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Speaker 1: Sign up now at Patreon dot dot netroocks dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome back to dot net Rocks episode nineteen hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety nine. I'm Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Campbell. We
Speaker 1: got some stories for you today, don't we.
Speaker 2: No, boy, Well, we did a while to figure out
Speaker 2: how we're going to do this show. Yeah, I really
Speaker 2: did want to talk about Y two K, just because
Speaker 2: it was a big part of my life, sure, dealing
Speaker 2: with it, and I think, you know, twenty seven years on,
Speaker 2: people forgotten or didn't know. You know, if you came
Speaker 2: to the industry later, you just don't know what we did.
Speaker 2: So I thought it'd be a perfect time to sort
Speaker 2: of dig into all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we got some stuff to do. This being
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, let's talk about what happened that year. Well,
Speaker 1: NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was a big story for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's first time NATO had ever done anything like that.
Speaker 1: Right, and it was to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,
Speaker 1: which you know, we kind of stood by and watched
Speaker 1: all this horror play out and finally said enough of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, slow Adameinlosovich gets arrested. At the beginning of the
Speaker 2: whole World Court. There's a lot of things that happened
Speaker 2: in that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Of course the y two K bug Pananic, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about here. Bill Clinton was impeached, Yeah, having too
Speaker 1: much fun with a cigar or.
Speaker 2: Something like that, perhaps well, but was ultimately acquitted by
Speaker 2: the Senate.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Another big one, sad the Columbine High School masker,
Speaker 1: which really was one of the first of those sort
Speaker 1: of the things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, I mean, it'd happened before, but maybe
Speaker 2: it's because the was around that the visibility of it changed.
Speaker 1: Yeah. East Timor Indonesia voted for independence from Indonesia and
Speaker 1: there was some violent unrest and the UN got involved
Speaker 1: there too. The euro was introduced in nineteen ninety nine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I forgot about that.
Speaker 2: It's not that long ago, is it. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 2: beginning of that.
Speaker 1: Yep, there was an egypt Air Flight nine ninety crash.
Speaker 1: Boeing seven sixty seven crashed into the Atlantic Ocean two
Speaker 1: hundred and seventeen perished, and that caused an international raw.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was concern that it was deliberate.
Speaker 1: Yep, vlad Putin becomes Prime Minister of Russia.
Speaker 2: When Boris Yeltsin resigns. Well, he was already prime minister,
Speaker 2: but then Yeltsin resigns as president, so Putin gets to
Speaker 2: be both. Yeah, at least temporarily anyway, and never leaves office.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Basically, you're right, you're.
Speaker 1: Going to talk about Mars Climate orbiterter. I'm sure, yes,
Speaker 1: So why don't we switch over to space.
Speaker 2: Sure, so let's start with polar Lander. So there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of Mars missions in ninety nine and they all
Speaker 2: go badly. Polar Lander launches in January, arrives in December,
Speaker 2: and on its way down they suddenly lose contact with it.
Speaker 2: It takes a we've never really found out exactly what
Speaker 2: happened to polar Lander, but in the post lost testing
Speaker 2: they come to the realization that in the final stages
Speaker 2: of its landing, after it's gone through aerobraking in the
Speaker 2: shell and all this stuff, and it's on its engines.
Speaker 2: There's a point of literally less than a minute from
Speaker 2: landing where it extends its legs and there's a sensor,
Speaker 2: there's a contact sensor on those legs that helps tell
Speaker 2: when it's actually landed, and that shuts the engines off. Well,
Speaker 2: the shock of extending the legs shakes the sensor enough
Speaker 2: that it thinks it's landed, so it shuts the engines
Speaker 2: off one hundred and fifty feet in the air. Yikes,
Speaker 2: bumber bummer. Can't blame it on the Y two K bug,
Speaker 2: can we? No? And although the other Mars went out
Speaker 2: of the way as well, which is in September where
Speaker 2: the Mars Climate orbiter and using the wrong type of
Speaker 2: numbers using Newton's instead of foot pounds, does not do
Speaker 2: its burn correctly to insert itself into the orbit of
Speaker 2: Mars and instead flies directly into Mars and burns up.
Speaker 1: So after this, we're a bunch of programmers at NASA.
Speaker 2: Let go there was You know. The sad part is
Speaker 2: that it's not the only one lost for the sort
Speaker 2: of thing. I think it was one of the first
Speaker 2: times they dealt with They got the numbers wrong. What's
Speaker 2: funny is that both those missions where reflights of instruments
Speaker 2: from another other lost flights, and then they two were
Speaker 2: lost although there were other flights. Getting to Mars is hard,
Speaker 2: two ways about it. Yeah, So let's get on more
Speaker 2: of the good news parts. In February, the Stardust Comet
Speaker 2: Sample Return Mission launches. So this is a small vehicle
Speaker 2: designed to intercept a comet called eighty one P Wild
Speaker 2: and it will actually put a great fly, yeah, fly
Speaker 2: behind the comet into its coma the tail coming out
Speaker 2: the back, extend these little platters to collect the material
Speaker 2: the stardust, and then by two thousand and six it'll
Speaker 2: return those samples safely to Earth.
Speaker 1: That's got to be a sturdy platter.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, if you think about trying to catch something
Speaker 1: in a hurricane with a paper plate, you know.
Speaker 2: Basically there's this error. This is gel that stuff gets
Speaker 2: embedded in. It was very clever design. The Cassini mission
Speaker 2: is on its way to Jupiter, and in June it
Speaker 2: does a fly by a Venus to get a gravitational
Speaker 2: assistant help them get out there.
Speaker 1: Didn't it take pictures too?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Many times? Remember Venus Yeah. It was a phenomenal machine, massive,
Speaker 2: right size of a school box. One of the very
Speaker 2: last gigantic observatories. We've not built anything like that since.
Speaker 2: Speaking of gigantic observatories, the Chandra X ray Observatory was
Speaker 2: flown on the Columbia Space Shuttle. Aileen Collins was the
Speaker 2: first shuttle commander. This was the heaviest payload ever lifted
Speaker 2: by shuttles fifty thousand pounds wow, and that it was
Speaker 2: to be clear, it was successful. Chandra is still operational today,
Speaker 2: provided it continues to get funding. But a lot of
Speaker 2: scary stuff happened on this flight. A few seconds after
Speaker 2: the launch, there was a pin in the right engine
Speaker 2: that came loose and tore into the side of the bell,
Speaker 2: damaging some cooling lines that have liquid hydrogen flowing through them.
