Who remembers the "Millineum Bug"?

[bluescribbler]

People the world over were panicking because the folks at Microsoft hadn't thought far enough ahead, hadn't planned for what would happen to computers when 1999 became 2000. It would be catastrophic, experts told us. Airplanes would crash. Highways would become gridlocked. Patients hooked up to life saving machines, including premature infants in incubators, would die.

Of course, none of these dire predictions came true. Why not? Because governments and industry spent many person hours and millions of dollars to avert those catastrophes. It was considered to be too urgent to ignore.

How I wish we saw the same urgency in dealing with global climate change. The consequences will be far more dire than anything the "Millineum Bug" alarmists could imagine. And yet, our government does nothing.

[Freddie]

1. My dad bought a generator

Came in handy years later with Hurricane Sandy. By then he was in Assisted Living and the place had generators. Thanks Dad!

[DavidDvorkin]

2. It wasn't Microsoft

The problem, such as it was, had to do with old, legacy software that allowed two spaces for the year. This was before Microsoft was a factor.

I wrote some of that software in the 1970s, and I complained about that potential problem with the year at the end of the century. I was told not to worry about it because the software would have been replaced by then; it wasn't.

[miyazaki]

3. The whole thing was a cold fart.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. The OP is right; it took significant work to get things fixed in time

I worked for IBM at the time; there were major customers who hadn't installed upgrades for over a decade, because they still just wanted their systems to do the work it did a decade ago, and it was working OK. They had to be forced to look at what would go wrong both with old software from IBM or other companies, and what their own software would do. And to set up test systems to check everything was fixed.