CRYUnicornClear wrote:Just like how all the computers would crash and there would be no electricity for y2K. Its a lot of hype to get people scared and
... make them pay programmers to fix their software, so the possible catastrophic events don't happen.
Which was very successful (and there was
a lot of work involved), but until the deadline, nobody knew if every important bug had been found.
And really, there was a gigantic number of (mostly) design bugs fixed, and we still didn't get everything - happily, what we didn't get wasn't critical.
But as someone who was at least a little involved, and who understands the underlying issues because I deal with similar things on a daily basis, I was surprised more didn't happen. We were lucky that time. And a lot of old COBOL programmers got unepected work and quite a bit of money - that's probably where most problems were buried.
Not problems weren't elsewhere, too. There's a reason for example, why some people call it Y19100 instead. (That's a case where someone had
fixed a Y2K problem, only to have other prograers who used that software reintroduce a new Y2K problem at that very place because they neither thought about it nor could be bothered to read the documentation.)
It's unlikely I'll get old enough for the 2036 one. And anyway that one might solve itself mostly by people migrating to 64 bit software. But again, it's the old stuff that isn't usually touched because it performs some critical function well, that is the likely source of any problems. Who would be willing to guarantee that every critical one will be found and fixed?
So you prepare for desaster and hope it doesn't actually happen. And if it turns out you did a good job, people will pour abuse over you for the unnecessary hype.