We are almost 2 months into the new year and haven't experienced the sweeping infrastructure failures that many expected last year. And what about the countries that apparently did so little to prepare? For sure the oil biz is hurting-and I remain doomerish not only because of the economic craziness but the ominous political rumblings worldwide. But...this is rather mild stuff compared to talk of 7,8,9,10(level of damage to system). Was the danger exaggerated? What do people think of the Meg Davis perspective? Was it really possible for the powers that be to work a simultaneous double spin game,that is to assure the masses that they would solve it all while selectively leaking doomer reports and "evidence"(via Internet) that whole structure was apt to crumble? And that this was planned to bolster the police state potential? Somehow,I can't quite believe that "they" could be so organized, coordinated and effective to pull that one off. Thoughts? H.

-- H (dryfarmer@hotmail.com), February 24, 2000

Answers

Like who is Meg Davis? Do you have a link? The way I figure, it is over. Thank goodness, there was almost nothing there. Were we mislead or were we lucky? I rejoice that the world stumbles on and I have no interest in retro-active anaysis of something that quickly recedes from view.

One thing I do wonder--did anyone get rich off of selling y2k stuff? Somehow, I don't think so.

-- (nemesi@awol.com), February 24, 2000.

I forgot,how much was spent on this "NONEVENT"??

-- You missed (Bang@Bang.Bang), February 24, 2000.

H... Yeah, I just read a piece of the Meg Davis write up again this morning. I have been struggling with the exact same question. At one point I thought maybe the Meg Davis idea was right... that somehow someone really smart had this all figured out. That they knew the outcome of Y2K would be lots of plans for moving us closer to a police state. But the more I think about it... I really wonder. Maybe it wasn't that they were smart, maybe just I (we) were really stupid. I read FactFinder's and others comments on TB2000 and I think I just didn't want to believe what they were saying. The thing is also, I just can't concede to Meg Davis that anyone could be smart enough to fool so many people on purpose. Yes, many of the things Meg listed off have come to pass, but I think maybe that stuff would have come about anyway. I think the Powers to Be just seized the moment and made a few more baby steps in the direction they always gravitate anyway. Of course the dilemma with that position is, what about the all the groups like the GAO and The Gartner Group, etc who were also fooled. Comments?

By the way, -- , it is worth analyzing even if the only reason I made all those preps is that I was stupid. Maybe I won't be so stupid next time! And besides, if Y2K is not still important, why are you making comments at a forum called TB2000???

-- DannyBoy (dannyboy@Iwonder.too), February 24, 2000.

remember.... all Y2K reporting is self-directed.......the effects are, in all essence, hidden, untill the qrtly reports are in, and the Gov. stps skewing the results.. Take the CPI!!! What, folks? we don't eat or drive????? the CPI is one of the most misleading indicators of all times. It is an accounting ploy!!!!! (really) Just run the REAL numbers!!!!!!

-- robert gridlock (plutus@yahoo.com), February 24, 2000.

To start, I consider the search for a "single villian" to y2k misguided. There were, in hindsight (and hey, if we've got hindsight we might as well use it), quite a few factors involved. Some suggestions for contributing factors:

1) The danger was indeed exaggerated. When we first started really addressing the issue, we genuinely did not know what we faced. And depending on what we found, the potential for really serious problems was undeniable. You combine ignorance with potential, and you have a legitimate threat to deal with. It wasn't fake and it wasn't hyped, it was real. In these cases, we really must assume guilty until proven innocent.

Over time, experience showed that (a) date bugs were trivial to fix; (b) date bug impacts weren't hard to work around or quickfix in most cases; (c) embedded systems had nearly NO functional reliance on dates. So while the problem was certainly wide, it wasn't deep. Kind of like fearing (with good reason) a pandemic, and subsequently finding that the symptoms are mild, don't affect critical physical functions, and recovery is quick. A great relief.

2) There was nothing resembling a clearing house of y2k information. We have literally many millions of systems, from embeddeds to mainframes. In important cases (the extremes), these were one-off custom systems, developed for specific unique purposes. Many of them (hell, the vast majority) were proprietary. This made it impossible to even begin to generalize about y2k across systems, even within a particular industry. Just because any ONE system was OK didn't necessarily mean the NEXT system, doing the same function, might not be hopeless.

