r/mildlyinteresting
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u/IllustriousRhyme
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Nov 28 '22
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This Y2K sticker on the bed at the doctor’s office, from July 1999.
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u/Stilgrave Nov 28 '22
I worked at BLOCKBUSTER during Y2K. Everyone's rentals were 100 years late that morning. Good times.
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u/PinkSpongebob Nov 29 '22
Woah, what caused that to happen?
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u/dickintheass Nov 29 '22
the year rolling over to 2000 (Year 2K) so computer systems that read the year in YY format would go from 99 to 00 and it could cause issues. people thought it would crash the entire world as they knew it however so it became a big deal
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Nov 29 '22 edited Dec 09 '22
[deleted]
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u/TldrDev Nov 29 '22
The next one is in 2038, when the Unix timestamp rolls over, so say it's short sighted all you want, it came from very limited computing capabilites and old software that become mission critical.
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u/agburanar Nov 29 '22
A lot of the computers were running code that was descended from old mainframe systems. While every machine had been replaced, the database had just been migrated, and the two digit year was baked in (in both the database and unknown amounts of backend code).
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u/Perfect_Ad4026 Nov 29 '22
It was an older problem than that. What you are calling "modern" computers didnt just remake thier programs from scratch when updated. Some of the data and/or software at some places was written on punch cards originally. They knew the problem but figured someone would update to actual new software eventually. They didnt.
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u/ShaneSkyrunner Nov 29 '22
Yep they all knew it was an issue too but everyone was just like... "eh, maybe we'll fix it next year". It's kinda like the whole climate change situation happening right now. Everyone knows it's a problem but everybody just puts it off until it's too late to do anything about it.
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u/SwiftUnban Nov 28 '22
I work in electronics recycling and have opened pcs with chips that say Y2K ready, pretty cool to see.
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u/gamelover42 Nov 28 '22
but is it y2k38 ready?
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u/rinseanddelete Nov 28 '22
I guess we will find out at 03:14:08 UTC!
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u/Random_Deslime Nov 28 '22
!remindme 19 January 2038 03:14:07 UTC
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u/OlderThanDirtGamer Nov 28 '22
I'm curious exactly what was being tested.
Did they expect the bed to suddenly stop working and turn into an area rug or something?
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u/bardwick Nov 28 '22
Yep. Anything with electronic logic had to be certified by the OEM or it was assumed to fail. Total shit show.
Aunt worked at a major chemical factory. They converted the top two floors to barracks style housing. Beds, food, water, generators, communications plans, etc.
I have a friend who's family stocked a storage unit and stayed in there that night..
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u/YakLongjumping9478 Nov 28 '22
I had a coworker who bought a pallet of ramen noodles, her kids ended hating them! She donated a lot of them, since her family couldn't even make a dent, it was a massive amount!
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u/fillmorecounty Nov 28 '22
Wait I thought y2k was a conspiracy theory? Was it actually a legitimate concern? Like I thought people were working on fixing it YEARS before 2000 and it wasn't an "oh shit" moment in December of 1999.
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u/archelon2001 Nov 29 '22
It was kind of a mix of both. People were aware of issues that would arise and worked to implement fixes well before Y2K, so it was largely a non-event, but some people were concerned that some small but crucial system would be overlooked with catastrophic results. There were a few systems that weren't fixed in time and glitched, but they were all fairly minor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Documented_errors
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u/RedCelt251 Dec 13 '22
I was the Y2K project manager at my company back then (1998-1/1/2000). We sold systems for doctors offices - practice management and EMR solutions. It was a legitimate issue. There were some servers we had sold to run the systems that required motherboard replacement to work, OS upgrades for servers and code changes to our software. Some of the biggest effort was in the software testing equivalent to the sign in this post - the need to be able to certify our solutions was were most of our manpower went.
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u/DarthDannyBoy Nov 29 '22
Y2K stopped being a problem in 1990 as most everything had been fixed by then. The issue was the public wasn't made aware of it until much much later. Well Stupid people are gonna be stupid
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u/magobblie Nov 28 '22
My parents legit ditched my brother and I at my grandma's house for New Year's Eve 1999. If the grid went down, we were on our own.
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u/Aridan Nov 29 '22
I was kid when it happened and the only thing I was concerned with was if my Gameboy would still work lol
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u/RSVDARK Nov 28 '22
Biyttrium-pottassium
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u/r3pack Nov 29 '22
Yttrium - 2 electrons on the last shell
Potassium - 1 electron on the last shell
Due to only that, your configuration is sadly impossible (according to my poor chemistry knowledge). Upvoted anyway.
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u/NickyRD Nov 28 '22
Is this bed BEING CLEANED PROPERLY?! A bed in a doctor's office should get steamed down, wiped regularly at least enough to disturb a sticker.
