http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2000/011700y2k/

The Glitch That Didn't Steal New Year's

Where were you on Y2K? Scientific American's readers report their experiences and share their observations.

Y2K really did sound pretty ominous. It was said that as the clocks rolled over to the year 2000, unprepared computers would interpret the date as 1900. And this seemingly small error would create chaos, shutting down transportation, communications, finance and other essential systems, crippling nations defenses and leaving us all to contemplate the first night of a new millennium howling in total darkness.

And, yes, many people took this specter of technological apocalypse very seriously indeed. They hoarded cash and food, bought generators and steered clear of air travel. But as the first second of January 1 slipped around the globe, surprisingly little went wrong. Many failures attributed to Y2K soon turned out just to be the day-to-day creakiness that plagues almost everything; most were quickly corrected. Some people breathed a sigh of relief and lauded the massive effort to head off disaster.

Curiously, others were deeply chagrined, charging that Y2K was all hype and evidence of corporate greed.

On January 3, we asked our readers to tell us what their Y2K moment was like. We received answers from nearly all time zones that provide a very human and often insightful look at Y2K. Many rushed to their computers to verify in the glowing screen that the world as we know it still existed. Some report very real glitches that were quickly fixed; some--like the reader whose automotive electrical system failed--well, who knows? There was praise for a disaster averted and anger from those who felt they had been exploited. There were even some who felt--technology aside--a sense of mystery at the dawning of a new era. And there was that best of all human traits: amusement.

At the end of first night, one thing was brilliantly clear: We were all still here. Below is a selection of your responses.

--Alan Hall

snip

January 1, 2000. Alarm clock rang. Got up. Kettle, toaster worked. So far, so good. Peeped out of window for rioters. Saw none.

Garage door still opened, motorcycle still started. Set off for work. Noticed traffic lights were ok. Looked around for crashed aircraft. Saw none. Still no rioters. Two revelers waved; I waved back.

Arrived at TV station. Electric door still worked. All equipment okay.

Checked computers. All okay except two. The remote studio controller thought it was 1980, but still controlled remotely. The other, handling Gaelic subtitles, thought it was 2001. Reset both. Checked other networks for rioters. Saw none. Watched the festivities from around the world.

Opened emergency supplies (large jar of coffee), then set about tidying up the huge pile of program and commercial back-up tapes that I knew I would no longer need.....

Happy New Year to you all.

Anthony Langton

Aberdeen,

Scotland

===

Y2K turned out mostly OK because of, not in spite of, early alarmists. I myself was a Y2K "Watchdog" for our church. 15 months ago, when I began putting Y2K inserts into the worship bulletins, I got a lot of flak--"Oh, it's all a bunch of hype" and "Don't be a fear monger." I deliberately avoided such hype, putting in only reports that seemed to be from reputable sources, like ITAA, the Senate special committee on Y2K (Senator Bennett's and Senator Dodd's), the Presidential Commission on Year 2000 Conversion, US Navy, Treasury, SBA etc.

I also daily scanned Yourdan's and Cassandra's and www.Y2K-links ("Scary Gary" North's, sans commentary) sites; etc. Gradually, folks began to take it seriously. Folks began to say, "Better prepared than scared." On the last Sunday of the year, I was asked to lead a Y2K service--we laughed at fate with several Y2K silly-songs to pop tunes and I led a dialog on "The Amazing Grace of Y2K: How it taught my heart to fear...and my fears relieved" (by being prepared and building resilient communities). We now plan to distribute our over- stocked goods to charity.

I believe much of the preparation that resulted in a non-event would not have happened without such warnings.

Paul McBroom

Irving, Texas

===

The most expensive ''no-show'' in the history of show business.

Filoktitis Salaminios M.D.

Athens

Greece

===

Working as an information systems specialist, I have to use PCs all my working hours. I knew that our PCs in the office are modern ones, so no Y2K problem should occur for us. But one interesting thing I found in the new year was that everybody who finds a problem in his or her work tries to relate it to Y2K! Unfortunately many people believe them.

