All I recall was that Italy seemed to be at major risk for taking too long to defend its systems against the potential bug....but not much, if anything happened in the end. I do know that IT specialists (try switching it off and on again) made a fortune by being on standby just incase.
No but for the previous 8 months we had tested the roll forward on all the industrial Programmable Logic Controllers in the drinking water production sites of a UK region. All PLC real time clocks passed but we found 30% of the connected graphic interfaces used for operator manual control and some automated process time routines hung and would have caused disruption to water supplies. They were replaced or in 5 cases inhibited from operating giving a event free midnight. Without the testing Y2K would have caused problems - only one site reported an induced fault where the timesheet computer failed to rollover and reset the date. Midnight passed without event but later that day it tried to do an automatic backup and faulted on timestamps for the files being out of range. Ross
Yes, my lights were well and truly out..............I think I may have imploded..............Certainly felt like I'd died the next morning. I spent my Y2K New Year's eve in the Timmy hangar, RAF Mount Pleasant.........I can't believe that was 25 yrs ago, still seems like yesterday.
I was working for an insurance company at the time, waiting to go to grad school. I volunteered to come in that morning and check the computers and alarms. (All normal.) As the fail would have rippled out from several epicenters I don't know what I would have done. I suspect not having electricity when I woke up would have been a clue. I did chortle a bit as I clocked in. I had a crayon handy incase the time clock didn't work.
What I find strange now, looking back, is that we were still young enough in the 1980s to think that the year 2000 was a lifetime away. The products that my company designed & manufactured were mostly for the food processing industry, so had an expected minimum life of 7 years from purchase date. We used 2 digit year format because memory/storage space was precious. But didn't consider what would happen when the year incremented from 99 to 100 (I.e. the carry bit has to go somewhere!) Yes, some companies exploited y2k. And we all had a jolly good laugh at it. But just look at the disruptions we have had in recent years due to 'minor' software glitches.
You are so right Steve, I know when I joined up in the 80s.......the year 2000 was a proper lifetime away....heck, I still had copies of the first comic I ever bought....2000AD.
My other half got a decent Y2K job in the run-up, hunting down & fixing bits of code in major systems. He says it was never going to be as apocalyptic as all those tabloid predictions; most of it was dealt with well before the date so was never going to be an issue. I grumpily refused a suggestion by mum to subscribe to 2000AD at our local shop. (She'd got me Action from issue 1 til its demise, and AFAIWC nothing was going to be as good My entire collection, with all freebies bar the Hook Jaw T-shirt transfer which I'd used, sat in my old room until my mother decided it should go to a better home. Now that was a disaster! )
Worse than the panic over Y2K was the Mayan Calendar of Doom nonsense. Okay, so the calendar "ended" in 2112. So what. Centuries ended regular, there was a new one waiting in the wings. But the hare-brained folks love a new Doomsday scenario. (But ask them about "Domesday" and they look blank.)
But Hook Jaw, a monstrous great white, with a huge harpoon hook sticking out of its jaw.....why did I always feel sorry for it, and always happy when it chopped people up?
25 years since Y2k and when the calendar clicked over into 2025 I found I had problems logging into 2 business sites:- Tesco Credit Card login: from their home page (www.tescobank.com) I click on the Login button and get a black & white (the worse kind) of access denied message. Finally got around to calling their helpline, waited in a queue, to then be asked by the lovely Kathleen "what browser are you using?". So they are implying its a Firefox problem! ...not something they've done. I'm just going to install a 2nd web browser. Amazon Checkout: having a list of goodies in my Basket, I struggle through Checkout until I get to the screen that tries to trick me into agreeing to 'Prime'. I carefully select "Continue my order without Prime" ...the page just refreshes itself and refuses to proceed! Anyone else having 'Y2k + 25' problems?