[Taltarzac725]

Originally Posted by Windguy

Do you have any idea what needed fixing? The old software and hardware encoded the year as just two digits in order to save on the outrageously expensive storage we had at the time. Remember, the software was written in the 60s and 70s when the computers had less processing power and storage than the most trivial of devices we use today. Think about your USB charging brick! Most modern computers come with a million(!) times as much memory as those old computers. Every byte was precious.

So, the software was written in a way that when you wanted to see how much time had passed since something (say, a bank deposit) had happened and just subtracted the two 2-digit numbers. Now, suppose it’s 2020. The date would be encoded as “00” and if your deposit was made in 1990, the time elapsed would have been computed to be -10 years! The software had no way to deal with that and would have crashed.

I’m sure the programmers realized that eventually the software would need to be rewritten, but they knew it would be decades away and the future could deal with it. So, in the late 90s, people saw the train coming towards us and decided to see how big the problem was. They searched virtually all hardware and software to see where years were encoded as two digits and found that it was a HUGE problem.

An additional problem was that the old finance software was usually written in one of the earliest of programming languages, which was called COBOL. Most programmers today write in much newer languages and most of the old COBOL programmers were retired or dead by the end of the 20th Century. It was a struggle getting knowledgeable folks to fix all the problems.

And what did the people, businesses, and government agencies who took on this monumental task get for their long, hard hours and billions of dollars get for their effort? Nothing but derision from the ignorant masses because they actually succeeded in moving that train that was barreling down on us to another track and the disaster was avoided.

If they hadn’t made the effort, people would have screamed bloody murder because they couldn’t get their money out of the bank because the software thought that they wouldn’t actually deposit their money for almost a century even though they made their deposits in the 1990s. People would have insisted heads should roll for not doing something about it.

These people were heroes and should be lauded instead of called cheats and liars. Shame, shame on those ignorant conspiracy nuts who make fun of them.

Thanks for posting that.


There are very real conspiracies but the 2024 solar flares and Y2K were not. The Y2K threat was very real.