And as a consequence, no single person or organization could collect more than spotty and nontransferable data about y2k health. Data collection was like urban warfare -- street by street, building by building, room by room. It was impossible *in principle* to rule out the idea that some date bugs somewhere might have influence far beyond their locus. And partisan organizations like GAO and Taskforce2000 got a lot of mileage out of this, mostly by setting unrealistic (and unnecessary) goals, and milking the publicity they could get claiming that the opposition was failing to meet "reasonable" goals. But that's politics.

3) Quite the contrary, there were good reasons to keep problems internal and confidential. PR reasons, legal reasons, competitive reasons, political reasons. And this meant two apparently identical assurances that "everything will be fine" could conceal wildly different situations internally. Our propensity for confidentiality, trade secrets, proprietary code and processes, private data (the crown jewels) tended to work against any organized, overall measurement of exposure or progress. There was a lot of deliberate darkness everyone kept everyone else in.

4) The only people in whose interest it was to generalize, were those who saw something to gain by identifying with the overall issue -- whether it be money, reputation, career or whatever, were naturally the fearmongers. There's nothing to gain claiming things will be normal! This is no more than the ordinary operation of the free market, but it DID permit some individuals to take advantage of the impossibility of proving a negative. NOT that these people were necessarily scam artists, but considering point #2 above, it just wasn't honestly possible to demonstrate that they were wrong about the big picture. All anyone could say was that THIS little picture or THAT little picture posed no detectable problem. The only answer to the question of "How many little pictures does it take before we know we're safe?" was "More than we have so far!"

And there was a certain snowball effect as a result. In hindsight, a LOT of money was unwisely spent "just to be on the safe side" because Big Problems could not be ruled out, and a lot MORE was spent because "look what *they* spent. They might know something we don't". We could know that the odds *looked* very low, and still know that betting with the odds and losing wasn't worth the chance.

Finally, I personally think people like Gartner Group, Yourdon, Capers Jones, and deJager DID find a wider audience in government officials and IT departments. And *most* individuals in government don't know much about computers, and even IT departments only know about their OWN department, not about their suppliers and customers. To some unquantifiable degree, I believe the vacuum of general y2k information really WAS filled somewhat by people selling fear.

5) [Well, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb] On the whole, media coverage of y2k was pessimistic (we're using hindsight here, remember?). If you step back a bit and think about it, business as usual is NOT a story. Problems are stories. Programmers with stockpiles and arsenals are stories. The various millennial religious concerns are stories. Serious threats to the infrastructure are stories.

But an invisible army of millions of maintenance programmers methodically and quietly repairing trivial coding errors are not a story. Tens of thousands of organizations, confident they've got it licked but advised by their lawyers not to say so just in case, are not a story. In general, what MIGHT go wrong is one hell of a lot more newsworthy than what might NOT go wrong, and lack of anything eventful or different is what the media ignore.

Let's be honest and face it -- had the media totally ignored y2k, and had nobody but maintenance programmers ever heard of it, nobody would ever have noticed a single damn thing out of the ordinary in their daily lives or in their normal news coverage. And it wasn't tiny, nearly unknown internet y2k fora that put y2k on the public's lips, nor was it the copies of Timebomb 2000 Yourdon managed to sell. Indeed, without the wide media coverage those books wouldn't even have been allocated shelf space in bookstores.

But the media didn't hype y2k (to the extent they did) because of any conspiracy. They were part of the same feedback effect that was triggered by the incredible expense of remediation. *They* didn't have the Big Picture anymore than anyone else, because there never WAS any source of that Big Picture (see #2 above again). They simply contributed to a public concern that turns out to have been unnecessary, but thankfully never took on a life of its own ("panic" or the like).

All in all, what we had was the very antithesis of conspiracy. A conspiracy is a group working in concert. What we had was lots of different groups working all at cross purposes. Even within single corporations, management fought with engineering, and marketing fought against legal. Every different viewpoint had a different y2k perspective, different goals and purposes. And as a result, y2k information was remarkable for being so amazingly incomplete, unreliable, contradictory, and ambiguous. Right up to the end, the single (IMO) best key to the entire puzzle was the huge number of dogs that were NOT barking during the night.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), February 24, 2000.

