When you're 100 years old

What would have happened if nobody had averted the disaster, please?
I can't get my head around how it would have played out.

It was many people in IT who worked round the clock to prevent the anticipated 2000 disaster. I remember my husband having to sign a disclaimer of some sort because he was working way over 50 hours a week. Something to do with EU regulations, I think? It was disheartening to hear the dismissive attitudes when it didn't all go wrong, with no comprehension that it only didn't because so many people worked on practice scenarios until they'd covered every possibility.

We have a centenarian living opposite us. He puts his longevity down to getting out and walkin a mile everyday. You can see him out and walking around the village most days.

I have noted this fact and am taking it up myself. I still have 20 years to go.

For yggdrasil, yes, in my working days, I was on several projects where companies had woken up to the fact that just 2 digits for the year would cause a problem (numbers are usually right-justified, so moving say 2001 into a year 'field' (space, slot, storage capacity, etc) would drop the 20, and leave the 01. Which causes problems.

Lots of firms had quite old systems, written when computers were just coming in, and back then, storage space was quite precious, and it likely seemed a good idea to only use 2 digits for the year (I expect nobody who wrote the systems thought they'd still be in use after 2000.

For Left-handed, yes, COBOL was widely used (and still is, for old systems that would cost fortunes to rewrite!). But you miss the point, it's probably not an 'age' field that is the issue, but back in the mists of IBM and ICL time, when disk storage was precious, also the methods for inputting data, it might have been very tempting to only have a 2 digit year in a date -- those writing those ancient systems probably never thought they'd still be in use after 2000. WHY this latest problem has arisen, sorry, I've not read the details. But it sounds like some IT Dept has been VERY careless!

And for FranA - "should have made lots of money at Y2K" - those of us who worked at software houses got no extra payments for that work, it was just another assignment (unless the volume of work required overtime).

The oldest person living in the UK is Ethel Caterham, born 21 August 1909. She’s 114 years old.

GrammarGrandma

My son-in-law's gran will be 110 on 14th May! She is an amazing woman but must have had to contend with this a lot. I join in thanking yggdrasil and her like for saving us from Y2K.

Wow!
Must be the oldest woman in the UK then, if she’s in the UK?

Just thinking - when I worked re a prescribing database online in order to cope with correct dosages re children we used months - not years - obviously something to do with coping with the same/similar issue ?

FranA

I don’t know why the programmers on here are protesting about not getting any credit. If they knew what they were doing they should have earned lots of money. Good software engineers could almost name their own price prior to Y2K.

You misunderstand their point. It is not money they wanted, so much as an acknowledgment that without their work, we almost certainly would have had a meltdown, which could have led to planes crashing out of the sky etc. What they got instead was blanket accusations that they had been crying wolf

I don’t know why the programmers on here are protesting about not getting any credit. If they knew what they were doing they should have earned lots of money. Good software engineers could almost name their own price prior to Y2K.

I was one of those sorting out Y2K too. I really don’t understand why people are still using such sloppy coding after Y2K. It isn’t difficult to avoid the problem.

yggdrasil

Thank you Lynne for that message. I was one of those who spent a long time preventing Y2K and never got the credit we deserved :-))

Me too. I was a system tester and hardly saw my bed for months

There were several minor Y2K problems. I made an appointment with a doctor on the 29th of February. No problem making it, but when I turned up the computer said no such date.

If it’s true then it’s just sloppy programming. I was programming for Companies House in the 1990s and we were using 3-digit codes for age way back then. Most serious programming (back then) was done in a language called COBOL (Common Business-Orientated Language) and in that the programmer specifies how many digits to use for each variable.

My son-in-law's gran will be 110 on 14th May! She is an amazing woman but must have had to contend with this a lot. I join in thanking yggdrasil and her like for saving us from Y2K.

I have the same problem when I have to insert my mother’s DoB. As she’s 104 the computers don’t accept it. As someone said they are going to have to change things as people are reaching 100 n more

I haven't seen this story and, as I'm 94 soon, hope something is done before I get to 100. Or would it be easier if I popped my clogs before then?

Thank you Lynne for that message. I was one of those who spent a long time preventing Y2K and never got the credit we deserved :-))

I read that story and what a gorgeous lady she is!

What an age to get to at 101!

It's good that she's seen the funny side of being branded as an infant!

Y2K was the computer disaster, set to shut down the world at the millennium. To save computing space, they used only two digits for the year - just as in this case, so when the year rolled over to 2000, computer would think it was 1900, which would have had a disastrous effect on those programmes that relied on time. It didn’t happen, so lots of people thought we were all scaremongering. But the reason it didn’t happen was a lot of hard work behind the scenes

Oh I think I get it now.
Thanks.

MissAdventure

What is Y2K, please?
I'm sure I should know, but I don't.

I think it's Year 2000...?

How embarrassing for American Airlines! Why on earth haven't they sorted this before.

Surely most places want four digits now!

It was that thing where we all had a bit of a panic thinking the world (or at least, all our tech) would end at midnight on 31/12/99, as computers wouldn’t be able to compute the date 01/01/00.

People laughed afterwards about us being so naive as to think there would ever be problems. Not knowing that there really would have been if we hadn’t had people like yggdrasil working on it!

What is Y2K, please?
I'm sure I should know, but I don't.

It is exactly Y2K. They have a 2 digit space for the year (ie dd/mm/yy)
That was what was wrong with the software 25 years ago. And the reason the predictions didn't happen was that I and loads of other programmers worked very hard to fix it in time!