Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 21, 2024

Today’s background music: “1999” by Prince.

I was there. it almost happened

I was thinking this sounds like what was predicted for Y2K as I read the strip. I’m glad Pastis went in that direction.

Jesus was born 25 CE, so next year is 2000 AD.

I’m a programmer… and ended up tasked with being sure that our products were “Y2K compliant”… in the course of which, I did quite a bit of research about what could possibly go wrong. MOST of the important fixes simply kicked the can down the road by deciding that any two-digit year less than 50 would be in the 21st century, any greater would be in the 20th (so ‘87’ would be 1987 but ‘12’ would be 2012). Simple. Robust. Fast. And of course, long term wrong, but it gave them another 50 years to fix it.

Spouse (who worked in a hospital) and I stayed awake until after midnight at her work area to be sure. Not a twitch.

BUT: If people had NOT fixed things up, all those worst case issues might indeed have happened. Good thing humans are willing to fix problems when there’s almost no time left to make the fix.

CrowdStrike just made it a reality….

Welcome to Y2K

That’s some wise shît, coming from Rat.

To recap, the issue was that the year 2000 was a leap year, unlike 1900 and 2100. What I wondered at the time was, how many programers knew that 1900 and 2100 were not leap years, and how many of the ones that did know also did not know that 2000 was a leap year. The ones who didn’t know did the right thing automatically. Namely, nothing different at all.

My business insurance company sent a one-question questionnaire that said “does your company have a plan for Y2K?” Didn’t ask what the plan was, just did I have one. I thought, “when in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” I checked the “yes” box, and mailed it back.

Pig, after that, I think you need to look at one of these {•\•}

My cousin is/was a software creator at the time. I asked him if I should really be worried, and in return he asked me if I knew how much money major electrical companies etc would lose if the systems went down completely for a single day, let alone the weeks/months people were prophesying. “There’s no way they’d let that happen,” he said, and yet he himself bought “survival rations”, bottled gas and water, etc.Here in Europe, we simply carried on and AFAIK nothing happened. The assumption that major corporations etc would leave it alll to the last moment was crazy.

Back in 1999, I was working as an ad designer for a major newspaper, one of the businesses I designed ads for was the Y2K store. They sold survivalists items, they were pitching quite the doomsday scenario. When 2000 arrived they were the only business that folded!

It was well behind schedule and incredibly over budget, but the Y2K bug was finally delivered late last week.

I know it’s a coincidence, but it’s interesting that this strip comes so soon after the tech outage that disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals, libraries, and a host of other companies and institutions around the world. That just shows how dependent on technology we have become, and what can happen if that technology fails. Fortunately, the Y2K bug was, for the most part, fixed before anything serious happened. Next on the agenda: the Y2K38 bug (aka Y2038 aka the Epochalypse).

I remember the hysteria surrounding the Y2K bug. My wife and I welcomed in the New Year 2000 by jokingly dancing to Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” we played on the stereo.

The Y2K bug caused someone to have a multi-million dollar late fee for a movie they rented from Blockbuster (the good ol’ days!) Now we have only AI to worry over….

There always was and will always be something to think/worry about … Just like Y2K … AI … Get over it and move the ball forward … Croc Power ;-)

I spent NYE 2000 at the house of a friend who believed all of the Y2K scare stories. He was actually disappointed when midnight came and went and nothing happened.

Well it certainly Azuring such widespread tech chaos is no happen.

A week-or-so before Y2K, I set my computer to 12/31/1999 and 11:55pm. And watched it turn over to see what would happen. It just went to 1/1/2000, 12:00 and nothing happened. So I knew it was going to be okay. I still spent that New Year’s Eve in church, though.

But a coming technological singularity IS a real problem. Intelligent machines with the ability to reproduce themselves and improve their own programming. And we need to figure out what to do about that before it happens.

It could also leave us fearful of the future instead of living in the moment.

We had won some tickets to a gala, including a couple of nights stay, so we partied our way into the new year. I wasn’t overly concerned. I was a PC tech at the time and couldn’t see anything critical happening. But I had a flashlight in my coat pocket. You know, just in case…

I was really young during the Y2K thing, so I never got into the hype.

It was late October, 1999, and we had been working furiously for eighteen months preparing for the upcoming millennium. I was IT Director and the home office had sent an auditor to our location.

She came to my office and asked “How are you doing with Y2K?”

I looked her in the eye and, with a straight face, said “Y2K? What’s THAT?”

The look on her face? PRICELESS!!!

In 1999 I had a programming consulting gig at a major bank (COBOL, CICS, IMS, DB2, and a little BAL) not specifically for Y2K. The higher ups were convinced by a company that they had a magic program that would parse source code and generate the necessary changes to assure Y2K compliance. Before we complied the programs into the test system (Yes we actually tested changes before moving them to production) the boss asked me to look to see if the changes were OK. About 40% of the changes were unnecessary or flat out wrong. Their magic software found a field in one program labeled “YR” and made a change to it. That field had nothing to do with YEAR. Their software also failed to remove code that tested a two digit year to determine century and it didn’t change screen layouts from two digit year to four digit year. And it changed year fields that were already four digits to six digits. After I presented my findings and the team had a bit of a chuckle the boss asked me to make the correct changes as necessary. Files and Databases were fine as they were already storing dates in YYYYMMDD format. The changes involved displaying four digit years on screens and the fields in the programs related to the screens and to remove century determination code. The system was compliant by June 1999.

