10 Years Ago....

eMeS

I've been going through some old notes that I saved from a while back.

I came across a set of notes today from ~October - November 1999.

At the place where I was working back then, on October 31st we were entering what we called a "hard freeze" with respect to changes. Basically, only approved emergency changes in response to some outage or degradation would be made between 11/1/1999 and mid-February 2000....

I was involved in some pretty hard-core systems automation at the time. Lots of cross-platform stuff and lots of custom monitoring tools . Beginning in early December of that year, we had to cover 24x7, meaning that regardless of what your role was in IT, you could end up working some really weird hours. I had worked nights in college, so it wasn't that big of a shock to me.

New Year's Eve that year, I, along with about 100 others, were camped out in our company's data center, watching our monitors and waiting for something, anything to happen.

Nothing really did, but they sure did feed us well for those couple of months! Then the market crashed a few months later and everything really went to hell in a handbasket...

Anyway, finding the old notes really jogged some memories. What were you doing in the run-up to Y2K ~10 years ago?

MS

UnixGuy

I was at beach party...and I didn't know nothing about IT back then

Turgon

I was involved in the usual upgrading that was going on in IT Departments around that time. In the eyes of many people Y2K was essentially a con that made a lot of schiesters money, but as no one was prepared to fly with the 'risk' and do nothing lots money was thrown at it. After all, in terms of justifying the spending how could anyone prove you hadn't fixed *something* with all the changes that were made. Add to which there was all the awareness raising of the *problem*. I thought potentially there could have been quite serious problems but it didn't pan out. I recall one layman in a pub saying it was a con before year 2000. I don't like it when people mock what they dont understand but this time he may have been right. Certainly there were a slew of unnecessary people hawking Y2K experience where it wasnt needed, but companies often hired them and paid them loot so they would have someone to blame if the unthinkable happened and they had to be seen by concerned shareholders to be doing something.

jojopramos

10 yrs ago? On the first half of 1999, I am employed at Fujitsu (contractual) working on Point of Sales (installations), Workstation (supporting Windows 3.11), Servers (installation of RAID and Windows NT) and ATM Machines. On the second half of it, I am working at a Hospital as a full time PC Technician (upgrading workstation for Y2K scare)... yeah, those experiences of entry level IT works help me bigtime as where I am now...

dynamik

I wasn't even legal...

UnixGeek

10 years ago, half of my high school classes were in electronics, which really meant that I was the sysadmin's gopher. I was running around campus, patching the Windows 3.11/95/98 systems for Y2K, repairing PCs, and generally getting my first taste of IT.

vCole

10 years ago I was turning 13 years old. (My birthday is in 18 days from today )

So I was in 8th grade - and wasn't really that into computers then.

Pash

dynamik wrote: »

I wasn't even legal...

You still aren't, and not in the age department either.

10 years ago I was partying, drinking and drinking some more......I turned out fine

Hyper-Me

I was just starting high school.

I do remember watching the news on new years day and there were a bunch of locals that were pissed that they spent their life savings on generators and canned food, and they thought the local or federal government should buy it all back from them. LOL

rsutton

10 years ago I had a pretty sweet job as a jr admin for an ROP school. One of my tasks was to upgrade the school web site. To do this I showcased the floral classroom and personally took pictures of every girl in that class for the web site. The good ol days.

girdavid178

wow...10 Years ago...I was 10 years old....I don't even think I had a computer back then.

Bl8ckr0uter

Middle School.

skrpune

Man that seems like a lifetime ago - I was in construction at that point, working as a project coordinator (quasi project manager) for a company that did HUD repairs on foreclosed homes. Depressing work - when the economy tanked, the company flourished. I'm sure they're doing great now...

Anywho, I was already getting bored with the job, so I tried to get my fingers into the IT side of things there - about this time 10 years ago, I started to play around a bit with Crystal Reports, doing some report customization & formatting. It was the best part of my job.

HeroPsycho

I was working in a local computer shop, contemplating taking an assistant manager position at a proposed new location, while finishing my Master's Degree in Education. I chose to finish my degree instead, as I was convinced I didn't want to do computer stuff the rest of my life.

eMeS

Turgon wrote: »

In the eyes of many people Y2K was essentially a con that made a lot of schiesters money, but as no one was prepared to fly with the 'risk' and do nothing lots money was thrown at it. After all, in terms of justifying the spending how could anyone prove you hadn't fixed *something* with all the changes that were made.

This is pretty much the situation as I remember it. Lots of panic in the 2-3 years leading up to the event that was mostly based on nothing factual. The other side of the coin was the part about not wanting to be seen as ignoring the end of the world.

Most of the unfounded hype I remember as being fanned by the media.

We were mostly done by early 1999 doing all of the various tests we were to do, applying numerous patches, etc... For those of you that weren't there, we were actually testing not only 1/1/2000, but various date conditions that could potentially cause a problem, the first that I remember being 9/9/99.

I remember 1999 being an excellent year. The year started out with the movie The Matrix early in the year, followed in a few months by American Pie. For the most part we had an unlimited training budget at work that year. I took a UML class, a couple of Java classes (one was about Swing!), and something else that I can't remember at the moment. I also attended a couple of conferences. 1999 was pretty much the height of the dot.com market as well...I remember regularly trading Sun and Cisco and making a ton of money that year simply buying and selling those.

Opportunity-wise, and many of you that are new to this market won't remember this, but the few of you that were already in IT will remember that it wasn't uncommon to get 10+ calls per day from recruiters, all offering very lucrative positions with this startup or that startup. Recruiters were still dumbasses, but they were nicer dumbasses because there was so much money floating around back then.