Thank guys-interesting responses. The address for the Meg Davis article is www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002Vni. I guess I was overly gullible re:y2k-but still feel alot of unease about what happened,what is happening now. Just what were those CIA, Navy War college,Senate committee etc reports based on? I mean they weren't selling anything for profit,eh? Honest mistakes? Deliberate playing of the paranoia fear cards? Unfortunately,the real upshot of this whole thing is that it will be virtually impossible to ever convince most people of the need to pre- pare in advance for anything and it does rather neatly fall into the gov's general plan-tendency-H

-- H (dryfarmer@hotmail.com), February 24, 2000.

H:

I don't think you can properly lump all those reports together. The CIA and Navy are paid to be paranoid -- to anticipate all possible dangers. In a sense, the organizations *themselves* are contingency plans! I'd be concerned if intelligence and defense organizations did *not* exaggerate problems, at least until they have damn good reason to dismiss them.

The political stuff is different. The GAO is a partisan arm of the Congress, the mirror organization to the OMB on the administrative side. These two see eye to eye when the same party controls both, and "find" very different things when opposite parties do.

And in any case, the Senate hearings, if you read them all, were a mishmosh intended to satisfy all constituencies. The TB2K forum extracted the one or two most pessimistic statements from volumes of testimony and represented those sentences as *typical* of the presentations. But those hearings are CYA exercises, so the Senators can say with a straight face that they "considered" all viewpoints. Do some digging and you'll find nobody presented a negative viewpoint (OR a positive viewpoint) unless they had something to gain by presenting that viewpoint, directly or indirectly. That's the essence of politics.

Above all, it should be clear that there was a distinct context for ALL that information, and it was necessary for TB2K, in general, to build a negative case in part by ripping "bad news" out of one context and presenting it in another. This is called "spin".

There was never any significant empirical bad news, but there was a lot of speculation about how things *might* be bad. And around here, there was a LOT of examination of the motivations behind any source of positive news, and NO examination of the motivations held by sources of negative news. And within THAT context, things could be made to look dark indeed.

After the fact, this is much easier to see. Before the fact, anyone who pointed it out was called a troll. So it goes.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), February 24, 2000.

Check a post about oil, 1-18-00 youdon, about how the oil people who mwere having problems.

-- ET (bneville@zebra.net), February 24, 2000.

I'll post my unified conspiracy theory when I have time...but in the mean time, watch for the contrails...they point to the next meeting place of the heptilateral commission...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), February 25, 2000.

So Flint... What do you think might have been a political motivation for the GAO to write the final report they did (the "100 day report" if I remember correctly) with all ITS doom? I never read the full report, but the summary was scarey! Enough so that I made several copies and passed them out to friends. Personnally, I don't think the media ever did pick that one up. The media reports I saw relative to that were much more mild than they could have been.

You said: "There was never any significant empirical bad news, but there was a lot of speculation about how things *might* be bad. And around here, there was a LOT of examination of the motivations behind any source of positive news, and NO examination of the motivations held by sources of negative news. And within THAT context, things could be made to look dark indeed."

This "speculation", was my downfall. I for some reason didn't need emperical evidence. I just needed/wanted to buy insurance based on the "speculation" of doom. (I wonder though, if the guys who were sticking to the "polly" side were still breathing a little sigh of relief on New Years Eve/Day.)

Thing was, I had been expecting God to judge the Nation, (I still am) and thought Y2K was a perfect opportunity for it. The problem seems to be though, that God didn't agree with my assumption on the when or how. Ah, what the heck... I always wanted a generator anyway!

DannyBoy

-- DannyBoy (dannyboy@Iwonder.too), February 25, 2000.

Flint, very good summary

Just some thoughts from a developer to put a realistic slant on y2k: I only know about business software (nothing about utilities):

A lot of money had to be spent simply to trawl the many thousands of programs for possible y2k bugs, then large test harnesses had to be set up for link/system testing. Even before that many sites simply did not have an inventory of their applications.

Some bugs were found that would have been showstoppers, perhaps impossible to fix as a "production" fault. Many trivial (display/format) bugs were fixed or left.Many systems are however heavily date reliant, most have a little date coding.

Older (e.g. cobol) systems were obviously more at risk.

I only know from my experience that if y2k remdiation had not been done in the companies I worked for, there would have been chaos. Whether this could have been fixed on failure, I doubt it very much.

