# Remember year 1999 and the panic regarding the Y2K bug?



## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 27, 2009)

Good times.


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## Irreverent (Apr 27, 2009)

Damn right!  Those were good times indeed!  

I made a killing on overtime, patching routers and switches and performing audits for the core network.  And money for new Passports and Catalysts was flowing like water for chocolate.


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## Ratte (Apr 27, 2009)

Just barely.


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## Stratelier (Apr 27, 2009)

WolfoxOkamichan said:


> Good times.


What a hoax.

I love you, man.


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 27, 2009)

Hell, it was fun selling those Y2K compliant shovels!


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## Ruko (Apr 27, 2009)

Can't believe that it has already been a decade.


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## Liam (Apr 27, 2009)

I was literally 9, and I could not see how a new millennium could spell the end of all civilization as we knew it.  Youthful innocence?  Insight?  Cluelessness?  I don't know.


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## ArielMT (Apr 28, 2009)

WolfoxOkamichan said:


> Good times.



Join the crew.


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 28, 2009)

Kinda fun especially when the media exaggerates on it.


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## Kajet (Apr 28, 2009)

Oh yeah... the media didn't over-react to that all... as a comedian said not even kids who lock themselves in their closet could have been as paranoid as everyone was then...


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 28, 2009)

lol bomb shelters


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## Liam (Apr 28, 2009)

There is always something new to panic about.  It reminds me of a quote.


			
				some famous guy said:
			
		

> There is nothing to fear but fear itself



It's just the swine flu!  Not the end of the world!


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## Shino (Apr 29, 2009)

Yeah, we just had a relapse. (See: conficker)

It was kinda funny watching the lusers implode back then, and then the egg on their face afterwards when nothing happened.

Too bad I was on school work study back then, I would have made a killing getting overtime (and a little hazard pay from all the contagious stupidity).


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 29, 2009)

What jobs where there back then that had overtime?


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## Irreverent (Apr 29, 2009)

WolfoxOkamichan said:


> What jobs where there back then that had overtime?



Lots of 'em.  Network infrastructure design, engineering, infra-construction and delivery.  Network operations, and service assurance too.  And gawds, was the programming team every burning the candle at both ends, running test cases through both billing systems and provisioning/activation systems.

Guys were buying bass-boats, RV's, swimming pools on the overtime money they were bringing in.  It dried up pretty quick in 2000, but man 1999 put me in a different tax bracket.  We moved up a house too.


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 29, 2009)

Where there people who saved up smartly?


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## Grimfang (Apr 29, 2009)

An actual book by a New York Times Bestseller...






I think I was in 7th or 8th grade. Even my teachers were telling us how satellites might lose power and fall to Earth and stuff.


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## CaptainCool (Apr 29, 2009)

ah, good times...
my first year in secondary school, A's everywhere... good times indeed^^


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 29, 2009)

Wow XD


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## Irreverent (Apr 29, 2009)

WolfoxOkamichan said:


> Where there people who saved up smartly?



Probably not.  I did max out my RRSP's that year (like a 401k).



Grimfang said:


> Even my teachers were telling us how satellites might lose power and fall to Earth and stuff.



It was a big concern.  Telesat was in a panic over their Anik A-E series, and there was concern for Nimiq when she launched in 1999.  It wasn't so much losing power, as losing control over directional gyros and positioning thrusters; which can mean instant end of life for a geo-sync DBS satellites.  It could also mean an unplanned de-orbit for a non geo-sync satellite.

Heh, I was just looking it up on an internal website......appears we sold Telesat to a US company in 2007......*Loral-SKYNET*, a division of Loral Inc. :shock:


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 29, 2009)

Actually, there WAS a problem back then, but thankfully programmers were able to patch it. However, the media still exaggerate stuff.


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## Sernion (Apr 29, 2009)

It was hilarious to see people take it too seriously and donating just about everything they've got.


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## Runefox (Apr 29, 2009)

There are other things we should be worrying about now.

The Year 2038 problem is going to cause a lot of hell in servers and other places where updates and the like (in UNIX, anyway) are generally cautiously applied.

Also, the Y10k bug is going to be a big one.


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## pheonix (Apr 29, 2009)

I remember it oh so well, how stupid we humans can be as a whole sometimes. lol


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## ArielMT (Apr 30, 2009)

The Navy, after hyping up Y2K preparedness including urges to not do any unnecessary traveling during Y2K, gave me orders to fly on Y2K.

My orders read, "REPORT NET 01 JAN 00 AND NLT 02 JAN 00" to my next training school.  No earlier than Saturday, January 1, 2000, and no later than Sunday, January 2, 2000.  Like most counterparts in the civilian world, the school was closed on weekends.

By a miracle, I was able to get detachment orders in enough time that I wasn't actually airborne during the Y2K incident itself.

Not exactly fun.


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 30, 2009)

Well I wouldn't worry about the Y10000 problem.


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## Shino (Apr 30, 2009)

Irreverent said:


> ......appears we sold Telesat to a US company in 2007......*Loral-SKYNET*, a division of Loral Inc. :shock:


 
Please tell me that's a joke.

*Googles it*

Oh, crap. Anybody know John Connor's phone number?

j/k

Yeah, I remember feeling sorry for the coders. I thought I was a basement money back then, but I swear, these guys didn't see daylight for a whole year. Nor did they shower.


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## Irreverent (Apr 30, 2009)

Shino said:


> Please tell me that's a joke.
> 
> *Googles it*
> 
> Oh, crap. Anybody know John Connor's phone number?



Its no joke.  My company _did_ sell its satellite division to *SKYNET*.   (I've got Sarah Connors on my RIM's speed dial)

And a lot of the old Anik A through E series birds are still up there and still in production.  I can't find records on how many got Y2k-patched, looks like a lot of the internal web sites got archived.

The other big fear from a Teleco perspective was 911 call centers and packet radio (used by most municipal fire/police/ambulance services).    That stuff has to stay up, and it got a lot of the patching dollars.  And stay up it did.  Until August 2003, but that's another war story for another thread.


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## Shino (Apr 30, 2009)

I still love the creative worst-case scenario for Y2k that the Simpsons did for one of the Treehouse of Horrors episodes. (One of the few I've seen.)

There's nothing more entertaining than seeing someone getting attacked by a Y2K-infected electric razor.


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## Lumnous (Apr 30, 2009)

XD i loved that year on the night went to a supermarket for a party and got to draw the Y2K bug XP


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## WolfoxOkamichan (Apr 30, 2009)

Yeah, I remember that simpson's epi lol


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