Couldn't agree more - Y2K was an unsurpassed example of a minor problem being expanded into a vast money generating scare.

In the years leading up to 1/1/2000 I was the IT manager for a medium sized company. Since all our systems were relatively new there was simply no way any of the PC's or software could be affected by the truncated date formats. Nevertheless we were required to spend significant hours writing reports for suppliers and customers assuring them that we weren't going to fall over on 1/1/00. Managers were simply terrified that they were going to be blamed for not addressing a problem which they didn't understand and which, they were assured, could be fixed by simply passing monies over to those who did understand the problem.

One group of aquaintances made a motza from the scare by writing a programme they called "Utility 10000". They would evaluate a company's system for a minor fee and then (surprisingly) find massive Y2K problems. The company, sufficently terrified, would then be assured that Utility 10000 would rectifiy all problems - for an appropriate fee. And what did Utilty 10000 do? It counted backwards from 10000 to 1, impressively displaying the countdown on-screen with the payer being told this number represented the checks and rectifications that the programme was doing. In fact it did nothing other than display the count onscreen.

At the end of the process the company was given a certificate saying that it was fully Y2K compliant which was in fact true.

Leading up to 1/1/2000 I assumed that, when none of the disasters forecast occurred, the perpetrators of this scam would be exposed and held to account - or at least held to ridicule. That nothing of the sort occurred remains a puzzle to me.

If it was a swindle, some of the largest IT and accounting services providers to government were involved in it and in advising the replacement of software and hardware that followed.

Some of these contractors are presently providing IT audit and general audit services to government, having succeeded in dislodging the previous internal audit departments.

Wasn't the outsourcing of IT, IT audit and general audit services a priority of the Coalition government? Why didn't these so-called reputable contractors advise government of Y2K over-servicing and fraud - because fraud is it is if the allegations are correct. What is the Government's Auditor General doing about these allegations?

Genuine Y2K problems existed all over the place. They were rarely problems with they way dates were *stored* in widely-available and widely-tested commercial software, but with the way date differences were *calculated* in lazily-written bespoke code that was often used only in one way and only by (sometimes numerous employees of) the one customer. The problem code was likely written in COBOL or proprietary programming languages like Clipper or dBaseIV or Visual Basic macros embedded in spreadsheets, not by madly-optimising 1960s mainframe hackers or by software houses still in business but in the 1980s by long-defunct local vendors or a couple of in-house people who had long since left not only the company but the country.

Some fraud might have been perpetrated by consultants pretending to fix nonexistent problems, but if their clients were really so ignorant as they felt themselves to be when engaging exorbitant contractors to take responsibility for a simple problem, it would have been next-to-impossible to track them down. Whistleblowers might have made a difference, but I didn't hear of any in 2000-2001 when it would have counted.

I had an incredibly mind-numbing job for a few months of 1999 doing the manual equivalent of counting down from 10000 to 1. The software I was testing had been part of vital communications equipment for decades, and had had some genuine Y2K problems (fixed before I started testing), so the job made sense and "had to be done" even if I was bored silly.

Except that the tested Y2K-compliant version of the system was never adopted -- the customer bought an entirely different system instead, from a foreign supplier.

Chris has invented a history that didn't happen, where have we seen that before. As someone who worked on miltary systems for Y2K I can tell you that there was some very real problems that had to be fixed. I just so you know I work for one of the largest IT companies in the world. We had to fix many problems with our internal systems if the problem didn't exist why did we spend millions fix our own systems? The libs a living on a different planet.

The following question is posed..."There has been much comparison between Y2K and global warming of late, so can parallels be drawn and lessons learnt?"...but not answered. I personally fail to see the logical connection between Y2K and climate change, even if we accept the account give here. The argument seems to be...look at Y2K it was a disaster story acting as a rort so maybe climate change is a disaster story acting as a rort...one could also say...religion is a disaster story acting as a rort so climate change is also a rort...but no member of the Liberal party would dare so argue...if that's the argument then notice it is clearly fallacious...so the answer to the question "can parallels be drawn"?... is no without a proper examination of climate change science itself...the proper way to make this argument then would be precisely backwards...start with climate and then talk Y2K.

This article is just rubbish. What Chris fails to understand, despite having a Bachelor's and Master's degree, is that software tends to hang around for a long time.

The legacy systems that Chris dismisses so blithely were, in most cases the backbones of most business IT systems. In the 80s I was installing and modifying accounting software that had been written in the 70s and was still running in the mid-90s. It was riddled with y2k. In the late 80s and early 90s I was working on some of the big banking systems. They had been around for decades and they too were full of y2k bugs.

There was lots of work that had to be done to check legacy systems and modify them accordingly. Yes, the fix was simple enough (in most cases) but there was so much code to check. There probably were some shysters out there, but Y2K was a real problem.

I have no doubt that the work put into Y2K was a success. Trying to claim it was a fraud and make some obscure point about global warming has to be one of the silliest things I've heard in ages.

