Rant on

Y2K (ancient history now) was a real problem.

Saw yet another dismissive comment about the year 2000 computer problem of year 2000. This is past history but since I was heavily involved with year 2000 remedation efforts, it still rankles when people who know nothing bring Y2K concerns up as a pseudo problem, and dismiss the massive effort to fix problems before they became an issue in production systems. I worked in healthcare and the system that made our provincial healthcare insurance system work were mission critical, complex, and had big date problems. If you have not worked with code, you can not understand this I suppose.

Y2K was a real issue, and it was only heroic efforts of armies of workers in information system technology who kept it from being a massive disaster. I was one. Uninformed and actually idiotic observations to the contrary, it was a major issue, and disasters of various sorts were averted by some major efforts. Huge number of mission critical systems depend on dates or they break very badly, and century is necessary for many of these. Short sighted programmers in years past did not allow for century in date fields. Simple problem with vast implications.

The effort to fix problems on non-trivial systems was costly. Allowing the systems to break would have been far more costly.