Alot seemed to go downhill after Y2K arrived; within 1 year of November 1 in 1999 I was divorced after about 7 years of marriage, the market had tanked and many had lost their shirts, dot com companies were failing and laying people off left and right, and as a nation we were about to make a huge mistake that haunts us to this day. Fortunately I avoided most of the market-meltdown by moving into cash in March of 2000 because of the pending divorce, only preserving it so I could split it in two to finalize the divorce!

Back to the con stuff, does anyone remember the guy that was going around suing companies because he claimed to have a patent on the major method by which code was fixed? I can't remember his name or what the technique was called on which he claimed a patent.

For those of you who haven't upgraded your pcs, here's something that might help you...

Y2K BUG FIX

MS

JDMurray

Ten years ago I was working on a very innovative, wireless entertainment device that only briefly saw the light of day. My only Y2K concern was how the Y2K situation was being handled by Microsoft in their products and services.

I was just this week saying how years from now people will look back on this time and judge that the public reaction to the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak was much ado about nothing. Someone in the conversation compared H1N1 to the Y2K scare, but I cautioned that a lot of unheralded Y2K (re)work was done behind the scenes to deter real problems that would be caused by the Y2K overflow bug. The work was unglamorous and often rolled into long-term software maintenance tasks. Nevertheless, many computer systems would have gone awry had all that behind-the-scenes work not been done.

rfult001

In the months before Y2K I was college freshman looking to be a millionaire working with computers. After the tech bubble burst I was a college droupout trying to get a record deal. 10 years later I am in grad school, working in IT, and still broke...

Hyper-Me

JDMurray wrote: »

I was just this week saying how years from now people will look back on this time and judge that the public reaction to the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak was much ado about nothing. .

Although I do agree that a lot of people are overly freaking out, I will say that H1N1 is no pansy virus. I had it a few weeks ago and i've never been so sick, or sick for that long, in my entire life. It was a doozey.

blargoe

I was getting dumped by the woman I thought I was going to marry. In hindsight, it was a good thing.

I was still a year away from my first IT job.

ColbyG

dynamik wrote: »

I wasn't even legal...

Hahaha, same here. I was 16. Getting in trouble at school.

APA

hehe I was 14...... oh the memories of not having any responsibilities or commitments!

NetAdmin2436

Funny, just the other week I just got a "Thank You" email from Hotmail celebrating 10 years of having that account. I was 19 and just starting at a local community college. The first semester I took a keyboarding class. Virtually nobody in the class had an email address, so the teacher had all of us create a Hotmail account. Needless to say I failed 3 of the first 4 classes I took. Early morning classes, alcohol and girls didn't mix too well for me.

miller811

I busy beyond belief doing system conversions in anticipation of Y2K. Working 70-80 hours per week with paid over time.

On a personal level, I expected the power gird and everything else to shut down at midnight.....

msteinhilber

Ten years ago I was beginning classes at the local community college. Ended up leaving school to switch from part-time at my employer at that time (local computer chain) for a full-time position. I was learning more on the job than I was attending classes. Turned out to not be a bad decision as I worked my way up to branch manager and ran a couple branches which gave me a real good sense of how to run a business since they ran them like a franchise with minimal oversight from corporate. Not that I condone quitting school for a job, but I did learn an awful lot. This really proved true when I did go back to school and since I took a mix of IT and business classes, I found a lot of the material covered in the various business classes to be things I already had learned on the job.

Paul Boz

In 2000 I was a Sophomore in high school

veritas_libertas

miller811 wrote: »

I busy beyond belief doing system conversions in anticipation of Y2K. Working 70-80 hours per week with paid over time.

On a personal level, I expected the power gird and everything else to shut down at midnight.....

Storing food for Y2K

My wife and I are still using the rice, and other stuff my parents stored for the coming disaster.

cbigbrick

Contemplating about leaving construction and my spouse. I did both in 2001.

JDMurray

Driving home today I realized that it was exactly ten years ago that I started using Napster. And thanks to all the other P2P networks that arose from that example, I haven't been able to kick the P2P habit since!

laidbackfreak

JDMurray wrote: »

Driving home today I realized that it was exactly ten years ago that I started using Napster.

that'd be about the time I first encountered it on a corporate network, the business had no objections to it, untill I pointed out it was crippling there services lol

oh and y2k I was on call from 20:00 - 08:00 I got paid 1k for the privilage given my monthly take home then was a little over that it was a sweet deal for me

Kaminsky

I was a pc support manager for a large hospital in the UK. Y2K was obviously a huge con between MS and Intel but I didn't mind. All the talk of planes dropping out of the sky and Intensive Care beds going off line and patients dying all over the place.

Most of the PCs we had on site were 286 or win 95 and I was glad to get them replaced even if it was only with NT workstations.

Spent about 9 months replacing all the old kit and come new years eve, they said I could get £50 to stay late on New Years night. I told them where to stick it and that I was going out with my mates to celebrate new year. They then said I had to due to my job and I replied nothing will happen and even if it did, it would be Monday wen everyone got into wok before they would notice. If anyone was in work on their PC at midnight, they deserve to have their PC blow up on them and so I am off out.

Nothing did happen as everyone knew although that didn't stop all the party goers looking up in the sky to see if they could see any planes plummeting to the ground.

Piers

hmmmm... 10 yrs ago, I was running through the y2k preparedness for a number of NT servers and Win95 and NT workstations, only 6 months into a new position, which I'm still in actually, it's evolved quite a bit (NT, 2000, 2003; 95, NT, 2000, XP), but in essence I'm still help desk/network/server admin

I was also about to go forth and multiply for the first time, my oldest boy just turned 9 last week