Discussion on:

The 10 biggest failures in IT history

1. Only because it was so recent, I think that's why it's so fresh in everyone's mind. I think transitioning people from Vista TO 7 might end up being a failure in the grand scheme when we look back 20 years from now. (See my #5)

2. Yes, it didn't happen, as a separate entity, but it became the foundation for Apple's success in OS X.

3. HA!

4. Don't think it was that big of a deal to make this list.

5. Well, now we have another one upcoming in 2012. At least these "writers", (they're not authors, authors actually contribute to society) that write about things like this (conspiracies) who would otherwise be nothing but a blob on the bottom of my shoe, would have you believe that. (Queue Dan Brown) They're like the AIG of the writing world.

6. Have to agree there, period. Working for a record label gives me an interesting perspective on this as well, and I couldn't agree more.

7. He's like Rush Limbaugh: I've pretty much forgotten about him, until someone brings him up because he said something about someone/something that was remotely controversial.

8. True, but I don't know, WordPerfect was good, but I don't think it could have single-handedly toppled M$. For it to do that, users have to pay attention to what they're purchasing, and who's screwing them.

9. The sky WILL be failling in 3 years! (Uh-oh!) According to idiots, that is. (See #5 above)

10. Telecom, good 'ole American freed-- wait what??? I can't have broaband internet access why? Because they don't want to spend the money to put it out here? WTF!??! @##$#%! What happened to the "greater good"? Oh, right....CHENEY shot it in the woods.

Good list though.

the reason:

fearing the 'end of the world', the government pumped 'liquidity'. i.e. created one new dollar for every 4 in existance in the time period close to 1999.

This grossly distorted the economy with major ramifications, including the housing bubble and subsequent major depression that the economy is now in!

It also encouraged speculations by dorks in the financial and other industries into anything that used cheap capital that would 'last forever'. now these biz are out of biz when capital dried up and special interests have made the taxpayers liable for their 'financeturbation'.

besides causing lots of people their jobs, it cost everyone who is not getting brand new fed$ lots of money. Inflation hurts anyone who can't get a raise to match, and especially those on fixed incomes and the poor.

Way to go, Fed!

A lot of people worked very hard to make sure that Y2K was not a disaster. The problems were there and had to be fixed. Most of the time the fix was trivial, but for some major keepers of databases, the fix required extensive changes to both code and data.

The only thing that could have gone wrong was a few interest calculations for banks that hadn't bothered to update their software for thirty odd years.

Shoot, I've got some old computers with the old software, all pre Y2K panic, all declared as dangerous at the time, I actually had them running over that week, not one of them had a hiccup. Neither did any of the old computer controlled household goods I had.

Simply put, no computer hardware actually used dates in their operations, they used integers that they converted to dates for display purposes. This was also how the majority of software worked, and still works.

Saying the Y2K averted a disaster is like saying changing from leaded petrol to unleaded petrol stop the world from blowing up. Ie. total BS of no relevance to real life.

Y2K was a major money making con job of an ad campaign, and it worked.

I worked on plenty of systems that would have failed had they not had fixes in place. I am not talking about trivial PC crap but serious mainframe database issues.

The issue was software related, and then, only with some old software. It was never, ever going to be a case of all the computers in the world coming to a halt, the way the Y2K Doomsayers said it would. It was never, ever going to be a hardware issue. The vast majority of the software floated through it without any issues at all.

I spent many wasted hours checking systems for Y2K compatibility, many more checking software for the same, only because I was being paid to do it - I knew the systems I was working on had no issues, but the idiots that be said it had to be done as they believed the BS.

One of my friends spent a whole year checking and rewriting a major program that had been written on Cobol back in the early 1970s, THAT did have a Y2K issue as it used data fields that stored two digit years. The mob he worked for had been talking about updating that code for fifteen years before they acted.

The whole Y2K disaster scenario was pure BS, if left to fix when things went wrong, we'd have had a few accounting program crash, and little else. Some countries took no action in advance and had no troubles at all, but then, they had few very old legacy software in their systems to have to worry about.

Yes, it would only have affected a few old accounting programs - like banks, building societies, perhaps some government departments like income tax and social security. Nothing important! But at least Super Mario would have continued to run on your PC, so that's all right.

