<story><title>Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?</title><text>There was very little fallout to the Y2K bug, which begs the question: was the Y2K crisis real and well handled or not really a crisis at all?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>davismwfl</author><text>From someone who went through it and dealt with code, it was a real problem but I also think it was handled poorly publicly.  The issues were known for a long time, but the media hyped it into a frenzy because a few higher profile companies and a lot of government systems had not been updated.  In fact, there were still a number of government systems that were monkey patched with date workarounds and not properly fixed well into the 2000&amp;#x27;s (I don&amp;#x27;t know about now but it wouldn&amp;#x27;t shock me).&lt;p&gt;There was a decent influx of older devs using the media hype as a way to get nice consulting dollars, nothing wrong with that, but in the end the problem and associated fix was not really a major technical hurdle, except for a few cases.  It is also important to understand a lot of systems were not in a SQL databases at the time, many were in ISAM, Pic, dBase (ouch), dbm&amp;#x27;s (essentially NoSql before NoSql hype) or custom db formats (like flat files etc) that required entire databases to be rewritten, or migrated to new solutions.&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents, it was a real situation that if ignored could have been a major economic crisis, most companies were addressing it in various ways in plenty of time but the media latched on to a set of high profile companies&amp;#x2F;government systems that were untouched and hyped it.  If you knew any Cobol or could work a Vax or IBM mainframe you could bank some decent money.  I was mainly doing new dev work but I did get involved in fixing a number of older code bases, mainly on systems in non-popular languages or on different hardware&amp;#x2F;OS because I have a knack for that and had experience on most  server&amp;#x2F;mainframe architectures you could name at that time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_red</author><text>&amp;gt;dbase&lt;p&gt;At the time I was managing a dBase &amp;#x2F; FoxPro medical software package...we were a small staff who had to come up with Y2K mitigation on our own.&lt;p&gt;Our problem is we only had source code for &amp;quot;our&amp;quot; part of the chain...other data was being fed into the system from external systems where we had no vendor support.&lt;p&gt;Thus our only conceivable plan was to do the old:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  If $year&amp;lt;10; 
    date=&amp;quot;20$year&amp;quot;
  else 
    date=&amp;quot;19$year&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It worked in 99.9% of the cases which was enough for us to limp thru and just fix the bad cases by hand as they happened. Eventually we migrated off the whole stack over the next few years so stopped being a problem. I&amp;#x27;m sure many mitigation strategies did the same....</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?</title><text>There was very little fallout to the Y2K bug, which begs the question: was the Y2K crisis real and well handled or not really a crisis at all?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>davismwfl</author><text>From someone who went through it and dealt with code, it was a real problem but I also think it was handled poorly publicly.  The issues were known for a long time, but the media hyped it into a frenzy because a few higher profile companies and a lot of government systems had not been updated.  In fact, there were still a number of government systems that were monkey patched with date workarounds and not properly fixed well into the 2000&amp;#x27;s (I don&amp;#x27;t know about now but it wouldn&amp;#x27;t shock me).&lt;p&gt;There was a decent influx of older devs using the media hype as a way to get nice consulting dollars, nothing wrong with that, but in the end the problem and associated fix was not really a major technical hurdle, except for a few cases.  It is also important to understand a lot of systems were not in a SQL databases at the time, many were in ISAM, Pic, dBase (ouch), dbm&amp;#x27;s (essentially NoSql before NoSql hype) or custom db formats (like flat files etc) that required entire databases to be rewritten, or migrated to new solutions.&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents, it was a real situation that if ignored could have been a major economic crisis, most companies were addressing it in various ways in plenty of time but the media latched on to a set of high profile companies&amp;#x2F;government systems that were untouched and hyped it.  If you knew any Cobol or could work a Vax or IBM mainframe you could bank some decent money.  I was mainly doing new dev work but I did get involved in fixing a number of older code bases, mainly on systems in non-popular languages or on different hardware&amp;#x2F;OS because I have a knack for that and had experience on most  server&amp;#x2F;mainframe architectures you could name at that time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unilynx</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t know about now but it wouldn&amp;#x27;t shock me&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ll be up for a few Y2K bugs at the start of every decade because &amp;#x27;year += year &amp;lt; n ? 2000 : 1900&amp;#x27; was such an easy workaround, for n=20,30,40,...&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pymnts.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;payment-methods&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;new-years-bug-takes-nyc-parking-meters-offline&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pymnts.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;payment-methods&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;new-years-b...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>