• Jakdracula@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    I worked as a cto in a publicly traded bank in the USA. In the USA, the regulation was that all banks had to have 10% of all deposits in cash. For example, If you were a billion dollar bank, you had to have 100 million in cash available at all times.
    Because of Y2K, there were deep concerns their would be a bank run, so all banks had to have 20% of deposits as cash. Enormous sums of cash.
    On New Year’s Eve 1999, my wife and I were taken by federal authorities to a safe house, where we were heavily guarded. We knew in advance they were taking us, but we didn’t know where and when it happened our cell phones were taken from us. Around 4 am they said everything was ok, my wife and I opened some champagne and they drove us home.

  • valkyre09@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    Y2K is one of those stories we look back on and think what a silly old load of nonsense. Truth is, if it wasn’t for the countless hours of overtime people put in to making those outdated systems support the date change, it really would have been utter carnage. You saw how crazy things got when we started to run low on toilet paper for a few weeks.

  • FarceMultiplier@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    My boss demanded that the whole IT team was at work watching and waiting. I think he bought us a dozen doughnuts.

    Of course, nothing critical happened at all. Some websites showed a date of January 1, 19100. That was all.

    • ZodiacSF1969@sh.itjust.works
      01·
      2 years ago

      Nothing happened because a lot of effort was put into changing vulnerable systems.

      I am old enough to remember Y2K. The media definitely stirred some people up about it, in my experience most people seemed to not be too worried about it.

      But we shouldn’t dismiss the hard work that a lot of people did to upgrade or redesign systems that Y2K could have affected.

      As a aside, I remember that when the clock struck midnight at the NYE party I was at someone flipped the circuit breaker for the house as a joke, turning out all the lights. I remember a few people gasping and wondering what the hell was going on for a few moments until the lights came back on and the prankster revealed himself. Was pretty funny at the time 🤣

  • ritswd@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

    I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      most of the concern for Y2K was actually about old systems. keep in mind, the IRS, for example, still runs servers with COBOL on it today, as their main database. it works, and it’s reliable. They’re far from the only group (read: banks, government agencies, hospitals,) who still do so.

      those systems… they had no idea what would happen and had to figure something out. most programs at the time didn’t actually acount for the first two digits of the year. 1922 and 2022 would have been indiferentiable to those programs. for then-modern systems, it was a simple patch. For the old equipment… not so much…