I can remember getting statements from my bank, many years ago, where the '19' part of the date was printed on the stationery and the computer put the rest of the date round it, which suggests that the date was in fact stored as a two-digit year and not four digits. If that code was still in the core of the program when Y2K rolled around (as was quite possible, as software tends to get added to, tweaked, and bodged, rather than re-written from scratch) then it could indeed have caused a problem.

Yes it was overblown, and a lot of pundits painted a doomsday scenario - the press love a good "End of the world is nigh" story, like Swine Flu, Bird Flu, and Global Warming - but there was a potential problem in some important systems and the reason we can look back on it and say "What problem?" is because a lot of people did a lot of work to solve the problem before it manifested itself in the form of the collapse of the banking industry. We had to wait another nine years for that!

extremely limited too. But that didn't stop people conning people for money to fix it.

Most of the banks affected already had plans to replace the software for totally new versions that were more efficient with the new hardware.

If your friend spent whole year rewritting a program for a y2k problems, how can you cay no problems were found?

Y2K did not happen because we were ready. That is the point. Windows were patched http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-offers-Y2K-patch-for-Win-95/2100-1001_3-223896.html Linux and *nix systems were patched and they still have to patch a lot http://www.linux.org/docs/beginner/year2000.html and so on, and so forth. It did not happen because people were working years in advance fixing problems and the world did not fall apart. Not because your printer was working fine, the problem was not with the new hardware, or software, but the old mainframes with limited ram, so instead of long we had short, to preserve memory space, but I guess you have no clue what am I talking about. If you think that Y2K was not an event, you do not have a clue.

and that's true. The predictions were that ALL computing devices, big and small, would crash and destroy the society. I, and a few others with real knowledge of the hardware and software, said that was BS and some legacy software needed fixing, mostly accounting type stuff - but the problem was a small issue. We were ignored and everyone paniced.

Millions spent checking systems to prove they had nothing wrong with them, just as we said they didn't; a few accounting programs were found to be faulty and would have issues, as we predicted; a few more were shown to have no calculation problems but the display option was changed to show all four year digits the program used, but had previously only displayed two digits.

Out of all the computer systems in the world, only about 30 to 40% of the mainframes and PCs were checked - the majority of the embedded mini-systems were not checked. Yet, no major disasters happened in the countries with lots of computers who did nothing about Y2K.

As a project to correct the massive errors that would create world wide destruction, it was a failure as there were no massive errors, there never was.

Now, if you'd been going on about the 2038 problem, well, there is a real issue that could have wider effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

You check every time you are crossing the street in case there is a buss running towards you. Why don?t you just blindfold yourself and step onto the street hoping nobody will hit you. Only a small number of people get hit by a car, especially in parts of the word that doesn?t have cars on the streets, or even streets. That was Y2K. We?ve checked left and right, we?ve seen the buss moving, we?ve got out of the way and we?ve successfully crossed the street. Not an event if you expected buss hitting us, but still a successful crossing of the street.

Talking to you reminded me of a story from Greek mythology which said that nobody could see Zeus without dying, because they could not contemplate the size of God. It looks like you cannot contemplate the size of Y2K problem that was fixed by people checking and fixing systems that were affected, without dying. That is the reason I will stop talking about this with you, because it obviously cannot get into your head that Y2K was a big letdown because we were ready. Every dollar spent on checking and fixing was spent wisely. I would rather have plain-control system checked and fixed than wait to see if something happened. The same goes for cooling systems in nuclear plants, checkup systems in rocket silos and so on and so forth.

In about 7990 years, there will be a horrible problem with all the 4 digit years. I am losing sleep over it now in preparation.

There was a lot of diligent work done by many people. I remember hearing that a South Korean nuclear plant had a systems failure because of y2k. I am sure that more serious occurrences were prevented due to hard work. Also a number of my former lecturers were paid to change systems they wrote a long time before. The made some serious cash and admitted to milking it for as long as possible. So there is both smoke and fire.

Six months before the big (non)event I was instructed to build a test network and test every piece of hardware and software in use by English schools in Germany and to find fixes for all the issues that existed. There was no need for any fixes whatsoever.