Hamid

Tehran

Iran

===

I work for a major computer firm and despite warnings galore for as long as I could take it, I took no preparing action for Y2K. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it strikes me as a mite coincidental that the people who caused the problem (1970's programmers, note the 4 digit year) are the ones who profited from Y2K. These are the people who control the computer industry today and who are reaping the benefits of all the extra soft and hardware sold in the panicstricken days before the big date. Like I said, I'm not much of a theorist but this one has got a bee in my bonnet, not that I can do anything about it.

Baz Oglesby

Dublin

Ireland

===========

Consider the largest Ethernet LAN of the world, the Stockholm Local Government Net, with 20,000 users spread over a 20-mile-wide area and about a hundred applications.

Nothing happend.

Andreas Ericson

Stockholm

Sweden

====

I saw one local hardware store that had a sign at the counter stating that generators could not be returned.

I noticed one fellow bringing back two propane tanks that were filled with fuel. The store stated that according to the fire department's laws, they could not take back tanks filled with fuel. The guy stated the valves were defective and he could not download them. He is taking the store to small claims court.

Lyman Delameter

Temecula, Calif.

==

I feel cheated and angry that people who did not have the credentials to be Gurus and High-priests of the Y2K fraud are allowed to tell their unfounded claims and doom and gloom stories.

The government should have verified this stupid thing first before spending billions of dollars for nothing. If Canada spent billions and South Korea did not and still have the same result, then some is wrong with the equation.

Not a single glitch in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia.

What is this? It was a definite fraud and should be investigated so it will not happen again.

The Y2K fraud caused massive unnecessary psychological and emotional stress to untold individuals, especially the elderly who did not have a clue what to do but follow the flow of the many have already been victimized by this ridiculous bug. I also blame the engineers, computer programmers and other professionals who knew that computers in cars, for example, are not date sensitive and that elevators have safety mechanisms and electric power plants are generated by water and not by computers and that lawn mowers will not attack people. They all kept quiet allowed this fraud to happened. Some people should go to jail for this. No Name

Vancouver, B.C.

Canada

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), January 18, 2000

Answers

How I love personal responsibility:

"Some people should go to jail for this." No Name

Night train

-- jes an ol, bemused footballer (nighttr@in.lane), January 18, 2000.

===

Y2K turned out mostly OK because of, not in spite of, early alarmists. I myself was a Y2K "Watchdog" for our church. 15 months ago, when I began putting Y2K inserts into the worship bulletins, I got a lot of flak--"Oh, it's all a bunch of hype" and "Don't be a fear monger." I deliberately avoided such hype, putting in only reports that seemed to be from reputable sources, like ITAA, the Senate special committee on Y2K (Senator Bennett's and Senator Dodd's), the Presidential Commission on Year 2000 Conversion, US Navy, Treasury, SBA etc.

I also daily scanned Yourdan's and Cassandra's and www.Y2K-links ("Scary Gary" North's, sans commentary) sites; etc. Gradually, folks began to take it seriously. Folks began to say, "Better prepared than scared." On the last Sunday of the year, I was asked to lead a Y2K service--we laughed at fate with several Y2K silly-songs to pop tunes and I led a dialog on "The Amazing Grace of Y2K: How it taught my heart to fear...and my fears relieved" (by being prepared and building resilient communities). We now plan to distribute our over- stocked goods to charity.

I believe much of the preparation that resulted in a non-event would not have happened without such warnings.

Paul McBroom

Irving, Texas

===

-- The quote that (says@it.all), January 18, 2000.

My dear Mistress Cherri,

Again! Dear lady! You have misunderstood. It is the YEAR thousand problem (and here it is already the 18th day into the year). And, it seems that today, oil. Or maybe soon, the lack of it! Seems to be the prominent topic on the forum.

Dear Lady, you surely should go to Jeff Cooper's shooting school! So far this time around, (shooting from the hip) you have hit a goose (missed the turkey, darn it!)..Two tin cans! But missed the target on the barn door; come to think of it you missed the door completely!

I would suggest...As a money saving effort. That you fill up your gas tank dear lady! For gasoline, she is going up! And up, and up!

Faulty Embedded systems at the Vensuelian(sp) oil refinery that just went up? Probably. Next thought. Can they get it back online in three weeks? I wonder just how many jobbers are being called today looking for the needed parts?

The point being dear lady, it isn't time yet to say it is over. For it ain'tover til it's over! And Y2K has only begun. As another said...It is the oil people! I can only add it is the economy people....!!

