I remember the attempt at upgrading the computers for y2k at work caused a week long crash,
It's 1999: are you worried about Y2K?
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I moved to USA, complete cultural shock, I learned that there was such thing as homosexuality and racism, it wasn't necessarily a good experience at first but has since been nothing but a blessing.
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
A lot of people thought it was a non event; working in IT @ the time, it was a non event where I worked because of the countless hours of scrutiny and numerous compliant upgrades that were performed.
That's exactly what happened, everyone these days talks about it as a non-event and a waste of money, but the reason that it was a non event was due to massive effort to find and fix stuff.
Every power station in Oz had some or another issue that would have ben a greater or lesser problem, and they were all fixed...and every station had the clocks adjusted so that they ticked over Y2K one at a time, in case some of them had glitches.
In the process, they found lots of other anomolies, date filling (some of the equipment ran out of "bits" on some february date a decade after Y2K.
I saw the effort going on, and personally made sure that I had a little bit more canned goods in the house, a little more propane and charcoal around the place, and a full bath of water before we went to bed that night.
A lot of people thought it was a non event; working in IT @ the time, it was a non event where I worked because of the countless hours of scrutiny and numerous compliant upgrades that were performed.
That's exactly what happened, everyone these days talks about it as a non-event and a waste of money, but the reason that it was a non event was due to massive effort to find and fix stuff.
Every power station in Oz had some or another issue that would have ben a greater or lesser problem, and they were all fixed...and every station had the clocks adjusted so that they ticked over Y2K one at a time, in case some of them had glitches.
In the process, they found lots of other anomolies, date filling (some of the equipment ran out of "bits" on some february date a decade after Y2K.
I saw the effort going on, and personally made sure that I had a little bit more canned goods in the house, a little more propane and charcoal around the place, and a full bath of water before we went to bed that night.
That time was bad for me..money and women wise. I was struggling with my job working long long hours for little pay. I really wished the world would have ended with the so called nostradamous prediction. Well y2k came..nothing happened..still struggle money wise..but by the next year i was having much better luck with women..
Worked for a major car company then - I spent the night from 8 pm to 8 am in the "bunker" b/c for some reason, they believed a lawyer needed to be around for the apocalypse. Ended up going outside at 12:30 to smoke a cigar and contemplate divorce from my first wife.
I was 15 and went bowling.
I was about 12 years old at the time. All I remember was my family still never owned a personal computer, and my parents were finally going to buy one. But my mom wanted to wait until Y2k was over, so we had to wait another few weeks.
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
A lot of people thought it was a non event; working in IT @ the time, it was a non event where I worked because of the countless hours of scrutiny and numerous compliant upgrades that were performed.
I was going to make the same comment but you put it well. I sure know we did a ton of work to be ready, and so did everyone else. There was a lot of inter-industry collaboration going on that made it a non-event.
If all that work had not happened there would have been massive problems.
A lot of people thought it was a non event; working in IT @ the time, it was a non event where I worked because of the countless hours of scrutiny and numerous compliant upgrades that were performed.
I was going to make the same comment but you put it well. I sure know we did a ton of work to be ready, and so did everyone else. There was a lot of inter-industry collaboration going on that made it a non-event.
If all that work had not happened there would have been massive problems.
My roommate and I stocked up on beer. If things did go wrong it was powerful currency, when nothing happened we had plenty of beer for awhile. He worked at a brewery so the investment was minimal. We were quite pickled January 1, 2000
My best friends mom had hundreds of pounds of rice in her house. And thousands of gallons of water. Converted her house to a warehouse, storing food and water. I kinda just shook my head and laughed about it. They were eating rice like two meals a day for YEARS after that.
Originally Posted By: exranger06
I was about 12 years old at the time. All I remember was my family still never owned a personal computer, and my parents were finally going to buy one. But my mom wanted to wait until Y2k was over, so we had to wait another few weeks.
Best buy (or some other similarly horrible electronics big box store) had flyers mid 1999 bragging that all their home PCs were Y2k ready. Less-than-subtle-hint: Is yours?
I was about 12 years old at the time. All I remember was my family still never owned a personal computer, and my parents were finally going to buy one. But my mom wanted to wait until Y2k was over, so we had to wait another few weeks.
Best buy (or some other similarly horrible electronics big box store) had flyers mid 1999 bragging that all their home PCs were Y2k ready. Less-than-subtle-hint: Is yours?
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Originally Posted By: eljefino
I worked in TV (still do) and we had to patch the commercial server to accept "kill dates" beyond 12/31/99. Then we had to go through and manually change them all in their meta-data one by one. (The kill date automatically makes them disappear after they've run their course.)
If we missed some, a bunch, there would have been a metric ton of work. But there wasn't!
Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty neat.
I worked in TV (still do) and we had to patch the commercial server to accept "kill dates" beyond 12/31/99. Then we had to go through and manually change them all in their meta-data one by one. (The kill date automatically makes them disappear after they've run their course.)
If we missed some, a bunch, there would have been a metric ton of work. But there wasn't!
Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty neat.
Originally Posted By: gathermewool
Originally Posted By: eljefino
I worked in TV (still do) and we had to patch the commercial server to accept "kill dates" beyond 12/31/99. Then we had to go through and manually change them all in their meta-data one by one. (The kill date automatically makes them disappear after they've run their course.)
If we missed some, a bunch, there would have been a metric ton of work. But there wasn't!
Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty neat.
(Grandpa Simpson pulls up his chair and packs his pipe.)
Back in the day of 19-aught-99 the station spent all kinds of money for 72 Giga-bytes of storage with a digital spot server the size of a refrigerator made by the good people at Odetics Broadcast. This replaced a Cue-Star device that filled a wall with eight 3/4-inch Umatic VCRs that were interconnected. (One would "cart" to said tapes with control tones, and said tones would activate the following deck when the on-air spot had 5 seconds remaining, and switch to it at zero seconds.)
Most commercials you see come with short contracts for a week or even a day. Movie trailers were good for "Friday the 15th" then "Next Friday" then "Tomorrow" then "Now playing", each requiring their own entry. To keep the system from over-filling, and to keep expired content from accidentally airing, it all had "kill-dates" a day or three after the contract ran out.
Stuff like station IDs and PSAs though had kill-dates of 12/31/99 and they ran over and over and over. It was our fear many of them would go bye-bye.
Originally Posted By: eljefino
I worked in TV (still do) and we had to patch the commercial server to accept "kill dates" beyond 12/31/99. Then we had to go through and manually change them all in their meta-data one by one. (The kill date automatically makes them disappear after they've run their course.)
If we missed some, a bunch, there would have been a metric ton of work. But there wasn't!
Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty neat.
(Grandpa Simpson pulls up his chair and packs his pipe.)
Back in the day of 19-aught-99 the station spent all kinds of money for 72 Giga-bytes of storage with a digital spot server the size of a refrigerator made by the good people at Odetics Broadcast. This replaced a Cue-Star device that filled a wall with eight 3/4-inch Umatic VCRs that were interconnected. (One would "cart" to said tapes with control tones, and said tones would activate the following deck when the on-air spot had 5 seconds remaining, and switch to it at zero seconds.)
Most commercials you see come with short contracts for a week or even a day. Movie trailers were good for "Friday the 15th" then "Next Friday" then "Tomorrow" then "Now playing", each requiring their own entry. To keep the system from over-filling, and to keep expired content from accidentally airing, it all had "kill-dates" a day or three after the contract ran out.
Stuff like station IDs and PSAs though had kill-dates of 12/31/99 and they ran over and over and over. It was our fear many of them would go bye-bye.
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