I was having to support hardware ranging (and believe me, this really is the truth!) 286's used for control systems up to the most powerful we had at the time, a P2-400 running Windows NT4. I found absolutely no problems at all! Everything rolled over into the new century without even the smallest of hiccoughs!

Your mainframes mayhave had major issues but believe me, our PC's and x86-based server hardware did not even flinch!

Y2K might or might not have been a major disaster had it been ignored. I'm firmly of the opinion that it was a non-event precisely because of all the checking, testing and, where necessary, correcting/updating that was done.

I simply cannot understand the logic of those who say it was a non-event because they didn't find anything in their particular, teeny, tiny part of the world-wide IT pie. Where does one get the arrogance to say that this was all a colossal waste of time and money "because nothing would have happened"?

Fine, your PCs didn't miss a beat. How can you also be sure that your power wouldn't have gone off at midnight or the respirator in the ECU of your local hospital wouldn't have stopped? Are you willing to always be so cavalier with your life and your society?

Firstly, if the power fails becauuse of Y2k, then I can put that in the catagory of "not something I can control".

I can also say I KNEW, because I had run EVERY hardware platform and EVERY software package through the time change several times. I was using managed and unmanaged environments, Windows operating systems from DOS6.22 to Windows NT4 and NOTHING untoward happened.

I am not saying that nothing COULD have happened. I am saying that IF something went wrong, then it was the result of something well outside of my own control.

There's no doubt there were serious issues, but the media hyped it so bad that people built bunkers in their backyard and prepared for the end of the world. I think the media should be accountable for it. At the very least, they should compensate the people who reacted in accordance with the media hype. These poor people still think the news is actually "news".

The media should have bought back their bunkers and survival supplies at the price they paid. Also, they should have forced Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, 80% of CNN and Fox news into these bunkers and locked the door forever.

Truth is subjectivity, but the news is turning into complete punditry and advertisements. Look at the Today show -- 90% of the program is an advertisement for GE subsidiaries and friends. The actual "news" is 60 seconds of Ann Curry reporting some facts that are also a bit distorted. Yet it is considered a "news" program.

The problem is that hype generates viewers and ad revenues, at the expense of the people who are screwed out of business when people "bunker up". That 2000 NYE was pathetic -- airlines and hospitality took the losses at the media's expense. I also remember a few media-fueled terrorism scares that emptied the streets of large cities during holidays. This was just on the heels of the .com recession.

I think there needs to be a disclaimer before, during, and after 80% of news casts, that this really isn't news. It's a melange of facts, opinions, and facts that happened, but aren't that important in the grand scheme of things. Maybe they should just get Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell to host these, and it can all be some Paris Hilton Jon and Kate plus 8 orgy of psuedo-news. Throw in the occasional case of the cute white girl getting abducted, and you'll get viewers!

I bristle when I hear people say there were no Y2K problems. I personally worked on problems that would have affected everything from manufacturing to welfare systems to airline ticketing and maintenance systems, and yes, financial systems that would have failed if the code had not been corrected. The results would have ranged from trivial (wrong royalty payments to athletes) to serious (wellfare recipients not recieving payments) to catestrophic (airline maintenance schedules being wrong or inaccessable). Anyone who says there were no significant problems is just plain ignorant, and I agree that Y2k was one of IT's biggest successes.

Y2K was the greatest correction of past sins in almost 2000 years...

In the early part of the 1990's disk storage was selling for $35-$40 per MEGA-byte. Today the cost is in the range of 8 to 10 CENTS per GIGA-byte. No longer do we need 6 digit dates to save storage space. So when Y3K comes around, we will all be ready.

Y10K could be a problem though...

...within a few hundred years, Earthlings will not be concerned about money, as technology will allow--and attitudes will direct--people toward the pursuit of knowledge, rather than financial gain. Therefore, everything will be free, and "things" in and of themselves will essentially become unimportant and 3YK or later won't matter.

But who's going to freely mine for metal for the pursuit of knowledge?


I came up with my own monetary system that I think works better. Instead of being paid to do work, when you do work you are given pay.

