firmware, and working really hard to see if we really did not miss anything in any piece of software code or eeproms.
New Years eve was spent in a conference room with separate phone/tv/satellite connections to the rest of the world. Being a global company we were in contact with customers in New Zealand: those were the first big sites to roll into the new year. Once we got feedback that all was ok everyone sat back and popped open a beer.
In the 26 years since many articles have come and gone about Y2K and that nothing happened. And many articles hinted that it was overblown and overhyped. I used to get angry about that because so much work was done by so many people. These days I just say: "Thanks for the compliments, it was indeed smooth because all the work was done in advance to make it work.".
Let's see what the next generation will do in Y2K38. I will probably be retired by then, but available for consultations against a very steep rate :-).
psychohistorian8@reddit
I impressed that his camcorder was only off by a couple of seconds
that's some damn fine calibration
Dedb4dawn@reddit
I earned so much money as a new tech running patches at our local universities and businesses. It was awesome.
This was in Africa and the only way to patch anything was to carry around a stack of disks from place to place, machine to machine. Even basic internet was just a dream for most places.
Why-am-I-here-anyway@reddit
It wasn't just a hardware/bios level issue. That was fairly easy to patch.
TONS of software from the 80's and 90's was written using a time/date scheme that only included the last two digits of the year. In particular, our back-office accounting/project management software was developed this way - it saved memory space in an era of 640k RAM machines and wasn't changed as the machines advanced in memory and storage space through the 90's.
So, in 1998, we were scrambling to revise the software and database design to fix that, then in 1999 (and more difficult) we had to develop an upgrade software package that went through a customer's entire historical data to revise dates to the new scheme. We had customers with 15 years of accounting and project data. The testing that went into that upgrade routine cost us a small fortune. Then we had to run ALL of our customer base through this upgrade and verify that their systems were working properly with no data loss issues before the end of 1999.
Had we not done it, on January 1, 2000, the systems would have continued to work - but all of the new data created would have been assumed by the system to be January 1900. Imagine the payroll issues among all the other problems.
RomanOswald@reddit
Blümchen… Damn I‘m old…
redderGlass@reddit
We spent 2 years checking and remediating things. On Jan 1 we walked into the main data center to hear an alarm going off. The alarming system and one other that didn’t alarm at all measured time and failed on time running backwards. We restarted them and they were fine
pseydtonne@reddit
I remember the weirdest non-compliant software was phpBB.
We got up Saturday morning, or hadn't gone to sleep yet but dialed up. You could see new entries on various chat boards from the year 19100.
Like, c'mon! You skimped on storage space for year values with software that could not be older than Green Day having hits. (PHP was just a CGI tool for personal home pages in 1994.)
johncate73@reddit
Darn. Didn't even change to January 1, 19100!
diredachshund@reddit
My parents were terrified about Y2K for a year or two leading up to it. Bought a generator, stocked our pantry with canned goods and stuff. By the time it actually rolled around, I guess they’d heard enough people say it wasn’t happening that they’d calmed down. I remember waiting up until midnight with my mom just to make sure and then going to bed.
TableDuck@reddit
I wonder how long I kept member of Y2K update committee on my résumé
Terrible-Bear3883@reddit
Our company tested thousands of PCs for Y2K compatibility, one site I surveyed had over 8,000 desktop and laptops, we spent months and months doing the tests, some just needed a BIOS update, most were fine, I can only remember one computer that had an issue out of all the ones we covered on service, an engineer went and rebooted it, set the clock and it was fine.
zidane2k1@reddit
Interesting that last part you mention; I remember back then reading that some computers couldn’t handle the rollover to 2000, but if the clock were set manually afterwards, it would continue to work fine.
Deer-in-Motion@reddit
A sincere thank you to all the software engineers who worked so hard to prevent catastrophe.
sputwiler@reddit
Oh it's an iMac. Those were fine. I think they set their wrap-around year differently, so it would've bit them in the ass later, but Mac OS X was already on the horizon.
I remember copying some files from Macintosh Quicken to PC Quicken (since Quicken didn't make the leap to OS X well) of that era and suddenly we had a lot of transactions that showed up in 1901.
Independent_Shoe3523@reddit
My boss asked me to look into the Y2K thing with their database software. I told her it was already Y2K compliant but went through all the steps. Did the updates. I reported back and she said she just found out it was already Y2K compliant.
She was hired because she met a coworker in temple.
Xerxero@reddit
So you know, just change the date to test this. No need to wait till New Year’s Eve
Blackholeofcalcutta@reddit
We all mustered at our CIO’s house. It was pins and needles as we had a lot of Informix 4GL stuff running production along with a smattering of other dusty stuff. The ball dropped and everyone logged into their assigned machines, ready to engage the apocalypse in combat.
Everything checked out.
Someone said: “Huh. So, what now?”
CIO: “What now!? Happy New Year! We’re all gonna get f$@&:$ up!”
Independent_Shoe3523@reddit
iMac. Ha!
cndctrdj@reddit
Ive got a few tandy 1000s that run fine still. No updates needed
BreakfastInBedlam@reddit
I belonged to a small email list that had worldwide members. I remember checking in with our New Zealand correspondent on the morning of the 31st (+11 to our -5) to see if airplanes were falling out of the sky yet.
szab999@reddit
I was maintaining a legacy system that was running on SCO Unix. The Unix itself was fine. But I had an urgent call on New Years Day. In 2010 though. Turns out, they hard-coded dates to start with "200" in this legacy ERP software when they prepared the software to work after Y2K. So we had to redeploy the ERP system (with newly hardcoded "201" dates of course) on that day to let the company run. I no longer work there, but sometimes I still wonder if they had to do this again in 2020. (you know, don't fix it if it ain't broken)
Inevitable_Yak_3975@reddit
The pile of trashbags really sells it lmao
landonbrandon23@reddit
Yay Y2K compliance