Speaker 2: That's not good, not enough to cause an abard, of course,
Speaker 2: there's no real good abort modes, but it does mean
Speaker 2: that they're losing fuel, and so the computers automatically compensate
Speaker 2: by throttling that engine up further, running it hotter, which
Speaker 2: runs it out of fuel even faster. It'll end up
Speaker 2: getting to orbit successfully, just a lower orbit than planned,
Speaker 2: but that's not the only thing that happens with the engines.
Speaker 2: An electrical short happens. It takes out two of the
Speaker 2: engine controllers, one for the center engine and one for
Speaker 2: the right engine. Fortunately, both their backups kick in. At
Speaker 2: that point there are no failure modes left. If anything
Speaker 2: else had gone wrong, they would have had to do
Speaker 2: an abort that had been designed but never tested.
Speaker 1: And they would have to use thrusters only, right, I
Speaker 1: mean the worst.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it. You know, if you're down to minimum
Speaker 2: life support that at this point you're not quite yet
Speaker 2: in orbit, but you're so there's only two failure modes possible.
Speaker 2: Presumably your past the solids. The salids are gone, so
Speaker 2: you're not going to have a challenger issue, but you
Speaker 2: don't have enough thrust to make it to orbit. So
Speaker 2: the two choices are either what they call a transitlandic aboart,
Speaker 2: where you would continue running the engine enough that you
Speaker 2: can make it across probably Despain. There Goza where they
Speaker 2: had a runaway big enough for shuttle, dump the tank
Speaker 2: and do an emergency landing of the shuttle there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we should be great, everybody's safe. Then payload makes it back.
Speaker 2: There's a question because it was the heaviest mission ever,
Speaker 2: Like what that would that would do? Yeah, And also
Speaker 2: there was a big question about how the heck to
Speaker 2: get the shuttle back after an abort like that, because
Speaker 2: you can find the seven forty seven over, but the
Speaker 2: equipment to lift it is so large. The more practical
Speaker 2: thing ultimately to do would be to actually transport it
Speaker 2: to a dock and put it on aircraft carrier to
Speaker 2: be brought back. Wow, that's not the crazy abort mode, Carl.
Speaker 2: Here's the crazy abort mode. It's it's called the return
Speaker 2: to landing abort mode. So get this. If your boosters,
Speaker 2: you're gone. You haven't got enough thrust to make it
Speaker 2: into orbit, so you underpower turn the shuttle around and
Speaker 2: fly backwards to decelerate the vehicle and try and get
Speaker 2: it back to Kennedy. Wow. This only was attempted in simulators,
Speaker 2: and almost all simulator attempts failed. Once in a while,
Speaker 2: somebody could manage to pull it off to actually be
Speaker 2: able to land it. So I don't remember all this drama.
Speaker 2: They never well, none of this happened. None of it
Speaker 2: happened because ultimately they made it over. These were contingencies.
Speaker 1: Oh, Okay, these were potential agency if they didn't have
Speaker 1: enough thrust to make it back.
Speaker 2: This is what they were going These are the things
Speaker 2: they were going to need to do. So yeah, Columbia
Speaker 2: came very close to that particular occasion. In May there
Speaker 2: was the Discovery went to the space station to bring
Speaker 2: cargo up for the ISS, which at this point is
Speaker 2: only two modules, Aazaria and Unity. And in December there
Speaker 2: is a Hubble servicing mission off of Discovery. This had
Speaker 2: been regally been scheduled for two thousand, but were they
Speaker 2: already had three gyros failed on Hubble at this point
Speaker 2: in ninety nine, and so they went up to bring
Speaker 2: them a new set of six gyro, some redundancy, and
Speaker 2: a new fine guidance computer some other two nups as well. Also,
Speaker 2: this is the year that China flies the first shen
Speaker 2: Zou vehicle. This is their manned space program. All this
Speaker 2: particular test was not manned. It's a derivative of Soyu's
Speaker 2: a bit bigger with more modern equipment in it. And
Speaker 2: so I brought it up because they'll fly their first
Speaker 2: man mission in two thousand and three. And this is
Speaker 2: the beginning of manned flight by the Chinese, which you
Speaker 2: know here in twenty twenty six they have a space station.
Speaker 2: It is continuously occupied. Very cool. All right, Moving off
Speaker 2: from space, let's talk about computing. AOL completes the acquisition
Speaker 2: of Netscape. Hooray, hooray. It's you know, it's twenty ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Now everybody's everybody's got mail now.
Speaker 2: Well but more saliently like that was the IPO Darling
Speaker 2: just a few years earlier, and now they're broke and
Speaker 2: have been acquired for pennies on the dollar. So you know,
Speaker 2: we see the end of the dot com boom here
Speaker 2: where the original catalyst of it is kind of tank.
Speaker 2: In June, Sean Fanning and Sean Parker release Napster. Yea.
Speaker 1: As we talked about this last last year nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: there was the beginnings of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course, by the end of the year, the
Speaker 2: RI will be pursuing them because remember we had the
Speaker 2: DCMA Act is already in play, so they're not putting
Speaker 2: up the CMA as what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Speaker 2: digital copyright yeah, which specifically says, hey, you know, you
Speaker 2: don't have to control the content per se. And remember
Speaker 2: what Napster actually is is a file sharing strategy. Now
Speaker 2: that they have the files that you can it's just
Speaker 2: sharing where files are so that you know they're making
Speaker 2: the argument. It's like, it's not us, but that's not
Speaker 2: going to Google. Google gets their first round of funding
Speaker 2: and the site is up, so the beginning of their
Speaker 2: search engine is starting to fly. Blogging already exists, but
Speaker 2: it's really only for people who are very web savvy.
Speaker 2: But Netscape releases RSS zero point nine zero, which they
Speaker 2: call the mean RDF side summary. It's really I think,
Speaker 2: with titles and links in it for you know, getting
Speaker 2: summaries of data to auditional reading, and this beginning of
Speaker 2: sort of the blog engine. Dave Weiner will take a
Speaker 2: hold of that specification and improve it substantially with additional
Speaker 2: information in XML and so forth.
Speaker 1: I remember we interviewed Robert Scobel about all that stuff
Speaker 1: much later, of course, yeah, later on, but this, but
Speaker 1: he was he was one of the first big blog advocates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was great and still is great, I know, honestly.