Example:
You want house renovations? You hire someone to do it, they get their money, but you didn't give it to them, its based on the value of the work. The only things that COST money would be consumables like food.
Basically you earn money by doing work.
But I, for example, wouldn't pay someone to renovate my house, they would earn their pay by doing the renovations.


Hmmmm, still not making sense?
How about like this.
I go to work and earn $50. The people renovating my house earned $100 from doing so. But I didn't pay them, they just earn it. I can then spend my $50 on a steak or something. They can do the same with their $100.
The idea being that society would become helpful rather than greedy.

OK. So someone gets $100 for renovating YOUR house. Lets say that there is a pool of available renovation time in a 50 mile commuting radius of your house. Not everybody can drop what they are doing and contribute to this pool. Some people are unable to renovate. Somebody has to build cars, teach children, sell groceries, fight fires or whatever, so they are already committed and if they all start renovating, then these other services will not be addressed. So, say everyone keeps doing what they are doing.

So the pool of renovation hours available is fixed, and really would only be expanded if the pay was better so people who do this would have incentive to do more of this (overtime) or some of the teachers/grocers etc. would have incentive to moonlight.

How does YOUR house get selected to be the recipient of enough of these limited hours to get your project done? A lottery system, perhaps? Say you get a bad lottery number and your house is slated for renovation in the year 2023, but you have twins on the way in 6 months? Now what? Maybe a black marked develops and you bribe some of these renovators to moonlight on your project ? oh crap, I just got back to the system we were trying to avoid. Let?s not do that.

So you have to somehow acquire money to pay for these renovations, since there is not unlimited labor time and materials to go around for everybody who would like to have something done to their house this year (and who wouldn?t, I know I would).

There are really only three ways to acquire money:

1. Develop a skill that is prized in the marketplace that affords income, hopefully above average income (IT pros mostly fall in this group)

2. Find a need in the marketplace and fill it (entrepreneurs and most small business owners fall in this group)

3. Screw over large amounts of unknowing people by small amounts that they might not notice and get enraged, or in ways that they can?t do anything about anyways (government contractors, industries with lots of lobbyists, wall street).

Most of your pay inequity and greed issues are due to the unfettered, under regulated activities in #3. Your ?do stuff and money should appear? concept doesn?t help with #1 or #2 and doesn?t address the relative worth of activities question. I mean, should an hour of a store clerk?s time really be compensated the same as an hour of a dba?s time? How do you know? Oh yeah, the MARKET lets us know!

Resources problem would be solved by planetary travel.

I'm all for free speech, but yelling fire in a crowded theater is not legitimate. I think the media has gone out of control -- too many news channels, too many over-caffienated pundits with a glorified English degree and no common sense. Y2K was a media monster -- they created it. The underlying problems were there, but were minor and were fixed. The global recession was greatly exacerbated by the media. They didn't cause the banks to fail (we have "clever" derivatives to blame for that), but the media beat the **** out of this story and convinced the public they would all be unemployed. Where I live, the 2001 .com bust was WAY worse than this current recession. Everyone I knew was unemployed. There were (are?) some serious problems with banking due to whittling down regulation, but the media told people to stop spending money. Every news story told people they were going to be unemployed and lose their house. So more people stopped spending, and it really happened. So much of a macro-economics is based on consumer confidence, and the media destroyed this. I personally feel GE and other media moguls did this in order to aquire other companies on the thrift.

Now there's 2012. The devil is going to arise, the book of revelations, blah blah. I'm not a Christian, but the media (even the "legit" media) is starting to pay attention to this. I don't think that because Kerry King from Slayer has his own custom Marshall head, it's a sign of the apocalypse. But you even have professors like that oddly named Bueno de Mequisto fellow saying there is legitimacy to the 2012 "apocalypse".

Ahh, the media. I love the first amendment, but they really do yell fire in a crowded theater. So many people lost their jobs when the media convinced people to stop spending money. The crisis wouldn't have been as bad if we didn't have 50 24 hour news channels and pundits with their hammy journalistic style giving more opinions than facts. I think we need to re-classify "news" and "punditry" and label these. Most news channels like Fox and CNN are punditry and not news. The best news is public radio and TV. I never saw Jim Lehrer hyperventilating about the economy or telling people to stop getting their car washed and do it themselves. His job is to report the facts, and not distort the truth. The media makes me sick, and Y2K was another over-caffienated media meltdown.

