2012

Y2K was real. I was there. We had to lure practically every COBOL programmer on earth out of retirement to remediate something like a trillion lines of code in all the legacy systems, not to mention some quick and dirty code in higher level languages in process control systems that should not have been there.

Y2K failures had already started popping up in the late 1990s in places like mortgage and drivers license systems, where distant-future dates were calculated incorrectly. I was on the Y2K remediation project for a large state government and it was truly frightening how much code had been written with two-digit year fields. There really were locks on mental hospital wards that were fail-safe and would spring open in event of a software crash, there really were building climate-control systems that would shut down when they couldn't figure out what day of the week it was, there really were online lists of emergency contact personnel routed through printers with embedded software that regarded 2001 as 1901 and wouldn't recognize any updates, and there really were dispatching and distribution systems that would simply crash at midnight on New Years Eve.

I can forgive the IT project managers of my generation, because back in the 1960s it was taken as a given that all existing programs would have to be thrown out and rebuilt every five years. Up until then every new generation of computer hardware/software was incompatible with all existing systems, and in the days of 80-column punched cards finding a way to save two columns was critical. Then OS/360 came out and suddenly everything was downward-compatible. What I can't forgive is the project managers of the 1970s and 80s who carried this standard forward, because they didn't want their project to be the one that had to absorb the cost of the format conversion.

We performed triage on the world's software, and by herculean effort we managed to "heal" all the "red blanket" systems. But plenty of "yellow blanket" systems remained to be healed. In the year 2000:

• My bank never sent me a correct mortgage statement, and according to its mortgage system the year had thirteen months. Its programmers had been busy making sure the ATMs would work.
• My power company did not send out any statements at all for the first six months, and then sent me one in July equivalent to about five years' charges. Its programmers had been busy making sure that the software controlling the generators would continue to function.
• I purchased two cases of diet soda with decomposed aspartame, in cartons with garbled printing in the expiration date fields. The programmers in the pharmaceutical companies had been busy making sure that wouldn't happen with the world's insulin supply.

So don't pontificate about Y2K. You weren't there. You can thank people like me for the fact that it wasn't a disaster, not the short-sighted managers who released all that millennium-incompatible code into production because, after all, then it would just be somebody else's problem. I was the somebody else.

 

One of two things can happen:

1. Financial Crash going back to barter system (No electricity no banks)
2. Asteroid strike which can cause chaos in the area that happened.

My bet is on manmade finacial collapse while Chinese take over Taiwan.

 

And my bet is that you would not be on planet Earth to post then. :bawl: