Ytwo Kaboom

The thing that gets us about this Y2K business is it defies all the experience we ever had with computers. Murphy is out the window. So is Pareto. Even HofstadtersLaw is blown away.

Where's The Kaboom?

Here it is: http://www.gargaro.com/MaRvInWaVs/boom.wav

See http://www.kiyoinc.com/WRP135.HTM

Some bugs will take more time to emerge than they've been given (I write on the morning of 7th Jan). Eg we don't know whether payroll will be printing bad cheques until the end of the week/month.

One bug I saw mentioned just caused error logs to be listed in the wrong order. It would not show up until something else went wrong, and then it might cause that error to be missed because the report was off the screen. Which could lead to a failure at some point in the distant future.

Mostly I would go for the last option you list: Y2K bugs are just bugs, and systems come out with bugs all the time. Y2K is interesting not because the bugs are severe, but because they all happen at once. -- DaveHarris

You seem to have contradicted yourself. "Some bugs will take more time to emerge" vs "they all happen at once." Anyway, Y2K is more interesting to me in terms of its psychological ramifications. MillenniumFever?. CalendarAnxiety?.

Sure "systems come out with bugs all the time" but TwoHundredBillionDollars isn't normally spent trying to 'fix' them or mitigate their effects.

Are you sure? It seems that far too many man-years have been spent trying to fix equals-in-if category of bugs

  if( x = 1 ){
      ...
  }

or the memory-leak category of bugs. If we convert that programmer time into dollars, what would the total would be, I wonder?

A rough estimate would be that programmers spend about half (?) their time tracking down and fixing bugs ...

Interesting is that we now debate; was there no Kaboom because we spent all that effort fixing, or was all that effort irrelevant because no Kaboom would have happened anyway. I think the first is true, but there is no way of finding out, is there?

Sure there is. Some countries -- ie. Russia -- spent just about nothing. No Kaboom. Small business spent about nothing. No Kaboom. And lots of new bugs were certainly introduced by the fixes. Still No Kaboom. Now it seems likely that many fixes were effective, but if there was a problem on anything like the TwoHundredBillionDollars scale we'd have at least seen a Kabump.

Here's everything I've learned from Y2K: Fear sells advertising.

There were some Kabumps. You just don't hear about many of them. What company would want to expose themselves to public ridicule or shareholder lawsuits by admitting that they'd had Kabumps? I'm (unfortunately) sworn to secrecy about two interesting ones. They'll probably come out over time. -- DaveSmith

There were lots of Kabumps. But they disappeared into the background noise of snafus and fubars. -- JohnCarter

There seems to have been a Y2K Kaboom after all. Throughout most of the year we heard the sound of the NASDAQ crashing as the Internet Stock Bubble burst. -- AlanHecht

Arguably, the bubble burst wasn't caused by Y2K. -- BrentNewhall

But it was a Kaboom (perhaps InternetStockBubbleKaboom?)

And there wasn't a panic because there was so much warning that most people got bored with it. In Australia, the GST did more damage...

One thing was a pervasive dishonesty in the computer industry. Manufacturers of hardware and software sold upgrades, updates, and replacements by saying "our new stuff is YtwoKayCompliant?, and you should ensure you have stuff that's certified so you'll be safe."

One of the curses of my life is that I have way more computers than I need -- my own little personal museum. On December 31st, 1999 while waiting for the big ka-chunk at midnight, I had powered up every computer in the house (those having any kind of time/date tracking) and watched to see what happened.

The only one that did anything wrong was an early PackardBell? 386, made in 1993. It had to be told the date at boot time after midnight, otherwise it thought the year was 1980. The Windows 3.1 file manager running on it couldn't handle the year, but otherwise worked fine.

Every box I had that was built later (1995 and onward) and which ran Windows 95 or later had no trouble. None.

So here you had manufacturers whose stuff had been Y2K safe for years, capitalizing on the fear, and making a point of not mentioning that, oh by the way our 1996 stuff is already okay.

So they had a bumper year in PC sales in 1998, really good in 1999 (what a shock), and by mid-2000 all the projections (based on the last two years of sales) began to break. And they were surprised! They couldn't figure out what had gone wrong!

Yes, sure, there were large software systems that had to be checked for holes, but the fact that the PC makers withheld that their prior 4 years of products were already okay led to dishonest marketing on a grand scale and pointed the gun squarely at their own toes.

Listening to the butt-covering market babble over the next couple of years, I could only shake my head. Idiots. And criminal idiots at that.

I'm glad it didn't affect my life. Oh, wait, it did -- I lost my job and racked up 9 months of involuntary unemployment over the next year and a half.

Oh well, at least no-one else got hurt. -- GarryHamilton

CategoryKaboom?