I expect there were many organisations who spent a lot on y2k but didn't find much to fix.

When it comes down to it, only those people working on the particular applications would know the effect of y2k on them.

-- Sir Richard (richard.dale@unum.co.uk), February 25, 2000.

Sir Richard-this is what I wanted to clarify(as a non-techie),that there really was a potential danger and that if nothing had been done, we would have had a large economic mess,at least. Now what about those countries that had neither time nor $ to do this level of remediation? Alot of people feel that this whole thing was a hoax because "nothing much" happened in these places. What about that? And what about what is happening in the oil biz now? A goodly # of refineries down,shortages of fuel oil ,diesel,pipeline explosions and malfunctions. All of this kicking in a week or two after rollover. Coincidence? And some would no doubt say that it is because on this forum mostly just the bad news gets reported and thus all blown out of proportion. That these things always happen and we weren't paying attention before. Hmmm. Alot of this has the trappings of a huge cosmic joke(sorry to go off onto a non tech realm for a moment). Like some I felt that this country has really overextended itself-to the point of where anything goes as long as it can make $. And that the dominant religion is that we are invulnerable,can do whatever we want with no future consequences. And that a y2k event would be the beginning of a payback for that attitude. It shows the danger of trying to judge a technical issue with "what ought to be" eyes. But be that as it may be I am still trying to iron out this apparent contradiction,if there was a real danger from widespread computer malfunction then how come the places that spent little on remediation have not fared much differently than those that did. H.

-- H (dryfarmer@hotmail.com), February 25, 2000.

H:

As I wrote earlier,

[Over time, experience showed that (a) date bugs were trivial to fix; (b) date bug impacts weren't hard to work around or quickfix in most cases; (c) embedded systems had nearly NO functional reliance on dates. So while the problem was certainly wide, it wasn't deep. Kind of like fearing (with good reason) a pandemic, and subsequently finding that the symptoms are mild, don't affect critical physical functions, and recovery is quick. A great relief.]

The point is that fix-on-failure turned out to be viable for most systems, partly because the problems date bugs caused weren't that damaging, and partly because the potentially debilitating bugs showed up in obvious ways and were easy to both find and repair. Hindsight has pretty clearly demonstrated that date bugs were overrated all along.

But it was very predictable (and several predicted it often enough) that after rollover, the determined doomers would comb the world to find any problems they could, rather than admit date bugs weren't serious after all. So what "kicked in" after Jan 1 was some really high-powered selective reporting, creating the impression that problems were unusually common. It's been repeatedly pointed out that all of these problems have non-y2k explanations that are most likely, and none of them show any hint of date bug symptoms.

Like DannyBoy, you seem beguiled by the notion that we somehow "deserved" problems, as some kind of retribution for moral decay or whatever. But as so many said here for so long, computers don't care about speculations or morals. They work or they don't. I suggest three solutions to your apparent contradiction:

1) Date bugs are a lot more benign than was feared. As a class of glitch, date bugs turn out not to be very damaging.

2) The value of remediation is proportional to the date usage of the system. Overseas systems tend to be older and less computerized. Manual operations are *much* more common in most of the world.

3) Our information about overseas systems was badly limited. There was always a sense on this forum that unknown meant broken, and foreign systems were unknown. We really don't know what they faced or what they spent. All we know is that overseas technical people were unworried and couldn't understand why those crazy Americans were blowing it all out of proportion. And with our usual arrogance, we dismissed them as clueless!

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), February 25, 2000.

Flint, you were doing reasonably well so far. But your last post sort of ruined it all.

Your point (1) above concerning how "benign" date bugs were/are contradicts several hundred billion dollars expenditure worldwide (including loss of 0.5% of world GDP by powering down just about the whole wide world for four days) with explicit support from the UN, World Bank, IMF, White House, CIA, FBI, US Congress, Federal Reserve, every central bank in this world, every government in this world, every corportaion in this world, etc.

As per your point (2) above and the "date usage" argument, what about Italy, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan ?? No banks , no JIT & logistics, no social security, no Customs ?? Everything manual ?? Don't kid yourself Flint.

The fact of the matter remains that we (that includes you) do not yet know either the etiology nor the epidemiology of Y2K. Till then, don't be so sure you know what Y2K was/is. Otherwise you'll sound conceited.

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), February 25, 2000.