Editing this -- how could I forget the Swine flu? The media is up to their old tricks of generating hype to generate more viewers. In the process, people with low risk for mortality are hogging the vaccine, and people with high risk can't get it. At the local children's hospital, even transplant recipients can't get it. 60 minutes did some decent coverage of this, and said for 99% of people this is just the flu. The reason their high school football player got it so bad, was his doctor gave him some medicine to control the symptoms (reduce the fever). The fever was controlling the infection, and after that he got even worse. Most of my doctors tell me, when I am sick, I'll get over it faster it I don't take too many OTC drugs. Again -- advertising and hype make people (even doctors) think that cold/flu medicine CURES colds and flus. No, it reduces the symptoms -- the symptoms are what your body does to get rid of the cold. I can see if you have a 104 fever, it needs to be reduced before your organs cook. But the fever makes the body inhospitable to the infection. So if most interal medicine/GP level physicians weren't so willing to placate patients with OTC's, I think less younger people would be on the verge of death with this. If anything, they should be given anti-virals. Root cause... But I digress. The media has turned the Swine flu into a fiasco, and because of that, people who need the vaccine aren't getting it, because people who don't need it are scared by the media into thinking they need it.

In short, they're yelling fire in a crowded theater. What they do hurts people -- it kills kids, it ruins people financially, it scares the crap out of people and they end up digging bunkers in their back yards and spending thousands of dollars on survival supplies. I wish everyone took the sociology of crime class I took at college. I learned how even though crime is decreasing, people's fear of crime is increasing due to media saturation. The world has never been a safer place than now, yet people think armageddon is on the horizon. Why? Because "the news" tells them. It's not news -- it's distortions and manipulations. Noam Chomsky is pretty much right on with his analysis of the media -- it's corporations who own it and use it to control and manipulate people. Not just Fox news... CNN is pretty bad too. Look at what CBS did to Dan Rather! (Sorry Tech Rep, I know you are a CBS company, but they suck). Go ahead and watch a mainstream network newscast, and then watch BBC or PBS. Where's the stories about the abducted white girls on PBS? Oh, they don't cover that because that's not really news... It's just a way to generate outrage.

Presumably the good people of Junee are being serviced well, but I would be wary of any IT consultant who displayed such a stunning ignorance of IT history.

I would also take issue with Jack's inclusion of the Y2K issue on a list of IT failures. Y2K was actually a stunning IT success. A problem was foreseen, assessed and rectified before it caused significant damage - if that is not a success, then I don't know what is.

It always amuses me when people talk about what a non-event Y2K was. To me it seems like fixing a hole in a bucket and then complaining that the bucket didn't end up leaking anyway, so why did I waste my time fixing it?

Your assessment is lucid and logical, which I can only assume, is the reason no one has replied

I agree with you. Suppose you have 200 construction workers inspecting a levee for leaks, because an impending hurricane is coming. Only a few small leaks are found and they are fixed immediately. Is the labor spent by the 200 workers considered to be a waste of time? Hardly.

The common phrase "better safe than sorry" is a common phrase for a reason.

to eat, sleep, and go to other places to do work, leaving participating in forums until we have time away from other things.

Heck, there was a period in October when I didn't get to TR for two weeks - so a few hours delay doesn't prove anything.

Also, all the people who claim it was a resounding success have not yet proved lists of major hardware non-accounting software that was proven faulty and would cause death and destruction as was presented to justify the trouble.

A few accounting programs needed fixing, hell, I said that right at the start. But not all needed to be fixed as they didn't all have the problem.

Relax, the comment wasn't meant to put natural disaster and digital disaster on equal ground. My point was that the preventative measure was taken and reduced the damage. Besides, in the digital world of today, I challenge you to find anyone that doesn't find even the most remote possibility of significant data loss to be a very very important concern.

"It's a few of accounting programs." Perhaps, but obviously the rest of the IT community saw it as a credible enough issue that it warranted action on a large scale.

