At the approach of the millennium, there was a lot of awareness raised about the apocalyptic nature of the millennium itself and the millennium bug.
Fears were stoked in people, establishments and governments. Billions were allocated to fight the bug and its predisposing data set up structure in electronic and IT equipment. Even nations without meaningful number of computers and IT systems and support budgeted hefty amounts for the war with the bug.
What was the war with the bug like in your country like and was the hype and the budgeted resources worth it?
The simple answer is that there was no millenium bug and all fears and cries of a melt down of systems ere unfounded. Life went on as normal.
Francis, there was no melt down and those who were in charge then would have us believe that was because the ameliorative measures were effective, the fixes worked.
The only program or device that I have every heard of that stopped working because it was designed for only 2 digit years was one that I had used for many years and continue to use. All I had to do was turn the clock back 20 years: 2018 reads 1998. Whoops, almost time to turn the clock back again. No need to do it on the computer, just the device. The potential was real, but I am the only person I know who had to deal with it. Very few applications then or now process data by date. The program/device I'm referring to was never compiled or re-created for an operating system newer than Windows 95. I have a W95 box dedicated to it. Can anybody guess what it is? Originally devised for Win 3.1, had to send in for the 3 W95 floppies. Plugged into the serial pot. Manufactured for 1 day and distributed for 1 month. Possibly foresaw the y2k problem, 5 years off.
Thanks Charles for bringing your experience here; so the millennium bug hype surpassed the reality.
I actually worked on looking for Millennium Bug problems in a major government computer program. In fact we knew the possibility of a problem was extremely low, but had there been a problem it would have been massively costly so although very low probability the possible high impact made it worth spending time checking. I think one of the problems with researching this is that even if I had found a problem the resulting action would have been a relatively small and simple fix of the program. A fix might simply be to change a single line of code from showing "01:01:00" to showing "01:01:2000" so not exactly headline grabbing stuff.
In reality we didn't find any millennium bug issues but I found a couple of other minor bugs in the system so my time wasn't totally wasted.
I know similar bug searches took place on major infrastructure systems, but for the reason given above there is very little evidence of how much they were needed. It is possible that some were found that would have had a serious impact but due to the simplicity of the fix were never recognised as having prevented a major issue. But if that fix was to government payment systems or major infrastructure then it may have prevented a major risk event occurring.
Unfortunately there seems to be a lack of evidence as to whether there would have actually been major problems. This could be due to confidentiality clauses in contracts, or simply that at the time programmers didn't particularly notice that they were preventing a major problem. The fact that no nuclear plants had their reactor cooling systems unexpectedly shut down on 01 January may have been due to there never having been a problem with their programming in the first place (as Charles mentions above most wouldn't cause a problem even if there is an incorrect date), as the initial programmers had used a four digit year in coding, or it may be that whilst checking the code a programmer changed the date to four digits (or indeed maybe there are some nuclear plants whose system thinks it's currently 1918). I doubt we will ever know.
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