Does anyone here remember the panic back in the 70s over the Jupiter effect?

You’re way behind on those times, Pig.

Never let a crisis go to waste…

Now we have windows 11 looming on the horizon.

“The sky is falling….The sky is falling!

On a micro level, however, AI has already denied my spouse a necessary cancer treatment via Humana’s “bot” decision-making. So there’s that.

The Environmentalist mindset.

The reason catastrophe didn’t happen is that tens of thousands of programmers and billions of dollars were spent to prevent it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Of all the commodities the world has to offer, fear is the biggest seller

“Never fear! The World’s Programmers are here to save the day!” ☺

Since I was born in ‘40, does that mean I haven’t been born yet and get another go-round starting in 2040? As Ahnold said, “Ah’ll be back”.

I would not be surprised if these were actual things they were saying in 1999.

I would have expected pig to be more inciteful, not rat…

key word was “could”.

A lot of people are into fear mongering.

Welcome to Earth, kids. Now before we learn our A-B-C’s, you need to know that there are hundreds of nuclear bombs in the world, any one of which can kill you and your family and friends and disintegrate your whole town. So, to avoid this we want you to crawl under your desk, pull your head down between your legs and kiss your “donkey” goodbye. There, we fixed it.

The threat of Y2K was real. The world ACTED to prevent it. How ignorant to forget that.

Memory was expensive and disks were small. At one company, dates were stored in 16 bit units: 9 bits for the julian date and 7 for the year. Data General Novas with 32k memory AND multiple users, in 1974 or so.

I was 49 when that happened. I remember all of the dire warnings about banks and everything else. What happened? NOTHING. My paycheck was auto deposited and that was all I really cared about at the time.

I wrote an eight page op-ed to the Washington Post when there were stories Every Dam Day about the upcoming y2k apocalypse. I explained exactly how each of the scenarios they described wouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t happen on January 1, 2000. Like, credit cards had issues that showed up in the mid-90s because they now expired in 1901. I prefaced my manifesto with “I know you’re not going to print this.” I don’t know if they didn’t print it because I was an unknown in the field or it would mess with their fearmongering or because it was Eight Pages but I was right.

Y2K was nothing. AI is something we should be concerned about.

Yes this is a cautionary story, but typical. Microsoft never tests it’s patches. They’ve broken computers and have to go back and fix it. I always set update to hold new patchs for a week to see if there are problems. Don’t need to be a lab rat for these folks. Same with untested medical crap.

Sounds like the messages sent out from the Milwaukee Convention regarding Joe Biden’s re-election.

My Ameritech National Security and Emergency Preparedness co-workers spent a darling night in our five state’s (capitol city) Emergency Operations Centers … because some General said so. This, after about a year of Public promise speeches.

Y2k has definitely destroyed society – it created millennials!

I hate how people dismiss Y2K as “See? Nothing happened!” when that outcome was in fact due only to massive effort. If nobody had prepared for it, there would have been huge problems.

Wait till civilization and its beloved internet get to the year 9,999. Then we’ll talk. :D

Y2K was a moment; AI could become ingrained in our society for who knows how long. We shouldn’t live in fear, but there are some things worth being concerned about.

Went on a dive trip for Y2K. The idea we would be underwater at 12/31/1999 midnight. We went to Turks and Caicos which should be off the grid of computers running electricity. If things did go wrong, there was plenty of seafood in the sea, and edible plants on the land.

A divemaster I trained with was sponsoring a trip to the Red Sea. I don’t think anyone went with him. Americans on a Y2K trip to the Middle East. If things went wrong, how many from the Middle East would blame the Americans.

Really old news, but it seems to me that the Y2K problem resulted from the dearth (and cost) of storage. Why use up data on expensive disk or tape drives when the century was going to stay the same for a long, long time? (turned out to be not so long after all).

Now you can store a trillion units of data on something the size of your fingernail.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

Somehow I had a feeling this was about the Y2K event by the second panel. I like to say I followed the experts advise and be somewhere I wouldn’t mind be stuck for a few days should anything bad happened. So I went to England! I was just across the street from the clock tower (Big Ben) and the Houses of Parliament at midnight. Sadly, nothing bad happened and I had to come home.

I think I last fixed a Y2K bug in 2009 by kicking it down the road to 2019. Then i retired in 2015. But it probably never came up in 2019 because the company was undergoing a “technology refresh”, i.e. a complete rewrite. All my old crew were gone last I checked.

How about the Ice Age we were supposed to be headed for in the 1970s?

I was 11 and a half, and didn’t even think about it. I miss those days…..

We become so caught up in the every day terror around the world, we forget to live. Sad truth is that the end of man is closer than it ever has been, spiraling down the drain.

Once the threat of Y2K was understood, retired and older still-active programmers were called in to assess and fix the problems. And they did. Hence the big nothing burger on January 1, 2000.

The secret is to think ahead, and fix problems before they arise, not just wait for others to take care of it, or pretend there is no problem, because it does not align with your own personal political dogma.

I admit I was afraid of the Y2K thing.

bro y2k simply would not have happened. computers can handle changing numbers.

I was working in a medical equipment supply warehouse in 99-00. We needed to be able to open the warehouse to supply spare parts to technicians as needed. As the newest employee, it fell on me to spend 48 hours straight on site in case problems developed on the switchover and the work had to be done manually. Of course nothing happened, and I enjoyed the pizzas that I had delivered.