Apocalypse never

[Undertoad]

"Why are you snapping your fingers?
"It prevents tiger attacks."
"But there are no tigers here!"
"It is working!"

Because it's impossible to prove a negative, I can't show that there weren't going to be problems without the panic. There might well have been. I'm saying they wouldn't have been apocalyptic.

Like your situation. MOST WIN 95/98 boxes were not patched for any Y2K problems these OSes had. Luckily, there was a workaround: reboot.

That's it. Reboot! OMG Apocalypse? No!! If you ran Win 95 and didn't have to reboot on a particular day that would be a good day for you!!!

But you have gone to the trouble of *imagining* an apocalyptic result (what if my system was doing something important!) and, that's exactly how this works. Voila apocalypse.

(J'ever talk to those legacy programmers? I knew some. They were doing global search and replace in COBOL code to prevent the checks from being printed with "19" instead of "20" in front of the year. The panic became more costly than the problem when it left the realm of the experts.)

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But you have gone to the trouble of *imagining* an apocalyptic result (what if my system was doing something important!) and, that's exactly how this works. Voila apocalypse.

I didn't imagine my computer doing something important, I knew that computers do important things and that my computer, a "modern" OS with the patch installed for this particular issue, still crashed. It may well have been a driver or firmware issue, rather than OS, but the point isn't assigning blame, it's acknowledging that computer systems are very complicated, and the advice to prepare for some level of infrastructure interruption was appropriate.

(J'ever talk to those legacy programmers? I knew some. They were doing global search and replace in COBOL code to prevent the checks from being printed with "19" instead of "20" in front of the year.

That might be enough for something that only prints the current date, like checks or receipts, and I'm sure there was plenty of that to do, but that would be a dumb solution for anything that stored historical data (1989 becomes 2089?), and would be irrelevant to the real concern - anything that compared dates, and would behave in an unpredictable manner if the comparison came out negative.

If they told you that all they were doing was cosmetic, they were either working only on the simplest of the software, or they were exaggerating the simplicity in order to make fun of the hype.