The only reason the Y2K bug didn't break everything was the dedicated and heroic efforts of a massive number of people in the two years leading up to the actual changeover, and we are already seeing effects of the equivalent 2038 bug starting to happen
And a few of us in IT at the office at midnight just in case…
why was preparation even needed? I thought the Y2K bug was just irrational mass panic? (I was born in 2006)
I was a very minor part of this for Chevron.
This is true and largely unappreciated.
my dad was on the Y2K team for merrill lynch! soooo many late nights telnetting in from home, for years. I hope the 2038 one doesn't consume the teams' lives like y2k did. but who knows if any lessons were learned.
I spent all of 1999 Y2K-proofing systems at a single manufacturing plant. And I spent New Year's Eve 1999 monitoring those systems as they rolled over without error, instead of attending the only turn-of-a-millenium party I'm every likely to be invited to. Sigh.
We started seeing the 2038 bug in late 2007 with the pricing of 30-year mortgages. This led to a very rapid overhaul of software that processed mortgages, which played a small role in automated risk analysis missing the warning signs of the impending 2008 subprime collapse.
My dad was part of the team at his company addressing this!