Opinion is one thing. Disinformation another.
Isn't there a moderator on this forum?
Really, some articles should not be allowed to be published.

This article is a waste of pixels.

Y2K overdone? Tell that to my sysadmin friend who got a 12:15am call on 01/01/2000 and had to go to work because of a midnight server crash - quite the worse for champagne too I might add!

The author is rewriting history. For the article to work, it depends on people's memory deteriorating seven years after the event.

Mischevious, malicious and pointless.

And WTF has any of this got to do with global warming/climate change? The subtext seems to be 'the world didn't end on 01/01/2000, therefore global warming is a leftie hoax, QED.'

Bizarre.

Perhaps the author would care to compare notes with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on that other great 20th century hoax??

I'm one programmer who had to make changes to a number of systems that would have stopped, or malfunctioned if programming changes weren't made prior to 01/01/2000. I did NOT gain financially from doing this; it was just part of my job, and a necessary task. Simply, we made the changes and everyone would conclude - "see, nothing happened, it was a big hoax". If changes weren't made, they would have complained.

Comparing Y2K and climate change, is just ridiculous.

Y2K was recognised as a problem, and was FIXED, even if some did get rich from it. I'm happy if the same happens with climate change.

It was a massive POTENTIAL problem. I have close friends who monitored the main frame computers covering two States. These massive contraptions are kept in temperature controlled 'bunkers', along with the personnel who were responsible for them.

In the final few days of of that year, a couple of them slept on camp-beds overnight counting down.

Nothing drastic happened, BUT these highly qualified men knew of the possibility of a major problem.

That's the irony of that situation; when nothing extreme occurred, well..; it had to be a fraud didn't it?

What nonsense.

as a IT consultant formerly involved in y2k patching...

HA HA... suckers...

come and enjoy a martini on my 50 ft'er moored in Matilda Bay.. nahhh on second thoughts, your microsft servers need patching...$190 per hour..

heh heh... suckers..

I think there is some confusion amongst people like Chris. I suspect Chris is the sort of person he claims to despise "...consultants, most of whom got their qualifications from reading Windows for Dummies...". It's telling that much of his column talks about date storage in EXCEL.

Of course systems that were released in the 90s, including most PC based systems were Y2K compliant. But as I said earlier, the big systems that actually did the hard work of many large organisations - debtors, creditors, general ledger in accounting, and withdrawals and deposits in banking - were full of Y2K bugs.

It's interesting that the only posting that has supported Chris (apart from the obvious troll) is mhaze. He or she says that all his or her systems were Y2K compliant because they were recently developed. I'm sure he or she is right. But he or she has missed the point. Most of the Y2K work was on old systems - systems that had been around for decades.

On a tangential issue, I am concerned about the deterioration of the quality of articles in Online Opinion. It seems that anything that can make the most obscure point favouring climate change denialism, no matter how silly, gets a guernsey. CitizenK is right. Opinion is one thing. Ignorant (or worse) disinformation is another thing altogether. Doesn't this blog have some editorial board that at least checks the facts of articles?

The system that I remediated for Y2K was originally written in 1978 and owed its architecture to the transaction master update magnetic tape technology of the late 1960s. The system had been written for the US complete with 50 state and 10 province (Canada} flags and bodgied along for the next 30 years by people who were programming themselves into a job for life.

However in 1994 Arther Andersen, Andersen Consulting, Accenture got the contract to write the Metlink Melbourne public transport ticketing system. It was not Y2K compliant, the dates were in the format dd/mm/yy.

I notice that the author claims to be a member of the Australian Computer Society, whose tag line is "ICT Professionals Shaping Our Future".

From the ACS Membership page:

"ACS membership implies a commitment to professionalism.

True professionalism demands continuing knowledge and skills development, backed by an underlying commitment to a Code of Ethics and Code of Professional Conduct and Practice."

I suspect they might be a little unhappy about this article, and the way it reflects upon their organization. It is a shoddy piece of work indeed.

It manages to make a mockery of their slogan as well as their principles. Quite an achievement.

Mr Abood - Next time, try putting your fish in a bigger barrel.

Bloody pointless to bring y2k up in this context. I see no parallel to global warming.

However... we worked on y2k and fixed stuff. Perhaps the main reason that consultants were used, in some cases, was because in-house staff were refusing to make the minor changes (your claim, not mine) that would have provided peace of mind.

But in either case. Global warming is another area. What we say about y2k is not relevant.

This article is on the money. Having worked in IT for over 20 years I had never seen such a debacle over a minor issue that was not all that prevalent. Those who are criticizing the author obviously have no idea what it was all (not) about.

I know, perhaps someone could make a documentary called the Great Y2K Swindle. Then the ABC can have an angst ridden discussion as to whether or not to screen it. Only deciding to do so on the condition a panel discussion happen immediately afterwards in order to carefully explain to their precious viewers why it isn't so.