Speaker 2: Even more relevantly, in ninety nine, a company called Pyra
Speaker 2: Labs launches a site called Blogger where you don't need
Speaker 2: to know anything about HTML and so forth. You literally
Speaker 2: sign up an account, create a blog from them, and
Speaker 2: just write so you know, beginning of all of those things.
Speaker 2: Over on the Microsoft side, I E five is released,
Speaker 2: announced as I E four done right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we see pre release versions a euphour, yah boy boy,
Speaker 4: we see pre release that's over now, thank god.
Speaker 2: We see pre release versions of Windows two thousand, including
Speaker 2: our first look at active directory. And in November, Microsoft
Speaker 2: is can declare the pernicious monopoly by the Department of Justice.
Speaker 2: Na Michel kick off a whole bunch of fun. A
Speaker 2: little company you may have heard of called Nvidia Releases
Speaker 2: is one of the first consumer GPUs ever. It's called
Speaker 2: the g Force.
Speaker 1: Twent fifty six, and they will IPO that year if
Speaker 1: they only knew that graphics was not going to be
Speaker 1: their cash cow.
Speaker 2: Well at least not right now, you know, not now,
Speaker 2: but who knows what's gonna be Like a little while later,
Speaker 2: Over in Japan, NTT DoCoMo releases the specifications for mobile data,
Speaker 2: including a simpl fied HTML. It's only in japad Over
Speaker 2: in the US, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, the first
Speaker 2: TVO Wow Divo.
Speaker 1: That t I remember one of our first conversations with
Speaker 1: you was about TVO and you said that in Canada,
Speaker 1: TVO doesn't get metadata.
Speaker 2: Like you can't use it. No, yeah, I used. I
Speaker 2: had to replay TV with some and DNS redirects.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, because you couldn't get metadata in Canada
Speaker 1: for some reason.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it just never was supported. The I Triple
Speaker 2: E combines their specification known as a TOO two dot
Speaker 2: one one B alongside of a security protocol a bad
Speaker 2: one called web and calls it Wi Fi. So the
Speaker 2: rebrand that name never stick, never got job. A little
Speaker 2: company called M Systems. We now notice sand Disc releases
Speaker 2: the first USB flash drives.
Speaker 1: Wow, and Kyo.
Speaker 2: Sera releases their visual phone known as the VP two ten,
Speaker 2: which is the first consumer phone with a camera on
Speaker 2: board with a whole one hundred and ten thousand pixels.
Speaker 2: What a great idea that was. Yeah. Two more pieces
Speaker 2: of software to talk about and then we can move on.
Speaker 2: The first is SETI at Home. Oh yeah, another thing
Speaker 2: we talked about back in the day. All right, So
Speaker 2: there's a great joke that you did on one of
Speaker 2: your first shows. Maybe it was the show you were
Speaker 2: a guest on where you were running SETI at home
Speaker 2: work units to raise the CPU so that your water
Speaker 2: cooled connected coffee or tea warmer. Yeah, would I would
Speaker 2: warm your tea. My coffee is getting cold. I got
Speaker 2: to run some SETI at homework units. Yeah, I had
Speaker 2: a little of course, it did early water cooling because
Speaker 2: I'm an idiot and I had this. I found this
Speaker 2: plate that was designed for sitting coffee on that had
Speaker 2: the water loop in it. And yeah, you could make
Speaker 2: the machine horder if you ran it hard enough. And
Speaker 2: the last piece of software I talk about is the
Speaker 2: Melissa virus. Oh yeah, written by David Smith, and it
Speaker 2: is certainly not the first virus. It was just a propagator,
Speaker 2: no payload. It was an innocent time back then. But
Speaker 2: with the innovation that Smith came up with was it
Speaker 2: was an email propagator. So when you opened an email,
Speaker 2: it would run a macro that would go through your
Speaker 2: entire contact list and email everybody in your contact list.
Speaker 2: And it was huge. It went everywhere.
Speaker 1: I don't recall getting spammed by it. So he avoid
Speaker 1: eye one. Yeah that's that's did you get it? I
Speaker 1: think I did.
Speaker 2: I think we did see that one go through because
Speaker 2: it crippled mail servers, right, just it would drop mail
Speaker 2: service to its knees because all of you, suddenly, each
Speaker 2: person you know, opening one email sends five hundred more
Speaker 2: right hanging on the sides of the contact list. And
Speaker 2: so the real problem is if you were a popular
Speaker 2: contact and I was, you got a lot of those emails,
Speaker 2: you got it, and then you know, I think I
Speaker 2: didn't set it off because suddenly I had fifty of
Speaker 2: the same email from all different people. You like, Right,
Speaker 2: that's not good. That looks bad. That's right, that's not right.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about the top ten grossing movies
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety nine. Number ten, Runaway Bride, number nine,
Speaker 1: Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me? Oh Man, Number eight,
Speaker 1: American Beauty seven, The World Is Not Enough six Nodding Hill.
Speaker 1: It's a movie my wife still wants me to watch
Speaker 1: with her, and I'm kind of rolling my eyes. Five
Speaker 1: Tarzan for the Matrix.
Speaker 2: Oh Boy, one of my very favorites nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that kind of blew. It's only number four.
Speaker 1: It's only number four because number three is Toy Story two,
Speaker 1: great great film. Number two is the sixth Sense m
Speaker 1: I see lots of doll yes, six hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: three million to be exact, and number one Star Wars
Speaker 1: episode one, the Phantom Menace, which came in at one
Speaker 1: point three.
Speaker 2: Billion dollars and disappointed so many people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, charge our banks kind of killed it for me.
Speaker 5: But.
Speaker 2: Admitichlorians are a parasite, Like just yeah, yeah, I'm a
Speaker 2: big believer in the machete order of how you watch
Speaker 2: the movies, where you actually watch episode four first, then
Speaker 2: two and three? Are you watch four and five first, right,
Speaker 2: so you see Empire strikes back, You're like, wow, what's
Speaker 2: going on? Then you watch two and three sort of
Speaker 2: the invention of Darth Vader, and then six is the Redemption.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't watch You don't watch episode one
Speaker 2: because it does nothing. You don't need it for anything.
Speaker 2: It's unnecessary. I remember we took our oldest daughter, Emmy two.
