On 03/10/2018 14:31, Larry Martell wrote:
It only went smoothly because there were people like me fixing the issues ;-)
In that case perhaps I should take some of the credit for writing code that never had a Y2K problem in the first place. ;-)
I worked on Wall St at the time, and I got a reputation for being able to find and fix Y2K issues. Really all that I did was grep the code bases for 2 digit years, and code that blindly added 1900 to them. There were a ton of those cases. It was not atypical for me to find 500-1000 or more such cases at each site. The fixes were easy but the testing took a while. I did this for banks, hedge funds, brokerages, bond traders, etc.
At one place where I had fixed probably 700 cases, after Y2K came and went without an incident the CEO said "You made such a big deal about this, and then nothing happened."
I think this shows that it was partly an industry-related issue. At the ISP I mentioned, the vast majority of the systems were Y2K-compliant and had ended up that way through the normal process of upgrades and patches over many years. (Well, apart from the single, major semi-proprietary system we knew about anyway). However, your employer (and your employer's industry) was very different: It clearly ran numerous disparate code bases, many developed in house, many of which were non-compliant and whose compliance was unknown until you found and fixed them.
I was definitely in the wrong industry!