.

the push at the time was that the hardware and software of ALL computer system would fail, that's what was claimed and why the push to have everything checked. Anyone with any real hardware knowledge at the time said the PC hardware was no trouble and there may only be some trouble with older mainframes. Those with real software knowledge pointed out that the only trouble would be with some accounting software with legacy two digit year dates that stored the year as an actual data field, and maybe a few other similar issues. Their words were drowned out by the panic merchants who claimed every computer system would fail.

Well, millions were spent, about 40% of all the computer systems were checked and found to be perfectly all right and never needed checking. A few software packages were found to have faults, mostly inherited from legacy code. No problems occured amongst the many more millions of computer systems that were never checked.

As a major IT project, Y2K was a con job. It was only ever a minor issue and should have been dealt with as such. Most computer systems around the world were NOT checked or validated.

In effect, the great effort to fix the MAJOR world catastrophe problem of Y2K was a failure. Mainly because it was to fix a non event, that's why nothing happened, nothing was going to happen in the way it was claimed it would.

Most computer systems around the world dont have the amount of automation of first world countries

And secondly, they dont have the higher standards or lower risk that we're used to.

They cannot be used as a basis for comparison

I was the Y2K Program Manager for a fairly large (1 billion annual revenue) company.

This company lived and died by dates.

If you think accounting systems aren't important, they why did my company fire the CIO and a few directors because they messed up on an upgrade to the accounting system, and the company could not send out any bills for 10 days. The CFO had to get a loan of $40 million just so we could stay in operation. Thank god that upgrade wasn't part of my scope as it had started a year before I arrived.

Yes, the company went through Y2K without a major incident. But the number of things that would have gone wrong if we had done nothing was truly monumental. Everything from billing systems, to embedded systems in sorting machines, to the PCs used to control the security systems, to the PCs we provided our customers to send orders in.

In short, if we had done nothing, that billion dollar company would have been on its knees, and that billing problem would be only one of a number of equally tough issues.

I had people swear to me that the systems they built would be fine. I proved many of them wrong. I had a consultant who had written a program in 1998 guarentee his code would be fine. I wished I had bet him some $$.

I earned my keep those years and more. We worked hard, spent money and solved many problems. And I others at some of our competitors and customers who did the same.

Did we all trumpet our successes? No, if the public knew how messed up our systems had been, they would have less confidence in us.

James

to sit back and do nothing or assume minor blips in the accounting software.

IT does not work that way. You dont wait for the problems to occur, then go fix them. That strategy would've 'brought the company to it's knees' as you so succintly point out.

Even companies plan for year-end do so to ensure a smooth transition.

One company I consulted with, reminded their staff with a flash message every morning when they logged in :
" It's (xxx-1) days to 2000. Are you ready yet ? "

"You dont wait for the problems to occur, then go fix them."

... unless it's your system security; then it's all about "but we haven't been effected by that yet".. hehe.. had to share the irony.

Picture a lion being pecked to death by a million sparrows. In 1997, I fixed lots of small Y2K bugs in apps for a design-and-manufacturing company. Simple fixes for small problems, all found and fixed early. If these were overlooked until Y2K, the company would have been struck with enough small problems to cripple its operations for weeks. Multiply this by a zillion companies, and you've got global gridlock.

I personally lead Y2K projects at two multi-billion dollar corporations and these companies would have had many serious problems if corrections were not made in advance. No one has mentioned the fact that indeed there were failures, but who would want to own up to these problems and be openly criticized? So, these problems were quietly corrected without fanfare. I know some of you are aware of this.

You're an IT consultant and you're making remarks such as this? !

"Simply put, no computer hardware actually used dates in their operations"

What level of understanding do you actually have of computers? The statement is incoherent and wrong.

Hardware doesn't make use of dates.
It's the software that does.
And the issue is how the software uses the dates and how those dates are represented.

Dates can be represented in hardware using a real time clock chip, and many of those chips used two digit years.

So there definitely was a significant risk that any software reading out a two digit year from a RTC chip may have a problem and fail at the transition from 99 to 00.

And the dates can be generated in software without using a RTC chip. The issue is still then how those dates are represented.

You say dates are represented as integers, and that is often true. Many variables are implemented as integers, and if we're talking PCs then that typically is a 16bit word size. 16 bits is large enough to represent a 4 digit year. However on some microcontrollers and languages, the integer size is 8 bits, in which case there is a problem: 8 bits isn't large enough to hold a 4 digit year.