Speaker 2: She was our only daughter at that point, and she
Speaker 2: was young, and she got so upset when Anakin had
Speaker 2: to leave his mom. Yeah, she got so upset she
Speaker 2: ran out of the theater. Crime fair enough. That's what
Speaker 2: the kids see, right.
Speaker 1: They knew how to Lucas knew how to tug on
Speaker 1: the kid's heart strings, that's for sure. All right, let's
Speaker 1: get into better no framework, I got a good one
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: Awesome, Oh man, what do you got?
Speaker 1: So I went looking in the trending repos on GitHub,
Speaker 1: but I didn't limit it to C sharp, but just
Speaker 1: the English language, and I found one at the very
Speaker 1: top called build your Own X and it's basically the
Speaker 1: repository is a compilation of well written, step by step
Speaker 1: guides for recreating our favorite technologies from scratch. So the
Speaker 1: whole idea isn't that you want to replace, you know,
Speaker 1: something that you have with something you can write. But
Speaker 1: it's for learning. Oh interesting, Yeah, it's for learning how
Speaker 1: to write code. Yea, doing stuff from scratch with an
Speaker 1: end goal that you already know what it does. So
Speaker 1: here's some of the things you can build. Three D renderer,
Speaker 1: an AI model, augmented reality, a bit torrent client, blockchain, cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: a bot, command line tool, database dock because everybody needs
Speaker 1: to write their own database before they die. Okay, I
Speaker 1: did that once once. Docer an emulator or virtual machine
Speaker 1: front end frameworker library, a game, GIT memory allocator, network stack,
Speaker 1: neural network operating system, physics engine, processor programming language, rej
Speaker 1: ex engine, search engine, shell template engine, text editor, visual
Speaker 1: recognition system, a vox cell engine, a web browser, a
Speaker 1: web server, and then there's a category called uncategorized. But
Speaker 1: I mean, this is real stuff. You know, it's cool,
Speaker 1: it's very cool. So I wanted to give a shout
Speaker 1: out to these guys. And you know, if there's anybody
Speaker 1: left on the planet who wants to learn programming, and
Speaker 1: they should, this is a way to do it.
Speaker 2: Let's cool. Yeah, nice, fine, well done.
Speaker 1: So that's what I got. Who's talking to us today, Richard.
Speaker 2: Knowing this is an unusual show and we're sort of
Speaker 2: put in pieces together, I wanted to do an unusual comment,
Speaker 2: call it an erratum or a correction or retractions from
Speaker 2: episode nineteen ninety six, which was when we did with
Speaker 2: Dan Roth talking about ASP dot net core. And I
Speaker 2: mentioned in the history part about Alexa in nineteen ninety six. Okay,
Speaker 2: and so with the pseudonym eternal twenty one is is comment.
Speaker 2: I thought the close claiming Alexa was released in ninetety
Speaker 2: six was an abul fool's joke. I think you were
Speaker 2: just able to start ordering books online around that time.
Speaker 2: Amazon Alexa was officially released in November twenty fourteen, alongside
Speaker 2: the Amos on Echo smart speaker twenty eleven, under the
Speaker 2: code named Doppler from Amazon's labs. That makes sense, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the Alexa that I mentioned. What I meant to
Speaker 2: talk about was a different Alexa. But I messed up
Speaker 2: my notes because in nineteen ninety six there were a
Speaker 2: new website was stood up called Alexa and it was
Speaker 2: a site for doing web traffic data and global rankings.
Speaker 2: In ninety six, like right at the beginning of all
Speaker 2: of this, and just to make it more complicated, it
Speaker 2: was acquired by Amazon. Oh boy, so my mistake. I
Speaker 2: mixed up the name of two different things that Amazon
Speaker 2: ultimately owned. They did shut down the website ultimately in
Speaker 2: twenty two. Yeah, but yeah, that's what happened there. My apologies,
Speaker 2: but eternal thank you so much for your comment, and
Speaker 2: a copy of music Cobi is on its way to you.
Speaker 2: And if you'd like copy of music go buy right
Speaker 2: a comment on the website at dot rocks dot com
Speaker 2: or on the Facebook. So we publish every show there
Speaker 2: and if you comment there and I read it on
Speaker 2: the show, I'll send you a copy of.
Speaker 1: Us to go by, and so just to lay the
Speaker 1: groundwork for what you're going to hear next, we have
Speaker 1: a bunch of just individuals store worries from individuals who
Speaker 1: worked on the Y two K bug in nineteen ninety nine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so we're going to listen to those now. Hi.
Speaker 3: Back in nineteen ninety seven, my first ever professional software
Speaker 3: development role was working with a company that had the loans,
Speaker 3: higher purchase and leasing products written in quick Basic seven
Speaker 3: point one that we needed to make Y two K compatible.
Speaker 3: And to say it was painful with being understatement. We
Speaker 3: had to go through every single dot bass file looking
Speaker 3: for every usage of dates, and the variable names were
Speaker 3: pretty consistently bad as you can imagine, like today's date
Speaker 3: was usually a dollar, and sometimes a dollar was used
Speaker 3: not just for today's date but for other values as well.
Speaker 3: On the once all the logic was fixed, and then
Speaker 3: as a ship all the floppy disks to all the
Speaker 3: customers and that was a massive effort as well. So
Speaker 3: in the end we had all the customers working with
Speaker 3: smoothly without any issues and they all went to plan,
Speaker 3: which is quite extraordinary really, So it was Yeah, it
Speaker 3: was a massive excess though, pretty painful.
Speaker 6: I'm Sean Wildemuth and I've been listening to the podcast
Speaker 6: since the early days. I think it was the early
Speaker 6: two thousands. Actually, I did work for a Y two
Speaker 6: K company. Actually they did SNMP audits to find y
Speaker 6: two k problems. As soon as two thousand were old around,
Speaker 6: they were out of business and I was out of
Speaker 6: a job.
Speaker 2: Go figure.
Speaker 6: Early on, I listened to dot net Rocks to hear
Speaker 6: about what was new in dot net, because those were
Speaker 6: the early days of one O beta and eventually one
Speaker 6: to one. Over the years, I've been invited on the
Speaker 6: podcast seventeen times. Carl and Richard have been incredibly kind
Speaker 6: and generous with their time, and it's helped my career tremendously.
Speaker 6: Twenty years on, it's still worth listening to every episode.
