this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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@CEOofmyhouse56 @TinyBreak I can remember working bloody long hours for >36 months to make sure they didn't stop working
Thank you
Me too. Was in the insurance industry at that point, working on a mainframe set up in the 1970s. Two digit year field across much of the system, but not all of it. No julian dates. Many many jury-rigged subsystems in 4 different programming languages to cope with all the different kinds of policies. Payments to be credited properly across 7 time zones and 3 different currencies from a myriad of banks etc. There was a real possibility that everything would re-set to 1900. But we got it right and got it done on time and fairly close to budget. Then the general public laughed and said Y2K was a hoax.
@Thornburywitch heh.
Yup, same - Thomas Miller in London (marine mutual insurance). Reasonably coherent code base (entire back end on AS/400, all business logic in RPG, COBOL, or SQL) But the code base was large, all data at rest & all decision logic coded with 2-digit years... And yeah we got there somehow, and woke up tired & hung -over to headlines about how the problem was exaggerated.
If we survive global warming by rebuilding the entire global economy on renewables it'll be the same.
All too true. Happily someone else's problem from my perspective having moved on to another industry.
@Thornburywitch I still work in tech but not at the code face anymore so yep, very happy to SEP it :D