[ExI] y2k bug

[Harvey Newstrom]

On Friday, July 11, 2014 10:04 AM, spike wrote,
> All the yakkity yak we heard in 1999 about the Y2K bug and how it was
going
> to kill us all turned out to be quite the bust.

Actually, the Y2K bug was not a bust.  I worked at IBM at the time, and we
fixed many of our products in advance to avoid the bug.  Had we not worked
months ahead of time, it would have been a disaster.  Even so, we were
forced to be on call during the holiday weekend at New Years.  Many things
still actually failed.  But since it was a holiday, few people noticed.  We
worked on the holiday and over the weekend to clean up a lot of stuff we
missed to get it working by Monday.  Then, all the clients we worked with
lied and told the media that  they had no problems.  Because the bug was
known in advance, nobody wanted to admit that they weren't prepared or
missed anything.  But the entire world did practically shut down that day.
There were major systems outages and communications failures.  It's just
that most of it was fixed in advance, and people were on-call and ready to
fix it the day it happened.

--
Harvey Newstrom   www.HarveyNewstrom.com