[Shop-talk] Was Y2k real: was everybody OK with Covid-19?

[Arvid]

I also worked in health insurance IT around Y2K.

There appeared to be two ways to fix it. One was to extend all date fields to accommodate the century. The other was to leave the date field as is and add logic where it was used to "do the right thing". It was assumed that most people were not over 100 years old so birthdays were assumed to be in the century appropriate for someone under 100. 01/01/00 was assumed to be in 2000, not 1900. Same way with dates of service, etc. ... assumed to be within the last 10 years.

Still took several years to go thru all the code that had been written over the last 20 years to get everything tested and working. All the effort turned it into a non-event.

Note that it will probably happen again with Y2K38 when the Linux epoch date rolls over but I am quite certain that will be somebody else's problem ;-}

On 3/17/20 10:35 AM, Mark Andy via Shop-talk wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> As someone intimately involved with Y2k back in the day...
>
> The software systems I worked on would for sure have broken with any dates > 12/31/1999.  Now, those systems were all health insurance related, so unlikely to cause everything to just shut off, but I would imagine billing systems for utility companies issuing shut off orders for lack of payment, etc. etc. would also have been affected.
>
> I don't think the world would have ended, but there was legitimately a year or so of necessary work to make Y2k not being a thing that actually happened.
>
> FWIW.
>
> Mark
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 9:37 AM Jeff Scarbrough via Shop-talk <shop-talk at autox.team.net <mailto:shop-talk at autox.team.net>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 9:33 AM Donald H Locker via Shop-talk <shop-talk at autox.team.net <mailto:shop-talk at autox.team.net>> wrote:
>
>         One problem that we will run into is that if the
>         measures are sufficiently effective, we won't have a catastrophe, and
>         many people will complain, "Well, that was all for naught!" and won't
>         want to take appropriate measures next time.
>
>
>     Like Y2k.  I'ts never been clear to me how much of the lack of catastrophe was due to overhype, and how much was due to a bunch of people buckling down and fixing it before it was a problem.
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