Speaker 1: So Richard Guy Royce is here to tell us his
Speaker 1: experiences with Y two K. Hi Guy, Hey, how's it
Speaker 1: going good? How are you? I'm doing all right? You know,
Speaker 1: I always like to say I'm fair to Midland. How
Speaker 1: was your nineteen ninety nine profitable?
Speaker 2: My line for a while now has been I bought
Speaker 2: a house off the back of what I made.
Speaker 1: With Y two K?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, It was a great time to be a consultant.
Speaker 5: It really was. You know, I was fairly young, relatively
Speaker 5: early in my career, and I was doing a lot
Speaker 5: of C plus plus and oh man, I wasn't on
Speaker 5: a C plus plus project that actually needed remediation. To
Speaker 5: work with Y two k. It was a let's just
Speaker 5: throw away this old system and completely rewrite it in
Speaker 5: C plus plush, and that was the solution that they
Speaker 5: had come up with. But I had a whole bunch
Speaker 5: of mainframe integration and stuff in it as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, great that you're a consultant, because that's just bucks.
Speaker 2: But from a from an architect's point of view, it's like,
Speaker 2: is this really the right thing to rewrite? And C
Speaker 2: plus plus? Yeah?
Speaker 5: You know, it's probably worth noting that the company got
Speaker 5: bought up by someone in the and someone else, and
Speaker 5: now it's not really a thing anymore. I could probably
Speaker 5: talk about the company honestly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but obviously somebody got paid like it worked out
Speaker 2: for them. Yeah, but you weren't actually remediating a C
Speaker 2: plus plus. It was just to rewrite. Yeah.
Speaker 5: They had was The client was Sterling Commerce, which if
Speaker 5: you've ever heard of them, they were like a EDI
Speaker 5: broker kind of thing before the Internet really took off.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's nine.
Speaker 5: And so they had like DN lines coming in from
Speaker 5: various big clients wow, and various ways of getting data
Speaker 5: in and out. And then they would take data from
Speaker 5: say a retailer, which is with a bunch of purchase orders,
Speaker 5: and then transform it into a format that would be
Speaker 5: suitable to and over a wire protocol that would be
Speaker 5: acceptable by some supplier that they bought their supplies from,
Speaker 5: and those sorts of things. And so you'd take in
Speaker 5: like one would come over the Internet using just like
Speaker 5: an IP tunnel of some sort, and then it would
Speaker 5: go off over FTP to some other server.
Speaker 1: Or rue Goldberg.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And so they were just they were the hub and
Speaker 5: they had all these spokes and so the hub itself
Speaker 5: wasn't really that complicated, but the spokes were where all
Speaker 5: the effort was at.
Speaker 2: But that means you're bringing other people's data. Are you
Speaker 2: now trying to enforce four digit years? No?
Speaker 5: No, that was all and then we're just we're just
Speaker 5: carrying the data around, right okay. Yeah, And some of
Speaker 5: them were integrated through the mainframe as well, so we
Speaker 5: had to like tie in with we used host Integration server.
Speaker 5: If anyone remembers host Integration Server, yeah, wow, there's a
Speaker 5: music story. I don't know if that's podcast safe about that, but.
Speaker 7: Well yeah, my first question was going to be were
Speaker 7: you dealing with code or data or both? I mean,
Speaker 7: it sounds like it was in memory, but what about persistence?
Speaker 7: And I thought that was where the real problem was.
Speaker 5: It was mostly it was dealing with code and data,
Speaker 5: but the data itself. They had data themselves that need
Speaker 5: to be remediated for their application, but the code was
Speaker 5: really the bulk of the work. The data that we
Speaker 5: were carrying on behalf of the clients. We just carried it.
Speaker 2: There was no and you I presume we carried it
Speaker 2: as string, so you don't care what's in it? Really
Speaker 2: like bytes, you're not actually doing any data. That's okay.
Speaker 5: Yeah, someone wasn't even strings. It was just bytes like
Speaker 5: some of the health I don't know if that. I
Speaker 5: don't remember if we did healthcare data or not. I
Speaker 5: don't think we did. I remember we had like various
Speaker 5: EDI formats, but it was really more about taking it
Speaker 5: and there was a transformation. But there's no Y two
Speaker 5: is K compatibility in there. Right then, at least not
Speaker 5: in any of the parts that I worked on. The
Speaker 5: thing I specifically remember spending the most time on was
Speaker 5: a obscure protocol that was popular in Europe called OFTP,
Speaker 5: the ODEBT file Transfer Protocol, which god, I don't know
Speaker 5: if that exists anymore or not if anyone's still using it.
Speaker 5: It's some standard. It goes like back to the seventies
Speaker 5: or something.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, debt dot Org. Dude, I'll include it in
Speaker 2: the show notes for people who.
Speaker 5: Will have it's still out there. Yeah, wow, good news.
Speaker 5: They're up to version two. Up the version two the
Speaker 5: seventies have called they want their version one back. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but yeah, it was. It was a really weird time though,
Speaker 5: because I mean, some companies took advantage of y twok
Speaker 5: to get budget to do rewrites that they kind of
Speaker 5: needed to do anyhow.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Tact it was a cover for all kinds of
Speaker 2: technical debt.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah. It was like a tech debt slush fund.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah. And some companies were and consulting companies were
Speaker 5: happy to take the money to do those projects. And
Speaker 5: it was it was weird because it was one of
Speaker 5: those times when it absolutely positively had to be done
Speaker 5: by a hard deadline that was completely inflexible.
Speaker 2: So this was the us FED deadline of June thirtieth,
Speaker 2: no no or voices. It was literally that nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: Like you will know you got January first.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, of twenty of two thousand, it's like, well
Speaker 5: it's not done by then, then we've got a problem, right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: And so everyone just sand bagged all the estimates on
Speaker 5: everything and you know, and then threw a lot of
Speaker 5: money at it, and then everyone met the date. And
Speaker 5: I was happy to be a part of it. You know,
Speaker 5: I was young, making money. It was great, good, good times.
Speaker 1: Nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You can also see from a C plus plus
Speaker 2: point of view because the way you did data structure,
Speaker 2: especially back then, like it's just no easy migration path.
Speaker 2: You have to build new structures to store data to
Speaker 2: the dates differently, right. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think I think that was even before like STL
Speaker 5: was a thing, right, or at least it was popularized
Speaker 5: because I remember the first C plus plus project I
Speaker 5: did professionally was for a a Central Ohio based lingerie
Speaker 5: company who has a secret.
