While the apocalyptic predictions for the end of the world were completely overblow, the Y2K problem was very real.
It was only because millions of programmers the world over spent billions of person-hours mitigating any potential problems that there was no widespread chaos on Y2K.
Here were likely results without any Y2K mitigation:
- Banks would have likely had many problems due to most still at the time (and even today!) running on very old mainframes. Fancy logging in to see $0 or negative million dollars in your account on Jan 1, 2000? No? Then be glad Y2K mitigation efforts occurred.
- Many nuclear (and other) power plants required mitigation. While the likelihood of causing some sort of meltdown or major disaster was small, with nuclear you know, wayyy better safe than sorry.
- Much of the power grid in general relied on computer systems susceptible to the Y2K bug. Like having power in the middle of winter? Thank a Y2K mitigation programmer.
- Many airlines relied on scheduling systems and software once again on very old computer systems. While widespread crashes were unlikely, having millions of flight schedules discombobulated by computer glitches might be a bit of a problem, don’t you think?
I could go on, but there’s no educating the uneducable.
As in IT, if you are doing your job successfully no one thinks you are doing anything. The systems just run and no one’s the wiser, or even cognizant of all the effort to make that happen.
Perhaps we should have just done nothing on Y2K to shut these fucknuggets up. I hate them so hard it hurts.