I agree. 2012 is a lot of hype just like Y2K was.
Y2K was not hype. It was very real and it was the fault of managers who kept putting the problem off. I raised the issue in the municipal government IT department where I worked in 1989. They took me seriously and completed their remediation in 1998, then sent their experts out to help the business community handle the problem. But many organizations were not so sensible.
In the 1960s, when I became a computer programmer, all data was submitted on punch cards, which have exactly 80 columns. With so little space, naturally the year was abbreviated to two digits.
This was a sensible business strategy, because up to that point, computer architecture had been completely changed about twice per decade. Every time that happened, all software had to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch for the new architecture. At that point we could fix any deficiencies in the old software. Some time in the future we'll have data entry by some medium other than punch cards, and when we once again completely rewrite all of our programs, we'll be sure to store the year as four digits. No problem!
When the IBM 360 mainframe came out with the OS360 operating system, no one realized that this was the last time that a new generation of computer would be incompatible with old software coding. A program written in 1957 would not run on a computer built in 1967, but the programs I wrote in 1967 can still run on today's computers, 43 years later.
Of course programs must be upgraded to handle new business conditions and to adapt to new standards of quality, security, convenience, etc. Programs are modified rather often. It would have been reasonable, during one of those modifications, to look through the entire program and find all the places where the year was stored as two digits.
But it's a lot of work to go through an entire program looking for one small thing, and it needs to be double-checked because it's too easy to miss one. This makes it an expensive process, and most organizations weren't willing to spend the money. "Don't worry about it, we'll do it next year."
"Next year" finally happened in 1998, when every IT manager in the world woke up and realized that all of his predecessors left the Y2K problem for him to solve. In two years, a great many old computer programs were going to get incorrect results when they compare two dates on opposite sides of the millennium. This was already starting to happen: systems processing insurance policies, driver's licenses, etc., with expiration dates more than one year in advance had already been crashing and had to be frantically reprogrammed. Multiply that by a million next year, when ALL the other programs start running into the same thing.
There were billions of lines of program code to check when IT departments finally got the order to drop every other project that wasn't concerned with life and death, and get into the business of Y2K remediation. We were hiring every retired COBOL programmer who could still see straight. (Of course newer programs didn't have this problem because they had been written right, but there were billions of lines of old program code still in production.)
It still wasn't enough. Once the problem was measured with reasonable accuracy, we recognized that we could not check every program and fix all the problems by Dec 31, 1999. So we did triage.
- Red blanket: If this system fails the consequences will be ruinous. Traffic signals flashing the wrong way, power generators shut down, elevators stuck between floors, mental hospital doors springing open or locking shut by default, critical contact lists offline, bank accounts unavailable, truck dispatching systems unable to figure out where to deliver the food... all of these were very real concerns in a year when computer technology with defective software could show up in any of thousands of critical systems. Got to put everybody to work on these first.
- Yellow blanket: If this system fails it will be inconvenient, embarrassing or expensive, but we'll muddle through. Fix these when we're done with the red-blanket systems.
- Green blanket: If this system fails it will be a nuisance and some people will complain, but they'll get over it. Fix these last.
On behalf of the IT staff of the entire planet I am so humbled by your gratitude that we worked our butts off for a year to keep YOUR planet running--because our bosses were too stupid to care about a Really Big Problem until it was almost too late. It's nice that you appreciate us.
As far as I know, we managed to get all the Red Blanket systems repaired. There were a few contact lists that were offline and had to be handled by calling somebody who knew somebody else, but nobody died because of it. A few doors didn't work but the security guards were able to work them manually. But none of the big disasters happened.
But we certainly did not get the Yellow Blanket systems completed, and most of the Green Blanket systems were put off until 2002 or later. I had personal experience:
- In 1999 I bought two cases of diet soda. Aspartame does not have a long shelf life when not temperature-controlled, and every carton has an expiration date printed on it. The expiration dates on these were garbled because the program that printed them had not been remediated and went haywire. Of course I hadn't bothered to check and only noticed when I popped a can and found expired aspartame. This software was on the Yellow Blanket or Green Blanket list because spoiled aspartame won't kill anybody. But this same type of expiration date generation algorithm is used in factories that make pharmaceuticals. Fortunately those programs were on the Red Blanket list and had been remediated. Nobody died from taking expired insulin.
- Our electic company was not able to send out a bill until July of 2000; and when it came it was for about five times what we owed them. Their accounting systems had not been remediated. Fortunately their programmers had been hard at work remediating the process-control software that keeps the generators running, and we didn't have any Y2K power outages.
- Our bank was unable to send out an accurate mortgage statement throughout the entire year of 2000--which, by the way, apparently had thirteen months. Their mortgage system had not been remediated. Fortunately both their account management system and their ATM software were corrected, so we never had any trouble getting to our money.
Y2K was real. We fixed it. You're welcome.
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