Speaker 1: Okay, not just one secret, yeah, we got more than one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: many secrets.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the first thing we did on that project
Speaker 5: was okay, well we got to build our link lists
Speaker 5: and our hash tables and all of our conventional trastructures
Speaker 5: because they weren't baked in. This was really before the
Speaker 5: standard template libraries became part of C plus plus. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, I haven't really been in this plus plus
Speaker 5: world a lot since then. I don't know if they're
Speaker 5: there anymore or not.
Speaker 1: But inflexible memory structures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that was just a nature of the beast. Yeah,
Speaker 2: sdls from the mid nineties, So by two thousand you
Speaker 2: may or may not have implemented against it yet, right, Like,
Speaker 2: it's just still early.
Speaker 1: So your structure has basically had two bytes for a date?
Speaker 1: Just why why is that? Can we boil it down
Speaker 1: to that?
Speaker 5: For the parts I worked on, I didn't really have to.
Speaker 5: It was it was y two K, And it wasn't
Speaker 5: y two K in a way because a lot of
Speaker 5: was just faring the data along or transforming it from
Speaker 5: one standard to another. And I don't remember, honestly if
Speaker 5: the standards how they handled dates. Some of them, I'm
Speaker 5: sure I mean n C plus plaus Land, I'm sure
Speaker 5: a lot of these dates were being handled by just
Speaker 5: unix states, which means the problem is coming back up
Speaker 5: here real soon.
Speaker 2: Right, And that's the second since nineteen seventy. Yeah, or
Speaker 2: two bits solution that needs to has been that has
Speaker 2: been converted to a sixty four bit solution if you've
Speaker 2: done the conversion.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But I just remember the weird file protocols that
Speaker 5: we were are not file the weird wire protocols that
Speaker 5: we were implementing to send these things, these files around.
Speaker 5: Had we built this one big core though, that did
Speaker 5: something that wasn't on that part of the project. Specifically,
Speaker 5: this big core that did so take like an EEDI
Speaker 5: thing and turn it into some other format that is
Speaker 5: amenable for that company.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: But I didn't get too deep into that specific aspect
Speaker 5: of it. It was more just building a lot of
Speaker 5: the protocol adapts to allow these files to be transferred
Speaker 5: across different wire formats.
Speaker 2: Right. So it sounds like you were a transport guy, Yeah,
Speaker 2: deal with all the different ways and stuff moving around
Speaker 2: and just C plus plus or another languages floating around.
Speaker 5: There was some COBAL involved, but I didn't touch it.
Speaker 2: Of course, because you had the main frame stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Because well, one of the integration points was the main frame.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, cob I think Cobol is the
Speaker 1: star of nineteen ninety ninety.
Speaker 7: Yeah, in terms of Y two K, there was so much,
Speaker 7: so much Cobal that had to be redone.
Speaker 5: I'm actually really surprised that I didn't find myself doing
Speaker 5: more of it, because it is it is something that
Speaker 5: I can do, well, could do. I don't know that
Speaker 5: I could do it today, maybe a couple of weeks
Speaker 5: get up to speed. But I did do Cobyl early
Speaker 5: in my career.
Speaker 1: And well, you know, chat ept you could do anything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, whatever, I did do Cobyl in my career.
Speaker 5: My first job out out of college was as a
Speaker 5: Cobal developer on DOS, a DOS based Cobyl system. So
Speaker 5: but it just never didn't line up that way. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it was, it was, it was fun, it's awesome.
Speaker 7: Only Cobal I ever did was in college. I have
Speaker 7: computer science class. The tests, right, yeah, just to pass
Speaker 7: the test, I mean, couple is not hard. It's just
Speaker 7: it's actually it's pretty easy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just everything's just a text file. Man, it's
Speaker 2: just like it's it's batch processing. It's fine.
Speaker 5: It wasn't even it's not even any more for both
Speaker 5: than modern Java.
Speaker 2: So I'm a couple doesn't have a lot of dot
Speaker 2: notation I think some ways is less for both. Well, guy,
Speaker 2: thanks for your viewpoint on this. It sounds like it
Speaker 2: was a cool project. And look a mitly twenty six
Speaker 2: years ago. Twenty seven years ago, so a long time ago.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's hard to believe it's been that long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and thanks for making sure the world didn't blow up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 5: Well, you're welcome to make sure that home Depot can
Speaker 5: get their data routed to their wholesalers so that they
Speaker 5: can you know exactly.
Speaker 2: Do you ever wonder about how much of your code
Speaker 2: is from then he's still in use?
Speaker 5: I do, actually, and I think there's a little bit,
Speaker 5: but not a lot.
Speaker 2: You would hope, right, Like I kind of want to
Speaker 2: kind of I'm hoping people aren't using that code anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I met that guy. He was that right, you know,
Speaker 2: like that's a long time.
Speaker 5: I was really an idiot back then. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 5: a bit more that I'm still an idiot, but.
Speaker 2: A very experienced idiot. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Excellent guy, Thanks a lot, Thanks a lot, good chatting
Speaker 7: with y'all. We'll see you out there. Yeah at the
Speaker 7: conferences for sure.
Speaker 5: Ye see you the next thing.
Speaker 1: And who should appear before us, Richard but Rick Hapworth,
Speaker 1: Hi Rick, Hello, What.
Speaker 8: A marveless, marvelous introduction that was? That was I want
Speaker 8: to go out at the door and come back and
Speaker 8: hear it again, quick and dirty.
Speaker 1: We understand you have some experience.
Speaker 2: With the Y two K bug I might have been around.
Speaker 8: I worked for university, so so life was entertaining, right
Speaker 8: because it wasn't just like, hey, here are the computers
Speaker 8: that you know make our business work or do our
Speaker 8: banking transactions.
Speaker 5: It was hey, we got.
Speaker 8: Chemists and physicists and engineers and you know what they're
Speaker 8: like mechanical chemical, chemical engineers, biomedical engineers and the computer
Speaker 8: scientists guys and the computing guys. So yeah, it was
Speaker 8: it was fun.
Speaker 2: So it's not just dealing with the student data. It's
Speaker 2: all of the laboratory data. It's huge a rate of
Speaker 2: different things.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the students were actually kind of easy. I mean
Speaker 8: we so I worked for a pretty small university in
Speaker 8: the UK, but we were actually pretty switched on. We
Speaker 8: were really early adopters of things like the Internet and
Speaker 8: the web, we got a web server before anybody else had.
