Anyone who had anything to do with computers towards the end of 1999 will remember the industry panic over the “Y2K problem.”
For those who may not, here’s the situation in a nutshell: Since commercial computer programs were created from the 1960’s on, programmers needed a way to signal to the program that processing was complete; that there was no additional data to be processed. Back then, the assumption was that those programs would certainly be replaced within a decade, so it became a convention to use the year “00” to signify “the end”. No one ever thought about more than a 2-digit year until the 90’s.
Suddenly, in the 1990’s it became clear that there were tens of thousands old computer programs still running everything from payrolls, to elevators, to air traffic control… and many of them were programmed to stop working if they encountered “00” as the 2-digit year!
Lots of experts sounded the alarm that every company worldwide would have to embark on a huge “Y2K (year 2000) project” — to test, certify, and possibly re-program systems to ensure that they would keep working when the date flipped to 01/01/2000.
Like companies everywhere we at IRI also had to re-certify every piece of software that we used. This was a bigger effort than it sounds like. We had to find times off-hours when systems were less busy, to simulate the change of date and test each program’s operation. Code that failed had to be examined re-coded, and re-tested. I had a team devoted to this testing. Luckily in our case, most of our software was not so old as to have used that old “end processing” convention, so there were few failures. Still, everyone held their breath when 01/01/2000 actually arrived. I had team members out at the data center at midnight just in case something slipped though testing.
After the successful date transition, I presented a small gift to each of my Y2K team members. It was the latest gizmo: a digital music player. No, the iPod didn’t exist yet for another 10 years! This was a unit called the Diamond by Rio. Although the appearance inspired the Apple iPod, the “wheel” was just a series of buttons.
This device came out in 1998, sold for about $200 with 32 MB memory for about 30 minutes of music! But wait! For another $200 you could pop in a whopping 64MB card and then hold a full 90 minutes of music. The team loved them!
