15 years since the Millennium Bug

[colinrobinson]

By 2000 you'd have missed the boat. Part of the drive for the implementations of SAP was that it was one way to ensure the bug didn't manifest. The rates pre-2000 for SAP were twice what they were afterwards. The contracts were few and far between, and very dull maintenance type stuff. Investing in training has never been a good way of getting into SAP - customers demand experience.

That would explain why i only did 1 sap installation an activeActive SQL Cluster hosting several SAP modules.

[Pondlife]

First proper job on a SAP implementation team from 98 to beat the bug. Rennes, Ghent, Gothenburg, Saarlouis (DE), Wissenbourg(FR) all in 2 years.

[stek]

We were unaffected as we used VMS. Still tested it though although that was another team.

Still had to come in though on 2 hour shifts (I think it was 2 hours). I was contracting and the rumoured super-overtime never materialised, in fact, we worked out the lasses behind the bar on the local were on more than us that night.

So I spent that night partly on a Nuclear Power Station, then watching the fireworks going off in town from my living room....

[NickFitz]

Around 1986, a friend was working on a system running on a couple of PCs to gather data from the hardware that weighed slaughtered pigs in an abattoir - the pigs were slung up by the hind legs on a kind of monorail affair, slaughtered, cut open and their guts emptied out, then travelled over the weighing mechanism mounted up on the monorail that sent the data over a serial link to his system in a small room to one side. A pig every three seconds, IIRC.

One evening he was talking about his latest work on the system, grinned broadly, and said "Tell you what, I hope they're not expecting to be running this thing in fourteen years' time, because they're in for a very nasty surprise when the year ticks over to 2000!"

He'd raised the issue, but it was dismissed as just one of those weird things nerds babble about by his seniors.

So at least some developers did actually anticipate this stuff well in advance, but doing anything about it was considered out of scope by whoever was managing things.

And as Sainsbury's and the other supermarkets supplied by the abattoir continued to sell pork in the early days of 2000, one can only assume that his system was either no longer in use, or had been suitably patched.

[Platypus]

We were unaffected as we used VMS.

Wrong! Although VMS was not affected, there are (were) plenty of lazy programmers coding 2-digit dates into data files.