You might try a little goose grease in your holster.That might stop your shooting iron from hanging up so much when you draw LOL...And I know just where there is a goose handy! Right over there where your first shot went..

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Shakey~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-- Shakey (in_a_bunker@forty.feet), January 18, 2000.

~~~~~~~~~~~~Shakey~~~~~~~~~~~~

You poor old sole (sic)You know you just love me and hang on to every word I post. You never met a lady as smart and brilliant as me and you just can't get over it!

The Y2K "problems" were over before 1999 was, and go and read my work experience again. That barely covers what I can do and have done.

I get bored easily, so you are going to have to come up with something besides guesses of embedded causeing problems, provide proof. The pollies don't have to prove anything any more, the rollover did that. It's all you people who want everyone to believe it isn't over that need to "prove" what you are saying now. You all spent so much time saying "prove it" when you were told things wouldn't fail (especially in a BIG way) so now that your own eyes should show you the proof has been given. If you still need proof, your brain probably has problems processing.....

So where's YOUR proof that it will take all year for Y2k to bring down society and the world???

HUH?? HUH?? HUH HUH HUH???

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), January 18, 2000.

Dear Fake Cherri:

While I can appreciate your irritation over the leading post in this thread, and while your response is quite on target, it's in violation of the forum's guidelines to use somsone else's handle and address. Fess up and sin no more.

Dear Real Cherri:

With all your endless, perfect knowledge, do you happen to know if there's a hyphen in anal-retentive?

-- Let's (keep@it.clean), January 18, 2000.

Other quotes that Cherri somehow overlooked.

http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2000/011700y2k/

The Glitch That Didn't Steal New Year's

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Nothing happened to my family's main computer. However, my personal computer (an old 386 that runs windows 3.1 with an effort) now believes it is 03- 27-99.

Stacy Haponik Calvert City, Kentucky

=====

I suspect that the scope of Y2K problems is being quietly under- reported.

As an example, I'm a senior software engineer at one of the largest institutional money management firms on the globe. We spent 20 months of grueling effort and millions of dollars to insure that our applications and interconnections with the rest of the global financial community were Y2K compliant. The size of the task was truly huge; the number of lines of code in our in-house applications alone is in the tens of millions.

I can report that--starting several days before January 1st--our applications started experiencing minor failures due to Y2K issues. These have continued, sporadically, to this moment. We are also aware that other entities (banks, investment firms, etc.) in the financial community are having similar 'glitches,' some serious. None of these problems appear to be show stoppers so far... but I can tell you that the public picture of a non-event doesn't correspond to the reality on my monitors. I can also tell you that the chances of any of this being reported publicly approach zero.

Why?

1. Who wants to appear on any lawyer's radar screen as they wait to unleash a barrage of Y2K-related litigation?

2. Who is eager to publicly admit that, even after all the time and money spent, we STILL missed some Y2K-related bugs?

Better to give the public the story that the problems didn't occur because of massive mitigation efforts, directed by enlightened management.

Name Withheld San Francisco, Calif.

=====

We have a DOS program that controls a state-of-the-art Digital Signal Processing console made in Switzerland by Daniel Weiss.

Every project gets logged in with a date. The program writes "2000" as "19100" !! I was sure it wasn't Y2K compliant and we know the software won't be rewritten by the manufacturer. I would never have thought that the date would have come out that way!

We also found a minor glitch in Peachtree Accounting 7.0, which was released to fix Y2K issues. When changing a posting from Nov 99 today, the software prompts you to enter a date when the posting was modified. You can choose to keep the date in Nov 99. But if you chose today 3 Jan 2000, it came out 3 Jan 1980 instead.

Bob Ludwig Portland, Maine

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All the big systems worked well, but a few of the computer systems at the hotel where I work had problems. The payroll punch-in clock went down, as well as the restaurant computers. Nothing too serious as things were fixed as soon as they came up. Still, I hope my paycheck comes out ok, as that system was still down as of yesterday. I think the hotel knew about it, as they had installed a new system, but that one doesn't work either. What we do now is just sign in, on a piece of paper. That's about it.

Brooks Groves Seattle, Wash.

=====

My online computer is stubbornly convinced it is 2094.

Don Parr Sacramento, Calif.

