

Ask HN: Was Y2K ever really a threat? - garrettdreyfus

I was wondering if y2k was baseless or real.
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Codhisattva
Absolutely a "threat". There were numerous systems in corporations running old
software in COBOL, and other un-exciting languages. There were numerous
databases with 2 bytes for the year field.

The "threat" is qualified in that these systems would have surely crashed or
produced bad results if un-patched. They clearly needed to be fixed.

Was the threat as dire as alarmists said? Was civilization on the brink? We'll
never know really, because a slew of contractors and developers audited
systems, monkey patched, and upgraded. Problem solved.

~~~
garrettdreyfus
Thanks I didn't live(sentiently at least) through Y2K and your response was
perfect.

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hamgra
Video about the END OF TIME. UNIX time that is, and it talks about the Y2K
issue.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA)

~~~
garrettdreyfus
Thanks that's a great video.