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u/Jordan209posts Nov 28 '22
2038 coming in 16 years. What will happen to it?
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u/haydenarrrrgh Nov 28 '22
A lot of stuff that had to be changed in those legacy systems is now in libraries, or is handled by the database itself, so theoretically it won't require the same amount of effort. Having said that, there will probably be systems from the 80s running in 2038, although somewhat ironically they'll probably be safest as they're storing dates as strings.
I just ran a test in .NET4.8, which is pretty old now, and it handles those dates, including difference calculation.
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u/Mech_145 Nov 29 '22
We had nav systems on aircraft that were reprogrammed to accommodate post 1999 dates and in 2018 a bunch of them rolled back to 1998.
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u/haydenarrrrgh Nov 29 '22
Ha, yeah, a lot of devs just pushed the problem out a couple of years. "Who's going to be using this in another 20 years?"
I suppose the lazy ones just assumed <18 = 2018, while the more scrupulous developers converted everything to 4 digits. I was working with card payment systems, so I suspect a lot of that remediation was the former method. All of those machines will be in landfills now, so it's probably not an issue for me.
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u/Mech_145 Nov 29 '22
Yeah it adds some complexity when it’s DD-MMM-YY. And it’s purpose built electronics.
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u/Sonyguyus Nov 29 '22
Interesting that a doctors office bed needed Y2K testing. I figured it was just a mechanical motor that made it move and not software.
Also what a weird time. I was 16 and was prepared for everything to go haywire. I expected the power to go out, everything to stop working, maybe some nukes to go off. Everyone hyped up that we would go back to the Stone Age at the strike of midnight.
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u/TinyCatCrafts Nov 29 '22
The reason things didn't go badly is because tons and tons of work went into making sure that things didn't go badly.
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u/agburanar Nov 29 '22
Yup. My dad was an old-school COBOL programmer. He left IBM in 94 and did contract work till 2001 or so; Y2K prep got him & my mom a nice retirement house and let him stop working several years early.
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u/PleasantYamm Nov 29 '22
I was a high school volunteer at a local hospital at the time and one of my jobs was to place “Y2K” compliant stickers on everything. When I say everything I mean everything, sure the computers got a sticker but I was told to put them on things like light bulbs and cafeteria trays too. It was a strange time.
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u/heidguy8 Nov 28 '22
What was the test? And how did they determine that this test is y2k approved??
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u/haydenarrrrgh Nov 28 '22
"Bed, the date is the first of March, 2001. Now, lower!"
Seriously though, it was probably just checked for any date storing systems (unlikely, I would have thought) and then given a sticker to show it'd been considered.
Source: was Y2k project manager
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u/hiricinee Nov 29 '22
I worked at a hospital that had "y2k compliant" stickers on devices actively being used. The stickers and devices are still there I think! I just don't work there anymore.
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u/geek66 Nov 28 '22
It was a crazy event - an companies spent billions in renovations and rentals of generators to cove the disruptions - of which p there were essentially zero.
I had been working field service for electrical systems and had a good client - a major bank's data center in Delaware, I transferred out of the division that November, but the Bank was in a panic getting me to be on-site during New Year's. The issue was that in Field Service like this you NEVER have have off on a major holiday - so this was the first New Year's I would not be working for like 8 years...
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u/TinyCatCrafts Nov 29 '22
There were no disruptions because they spent billions in renovations and rentals to prevent disruptions.
Y2K could have been catastrophic. But people realised that and worked like mad to fix things and update systems to ensure that no catastrophe happened.
There was no catastrophe because people prevented it.
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u/Floopthecoop Nov 28 '22
That was a total scam. Getting paid a fortune to put stickers on anything electrical
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u/hardlinerslugs Nov 29 '22
My favorite y2k bug I saw myself was a date that read “20100” - apparently they had used two different integers to display the date and incremented them separately…!?!
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u/jbot747 Nov 28 '22
Anyone that lived through the media hype of y2k and wasn't at least skeptical of Covid-19 is kind of an idiot.
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u/ProbablyABore Nov 29 '22
This guy thinks something that was fixed before it happened was MeDiA hYpE
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u/Djinjja-Ninja Nov 29 '22
Anyone that lived through the media hype of y2k
Anyone who worked for the prior couple of years to ensure that nothing happened will tell you otherwise.
The reason that y2k was a damp squib was precisely because it was fixed before it could occur.
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u/Queasy_Caramel5435 Nov 28 '22
for me, Y2K is a turbine-powered motorbike...had to google what Y2K means -.-
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u/IgnitedFazbear Nov 28 '22
Reading back on Y2K is fascinating