And the issue is also to do with, fundamentally what the software does with a 16 bit integer, the application may still only represent the year using two decimal digits despite the fact the data type is can represent a 4 digit year.

So saying there was no problem, shows a complete lack of understanding of the issues involved.

I worked in the run up to Y2K on a nationally important system for the British Government, external consultants (of which I was one) was brought into to track down and fix any date related issues, and the there most definitely were.

The reason there was no problem when Y2K came about was because of the amount of work people put in to fixing the issues.

Also, without testing the applications and systems, it would have been impossible to say what effect the transition from 1999 to 2000 would have.

Undoubtedly, there will be systems which only represent dates as a two digit year that the transition would have no impact on at all, but do you want to just assume prior to Y2K that this would be the case? !!

The risk of systems failing was very high, and the consequences serious. To make such an assumption would have been extremely foolish, so the prudent approach would be to investigate and fix the date related issues.
And this is what happened.

Your comments are complete naeve.

I did a lot of those changes myself. Some very old Mainframe systems would have failed. Most of the fixes were in place well over a year ahead of time, that is why it was so low impact on the "day after".

less than 1% of systems that needed to have their software fixed because they were based on old legacy code with the two digit year dates and stored the data in date style data fields. Lucky you.

It was never ever going to be the major world disaster the Y2K proponents claimed it was.

If that 1% of systems had included things like the Bank of England, or the Federal Reserve, or the Dow Jones, or individual banks like Barclays or HSBC, or even things like missile systems, then it could have been a major world disaster. It would have been no use saying "It's less than 1% of the systems" if the stock market has gone into a bigger crash than in 1929, the banks have lost everyone's account details, and the Pentagon computer is lining up automated responses to imagined incoming attacks!

central banks (BTW, from memory, I think most central banks had already replaced all their software before the Y2K scam started, for other administration reasons) there would never have been the planes falling out of the sky and the nuclear power plants exploding, the way the Y2K conmen claimed they would.

edit to add

If those in charge had listened to the people with real tech knowledge, they would have spent about 2% of the money wasted on Y2K and resolved it all within six months by concentrating on the areas where it was really an issue - the older accounting software, and having every check on the history and age of their control software.

Do you work for Gartner? They don't understand non-business computers either.

There were some new programs that used 2 digit years. I had installed a script on a website that used them. I suspect that some sysadmins had scripts that used 2 digit years.

It's laziness, and a desire to have the data look like the presentation, that is the problem.

By 99, most serious programs were being written in languages that had date libraries that used the system's time. VB, I think, even had dates in the syntax. They were not going to fail.

There were still people doing things the old and simple way though. Maybe you'd take some input that looked like "5/20/98", and just add 1900 to 98.

Or they'd just store dates as text.

displays, the underlying data field was either an integer using the system's time or were stored as a four digit year, but only displayed two digits. That was the situation with the great majority of all the software examined.

A specific example..The University of Maine ran Y2K tests on its infrastructure systems. Lo and behold, when they tested the date change, the steam plant system for the entire campus shutdown. Let me see, UMaine, no heat, January 1st. The fix was finding retired programmers who could remember how to rewrite the code. I'd say the implementation of the Y2K fixes was a resounding success.

into a heating plant management software in such a way as to be important to the operation of the plant. The great majority of such plants around the world had no troubles, but not all were totally controlled by computers with such old control software.

If things had been left for the plant to fail, no one would have died over the incident. Isolated issues like this and the accounting software did NOT justify the many millions spent in the Y2K panic of the late 1990s.

People die every year in the northeast from not having fuel to heat their homes. What's the basis for your statement that this wasn't life-threatening?

Also, saying that the date shouldn't have been coded that way isn't an argument that there was no problem. There are STILL a lot of old systems out there that don't get replaced because they continue to work. If this was a problem at a large university in a developed country, you have to assume there were even more in poorer areas.

with Y2K issues outside of a few accounting programs. I wonder if some issues were just coincidental or not.

As to people dying from not having heating fuel, the ones I've heard of have been they died because they had the heat off for a number of days, not minutes or hours.