Speaker 8: We kept turning up in those sort of web magazines,
Speaker 8: you know, that kind of stuff. And we had student
Speaker 8: labs for the students. We'd got connectivity from holes. But
Speaker 8: at the end of the day, we chose what to
Speaker 8: give students, and we controlled the machines and you know,
Speaker 8: we disinfected them after they logged out physically and and electronically,
Speaker 8: you know. And it was a closed environment, whereas the
Speaker 8: the rest of the university academia is a crazy place
Speaker 8: because academics have freedom, right and it's like all right
Speaker 8: now and I've bought this thing and I'm going to
Speaker 8: do some research with it, or We've got this.
Speaker 2: New Sure it's there. It's their grant money, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're just going to get stuff. Yeah, and we go
Speaker 2: in and expect you in it to manage it for them.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know, what does it do? What does it need?
Speaker 8: Have you read the man you all, have you read
Speaker 8: the system requirements? And just not after midnight? So yeah,
Speaker 8: I mean Y two K for us was a combination
Speaker 8: of several things, really, right. So we got the administrative
Speaker 8: side of the house that was one sort of computing
Speaker 8: department and they were the guys who were looking at
Speaker 8: our HR systems and our finance systems and our student
Speaker 8: coord systems, and that's that's very similar to all everybody
Speaker 8: else is white to get.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And then we got the sort of estate side of
Speaker 8: the house, which was a bit more challenging because they
Speaker 8: tended to have less budget, and it was things like, well,
Speaker 8: what happens if that fails, Well, the air conditioning goes
Speaker 8: off in all of the buildings at once, and and
Speaker 8: you know, it's a combination of bespoke physical hardware card
Speaker 8: and I remember once at the time it's like, what's that. Well,
Speaker 8: that's that's the control system further heating. That's an eight
Speaker 8: bit icer card. I haven't seen one of those for quite.
Speaker 2: A while, vintage gear.
Speaker 8: Yeah. And we also had the telephony switches, which by
Speaker 8: the way, were not digital telephony switches at that point either.
Speaker 8: And we were a campus, right, so we got several
Speaker 8: of those. And then we got the general academic populace,
Speaker 8: which is mostly what I was dealing with. So I
Speaker 8: was part of the Academic Computer Center, so provided compute
Speaker 8: for the students and compute for all of the academic
Speaker 8: departments except computing, who were their own fiefdom and non
Speaker 8: shall pass and we'll do what we like. And they
Speaker 8: had their own stuff, right, and they managed.
Speaker 2: Very much.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but but the bit in the middle we were
Speaker 8: pretty switched on. So we've got we've got netwear Service
Speaker 8: and I still maintain NDS is a better directory than
Speaker 8: ad will ever wish it was. And all of our
Speaker 8: academic departments had netwear service and they were all netwere
Speaker 8: five one big NDS. But then departments had their own compute.
Speaker 8: So our electronic imaging department they did computer graphics and
Speaker 8: that kind of stuff. They got silicon graphics, really nice
Speaker 8: shiny stuff. And it was like people and the organization
Speaker 8: knew how they worked. What's that's an indigo? Well it
Speaker 8: looks cool, no idea. Kem Inge had a dusty old
Speaker 8: deck vax that was set in the back of a
Speaker 8: room that somebody had bought, that was still sort of
Speaker 8: ticking along, you know.
Speaker 2: And it was still running, like I've've seen plenty of
Speaker 2: those as paper weights, but it was still running.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm hearing like the list of hardware, So how
Speaker 1: much of the preparation was replaced the hardware and how
Speaker 1: much was Oh, we had the source code to this,
Speaker 1: let's we got to fix this code or this database.
Speaker 1: How much of it was software versus hardware?
Speaker 8: Surprisingly little actually was replaced the hardware. So again as
Speaker 8: an academic computer center, we were organized. We had a
Speaker 8: thing we called rolling replacement, so we replaced twenty five
Speaker 8: percent of our computer estate every year. So we didn't
Speaker 8: have that much in terms of legacy gear ourselves. Right,
Speaker 8: some departments had older compute and we helped them try
Speaker 8: and work out budgets and replacement plans for desktop PCs.
Speaker 8: A lot of what we were doing was very much
Speaker 8: cataloging in a state of applicationations, which was well into
Speaker 8: the hundreds, right, with everything from like weird scientific chemical
Speaker 8: modeling applications and finite element analysis and CAD and compute
Speaker 8: all the way down the word processes an office and
Speaker 8: that kind of stuff. Sure, and it's like, well, we've
Speaker 8: got a catalog at all, We've got to check with
Speaker 8: all of the distributors whether this stuff is y two
Speaker 8: K compliant and if it's not, is there going to
Speaker 8: be a patch? And if there isn't a patch, well,
Speaker 8: what's our contingency?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's the work around? Or does it is it relevant?
Speaker 2: Like if you're not analyzing data across from ninety ninety
Speaker 2: two thousand. Does it really matter exactly?
Speaker 8: You know, if the lab is out partying, does it
Speaker 8: matter if the mass spec isn't why two K compliant?
Speaker 8: If it switched off? Right, So it was very much
Speaker 8: a lot of spreadsheets, right of what have we got?
Speaker 8: Does it tick the box?
Speaker 2: And then but a software inventory is something you probably
Speaker 2: needed anyway. This was an excuse to get one.
Speaker 8: Yes, I mean we had again, we knew what software
Speaker 8: we had, right because we maintained the student clusters. We've
Speaker 8: got this huge list of applications that we had to
Speaker 8: install for students to learn on. But the further away
Speaker 8: from our own stuff, we got the thicker the fog, right,
Speaker 8: and you could kind of walk into any office you like,
Speaker 8: in any department and go what have you got? And
Speaker 8: you'd learn about three new things and one of them
Speaker 8: they only used on a Tuesday, and one of them
Speaker 8: they bought. It was still in the box and three
Speaker 8: years ago killed Let's make a note and what's important?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no kidding. Did you get to a point where
Speaker 2: there was applications that you had to fix yourself? Or
Speaker 2: I mean academics also tend to write software in certain
Speaker 2: spaces too. I've seen this software written by a chemical engineer.
Speaker 2: It looked like an engineer wrote software right only.
