I was fresh out of college in 1999, and I landed my first job as an IT monkey working on a Y2K readiness project for a major IT company. Said IT company's client was an airline company, so you can bet the company was super fucking serious about Y2K readiness.
My job was basically to assess every piece of software on the network for Y2K readiness and recommend an upgrade in case readiness could not be confirmed. We were looking into software like image viewers or word processors. Now, in retrospect, we all understand that no plane was ever gonna crash if your image-viewing software couldn't handle the rollover... But at the time, there was a distinct sense of "It's probably alright, but there's no way we're taking any chance." It was a case of chaos theory thinking... What if that faulty software was the butterfly's wing that would trigger a hurricane?
Nowadays the popular position is to say that consultants filled the heads of IT companies with stupid silliness until we all got worked up into a frenzy, but I'm not so sure. There had never been anything like the Y2K bug before in the history of IT, so we couldn't know that thing would turn out alright. The nagging little possibility of a catastrophic failure cascade was too horrifying to allow. We had to do it just in case.
When December 31, 1999 came around, I had moved on to another company that was involved in network security for banks. Everyone in the company was notified we were on call for when midnight came around. In the final hours of December 31st, I was serious apprehensive. Surely something would go wrong somewhere... The countdown happened, and then nothing.
Frankly, I expected something somewhere to go wrong. Just a glitch, nothing catastrophic, but there should have been something. Except there wasn't. It was almost a disappointment, in a way. But it doesn't invalidate the idea that they could have gone wrong, and that possibility was intolerable.
I was fresh out of college in 1999, and I landed my first job as an IT monkey working on a Y2K readiness project for a major IT company. Said IT company's client was an airline company, so you can bet the company was super fucking serious about Y2K readiness.
My job was basically to assess every piece of software on the network for Y2K readiness and recommend an upgrade in case readiness could not be confirmed. We were looking into software like image viewers or word processors. Now, in retrospect, we all understand that no plane was ever gonna crash if your image-viewing software couldn't handle the rollover... But at the time, there was a distinct sense of "It's probably alright, but there's no way we're taking any chance." It was a case of chaos theory thinking... What if that faulty software was the butterfly's wing that would trigger a hurricane?
Nowadays the popular position is to say that consultants filled the heads of IT companies with stupid silliness until we all got worked up into a frenzy, but I'm not so sure. There had never been anything like the Y2K bug before in the history of IT, so we couldn't know that thing would turn out alright. The nagging little possibility of a catastrophic failure cascade was too horrifying to allow. We had to do it just in case.
When December 31, 1999 came around, I had moved on to another company that was involved in network security for banks. Everyone in the company was notified we were on call for when midnight came around. In the final hours of December 31st, I was serious apprehensive. Surely something would go wrong somewhere... The countdown happened, and then nothing.
Frankly, I expected something somewhere to go wrong. Just a glitch, nothing catastrophic, but there should have been something. Except there wasn't. It was almost a disappointment, in a way. But it doesn't invalidate the idea that they could have gone wrong, and that possibility was intolerable.