Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

Re:Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? by foobar1962 on Friday March 13, 2020 @05:40AM (#22565929)

I worked at a University that had a 28 story tower. Around 1998 they set the clock in the lift management system to 1 January 2000 and all the lifts lowered themselves to the bottom of the lift wells because they hadn't been serviced for 50 years (or something).

So yes indeed stuff was broken, but it got fixed before the big date.

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Re:Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? by bridgerj on Sunday March 15, 2020 @09:42PM (#22588845)

This sounds apocryphal. If setting the date forward triggered a maintenance warning, it sounds like the date system was working correctly.

More importantly, lift systems are not sensitive to long duration dates. They do not need to be.

This story reflects one of the myths that emerged from the media. Around 1997 they started discovering the topic of embedded systems and that many devices, including lifts, contained "computers." Not understanding the restricted and specialized nature of embedded systems, they then claimed all these systems were vulnerable to Y2K, and that the whole world was about to crash.

Most embedded systems, in lifts and other devices, had been designed in the 1990s. If they used dates, they did not use mistakes from the 1960s.

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Re:Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? by foobar1962 on Monday March 16, 2020 @06:18AM (#22591431)

The system was using 2-digit year and the service interval was went negative. It indeed happened, I was working in the IT department at the time.

The system was probably designed in the 1970s.

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