Speaker 8: So so stuff like that we we genuinely did, go well,
Speaker 8: it's your problement now. So we had several people in
Speaker 8: the computer center who did application support. Right, So we'd
Speaker 8: got like a couple of Fortrend specialists and a few
Speaker 8: other guys who were into certain languages, and part of
Speaker 8: their job was to help both teach it and also
Speaker 8: to support departments if they were trying to write their
Speaker 8: own stuff. Most in house developed software, though, was like
Speaker 8: Fox pro and Access. You know, there's two great pillars
Speaker 8: of solid foundational computing. Our admin computer team had written stuff,
Speaker 8: but they started with quite a long run up and
Speaker 8: examined their stuff very careful and had programs to fix
Speaker 8: it as they needed to. Most of the academic computer
Speaker 8: centers stuff was you know, we need patches for Windows
Speaker 8: ninety eight, ninety seven, eighty five, Office ninety seven, that
Speaker 8: kind of stuff. We had some in house written software.
Speaker 8: We had a magnificent student printing system that was entirely
Speaker 8: written in Perl.
Speaker 1: Languages.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but I mean, so I did some research before
Speaker 8: coming on right, I actually went and looked up things
Speaker 8: like pearlam and Pull's statement on y two K is pearls?
Speaker 8: Why too compliant? Like a pencil is y two K compliant?
Speaker 8: You can write good stuff with pearl, you can write
Speaker 8: bad stuff with sure?
Speaker 2: Got it? Well? I ran in this all the time
Speaker 2: with the projects that I was dealing with, where they
Speaker 2: just didn't use the date structure, which was why too compliant.
Speaker 2: They were storing dates and strings and they weren't compliant
Speaker 2: to anything, and they were almost impossible to validate. So
Speaker 2: you know, part of this is just untangling what have
Speaker 2: you done with your dates?
Speaker 1: Stuff that I was doing was all just using standard
Speaker 1: date fields which were y two K compliants. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't have too much trouble.
Speaker 8: I think a lot of our stuff, honestly, was like that.
Speaker 8: We struggled more with departments simply running old stuff because
Speaker 8: they'd never been bothered to upgrade, rather than actually stumbling
Speaker 8: upon something that genuinely wasn't competitive.
Speaker 2: So now there are four versions behind.
Speaker 8: Again, once we'd moved away from the yeah, because well
Speaker 8: it works, why we need to work gread?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 8: You know, well word style was good enough.
Speaker 2: Enough, like January first, two thousand rolls around and all
Speaker 2: the software bursts into flames either. Right, it's just if
Speaker 2: you have to do something spanning across those the ninety
Speaker 2: ninety two thousand, if it doesn't do date Maath properly,
Speaker 2: dumb things are going to have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the gist of it.
Speaker 8: Fundamentally, we checked everything as we approach the Christmas break
Speaker 8: because we're a university, should we we shut down for
Speaker 8: a week? Yeah, you know, the core services were all
Speaker 8: running on some Solaris, Our network servers were fine, most
Speaker 8: of the desktop machines would be turned off. Anything people
Speaker 8: weren't sure about was turned off, and it was much
Speaker 8: more a focus on how do we make the system
Speaker 8: safe than necessarily how do we continue doing business over
Speaker 8: the year termination? Right, because we're university, so we're closed
Speaker 8: to learn first thing on January first.
Speaker 2: Which makes me think the week back after the Christmas
Speaker 2: break would have been the hairy week because now you're
Speaker 2: turning stuff back on again. You don't know what's going
Speaker 2: to happen now, or you know, you're not sure, and
Speaker 2: it's every department probably got a little bit of it,
Speaker 2: so you're just sort of staring at the phone waiting
Speaker 2: for it to go off.
Speaker 8: Yeah, basically. But again, I think the problem is we
Speaker 8: all did such a jolly good job of the planning
Speaker 8: and the lists of things we had to be careful with, right,
Speaker 8: The Y two K was such a non event for
Speaker 8: all of us, and it's well.
Speaker 2: You suddenly had a deadline to get all your updates done,
Speaker 2: and if you did them, you're probably fine.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean the cool thing is I was looking
Speaker 8: at the way back machine before I came on and
Speaker 8: you can still see our Y two K page for departments,
Speaker 8: and it's literally just a list of updates. Download this install,
Speaker 8: this install, this install.
Speaker 2: Listen, you'll be fine, right.
Speaker 8: The actual Y two K plans sadly are locked away
Speaker 8: between behind authentic K, so lost in the.
Speaker 2: Midst of time. Yeah. What's hidden is the sheer amount
Speaker 2: of work it took to get that list right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, and the number of trees we killed in
Speaker 8: finding the list of software, checking all the hard ware,
Speaker 8: making sure all the departments had a plan and they'd
Speaker 8: all signed it off, right.
Speaker 2: That's right. That's where they knew. They knew what to
Speaker 2: turn off, they knew what to update, and they knew
Speaker 2: who to call. The week of the first week of January. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a good plan. Yeah, well done, Rick. It's a
Speaker 2: great story, and it's just sort of a reality of
Speaker 2: this was a lot.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of housekeeping and a bit of firefighting.
Speaker 1: H Yeah, good story, good stuff. Thanks for sharing it
Speaker 1: with us.
Speaker 8: You're very welcome with the pleasure as always.
Speaker 1: All right, So that's our show, Richard. Yeah, I'm glad.
Speaker 2: We got a few different stories from different folks and
Speaker 2: where they were and how they dealt with these issues.
Speaker 2: I mean, some of it wasn't that big a deal
Speaker 2: to software updates, but sometimes you had applications that needed
Speaker 2: to be fixing. You had to go through them line
Speaker 2: by line. That's certainly the work I did the first
Speaker 2: half of ninety nine was doing line by line fixes,
Speaker 2: although we wrote partiers and things to do it as
Speaker 2: quickly as possible, because there was a lot of code
Speaker 2: of you.
Speaker 1: That's right, and you know, the world remembers nothing happening.
Speaker 2: But as we did, we did a good job. It
Speaker 2: a good job, that's right, became a non event. All right.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess that's all we have for today, and
Speaker 1: we'll see you next time on dot net.
Speaker 2: Rocks for episode two thousand.
Speaker 9: Yes dot net Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's
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Speaker 10: back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand
Speaker 10: and two.
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Speaker 8: You got Javans
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