=====

I think that Y2K was a real menace. But, fortunately, all efforts spent to fix the 2-digits trouble were valuable. Think about what could have happened if nothing had been done? What if people had thought that it wouldn't be serious and so turned their backs to the trouble? The answer probably would have been that the year 2000 would have been born with an "apocyliptical" face. I hope that this episode will be seen as how we were smart enough to solve our troubles before they happened.

It's better to prevent problems than to fix them.

Joao Cura D'Ars Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais Brazil

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On Sunday, Jan 2, I visited the Arizona Diamondbacks (major league baseball) website because my six year-old son is a fan. I wanted to sign up for their "Insider" email to keep abreast of the upcoming spring training events. I entered my son's name and email address-- and where they asked for year of birth, I entered 1993. When I submitted the form, I got an error message that stated the date was incorrect because "1993 has not occurred yet."

No biggy, but it stopped that process cold.

Mike Martin Phoenix, Ariz.

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My 1991 KLH-1, 1 meg RAM, 40 meg HD computer woke up New Year's Day thinking it was 1980. I tried to convince it the date was 2000, but it refused to believe me. Having tried and failed with the truth, I told it we were reliving 1999. It seems content with the lie and I don't use it much any more anyway. I would have thought that MSDOS 6.22 would have had a better grip on reality. Sad. Not important but sad.

David Huie Green Century, Florida

=====

I intentionally left one of my computers, a Gateway 486/DX2 system, as I left it in late 1996--Windows 3.11 with older applications. Two of the main applications blew to hell at midnight at the turn of the new year, and a menu program returned a date of 1/1/100. Worse, some of the Microsoft Office applications, including Excel 5.0 and Access 2.0, do not handle dates properly any longer. The system did successfully roll over to 1/1/2000, even though it has a 1992 level BIOS. All Y2K problems that have surfaced have been in the application programs, not the operating system. All of my other systems, which I upgraded, appear to be okay.

If you meet someone that believes that Y2K was a hoax, I would be glad to show them the result of complacence, or, in my case, doing nothing to one system to see what would occur.

I believe that if the media had not hyped the problem (and we all knew it was being over-hyped), a lot of people would have been stung by the Y2K bug. It's like recreational drugs, I suppose. You cannot say "just say no" too much. Similarly, there was no such thing as too many reminders of Y2K.

Bob Nelson Jacksonville, Florida

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I was in programming on IBM mainframe, payroll systems. I quit (retired) back at end of July - got sick and tired of working with third-party software. I will say, if so many companies/government agencies had not spent as much effort as they did, I really do think we would have had a major disaster on our hands. I'm sure many were talked into buying new software instead of fixing the old, when the fix could have been much cheaper.

The company I was with spent over $150,000 just in man-hours installing a new release of our payroll system. We had to because we knew the prior release was NOT Y2K compliant. There was an astounding amount of effort applied all over this country. I wonder how many programmers simply got burnt out over this? (I ended over 35 years in programming, and this finally did me in.)

My only 'preparation' for 2000? I left my car in the driveway because I wouldn't have been able to get the garage door open if we didn't have power.

Clyde Vinton, Va.

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As a computer support worker for Brigham Young University, I have encountered a number of problems. First of all, the programming deficiencies of Netscape version 4.05 and earlier have necessitated upgrading the browsers of more the 10 percent of our professors. This has tied up staff and administrative personnel. In addition, we are seeing failures among scientific software packages. We have been contacting vendors for upgrades, but have thus far had to set computer clocks back to 1999 to retain functionality of the software.

Matthew Perkins Provo, Utah

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-- The rest (of@the.story), January 18, 2000.

Naughty, Naughty! Mistress? Cheri?

In "Drag" are we? And your work experience? Besides that of imposter! As for the rest! I submit the rest of this thread's (other's) replies to your pomposity! And dear Lady ( I do hope that you are not cross dressing to). I derive no mirth at some one leading with their "verbal" chin, as has been done by one or the other of you( your personalities) in the past by your alter ego or you...

Come to think of it! Y2K Pro! Is that you? LOL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Shakey~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-- Shakey (in_a_bunker@forty.feet), January 18, 2000.