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Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month, we'll get you that and a special dot net Rocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot netroocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net Rocks episode nineteen hundred and ninety nine. I'm Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Campbell. We got some stories for you today, don't we.
No, boy, Well, we did a while to figure out how we're going to do this show. Yeah, I really did want to talk about Y two K, just because it was a big part of my life, sure, dealing with it, and I think, you know, twenty seven years on, people forgotten or didn't know. You know, if you came to the industry later, you just don't know what we did. So I thought it'd be a perfect time to sort of dig into all that.
Yeah, but we got some stuff to do. This being nineteen ninety nine, let's talk about what happened that year. Well, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was a big story for sure.
Yeah, that's first time NATO had ever done anything like that.
Right, and it was to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, which you know, we kind of stood by and watched all this horror play out and finally said enough of that.
Yeah, slow Adameinlosovich gets arrested. At the beginning of the whole World Court. There's a lot of things that happened in that. Yeah.
Of course the y two K bug Pananic, which we'll talk about here. Bill Clinton was impeached, Yeah, having too much fun with a cigar or.
Something like that, perhaps well, but was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.
Yeah. Another big one, sad the Columbine High School masker, which really was one of the first of those sort of the things.
Yeah, I think, I mean, it'd happened before, but maybe it's because the was around that the visibility of it changed.
Yeah. East Timor Indonesia voted for independence from Indonesia and there was some violent unrest and the UN got involved there too. The euro was introduced in nineteen ninety nine. Yeah, I forgot about that.
It's not that long ago, is it. Yeah, it's the beginning of that.
Yep, there was an egypt Air Flight nine ninety crash. Boeing seven sixty seven crashed into the Atlantic Ocean two hundred and seventeen perished, and that caused an international raw.
Yeah, there was concern that it was deliberate.
Yep, vlad Putin becomes Prime Minister of Russia.
When Boris Yeltsin resigns. Well, he was already prime minister, but then Yeltsin resigns as president, so Putin gets to be both. Yeah, at least temporarily anyway, and never leaves office.
Yeah.
Basically, you're right, you're.
Going to talk about Mars Climate orbiterter. I'm sure, yes, So why don't we switch over to space.
Sure, so let's start with polar Lander. So there's a bunch of Mars missions in ninety nine and they all go badly. Polar Lander launches in January, arrives in December, and on its way down they suddenly lose contact with it. It takes a we've never really found out exactly what happened to polar Lander, but in the post lost testing they come to the realization that in the final stages of its landing, after it's gone through aerobraking in the shell and all this stuff, and it's on its engines.
There's a point of literally less than a minute from landing where it extends its legs and there's a sensor, there's a contact sensor on those legs that helps tell when it's actually landed, and that shuts the engines off. Well, the shock of extending the legs shakes the sensor enough that it thinks it's landed, so it shuts the engines off one hundred and fifty feet in the air. Yikes, bumber bummer. Can't blame it on the Y two K bug,
can we? No? And although the other Mars went out of the way as well, which is in September where the Mars Climate orbiter and using the wrong type of numbers using Newton's instead of foot pounds, does not do its burn correctly to insert itself into the orbit of Mars and instead flies directly into Mars and burns up.
So after this, we're a bunch of programmers at NASA.
Let go there was You know. The sad part is that it's not the only one lost for the sort of thing. I think it was one of the first times they dealt with They got the numbers wrong. What's funny is that both those missions where reflights of instruments from another other lost flights, and then they two were lost although there were other flights. Getting to Mars is hard, two ways about it. Yeah, So let's get on more of the good news parts. In February, the Stardust Comet
Sample Return Mission launches. So this is a small vehicle designed to intercept a comet called eighty one P Wild and it will actually put a great fly, yeah, fly behind the comet into its coma the tail coming out the back, extend these little platters to collect the material the stardust, and then by two thousand and six it'll return those samples safely to Earth.
That's got to be a sturdy platter.
Yeah.
You know, if you think about trying to catch something in a hurricane with a paper plate, you know.
Basically there's this error. This is gel that stuff gets embedded in. It was very clever design. The Cassini mission is on its way to Jupiter, and in June it does a fly by a Venus to get a gravitational assistant help them get out there.
Didn't it take pictures too?
Yeah? Many times? Remember Venus Yeah. It was a phenomenal machine, massive, right size of a school box. One of the very last gigantic observatories. We've not built anything like that since. Speaking of gigantic observatories, the Chandra X ray Observatory was flown on the Columbia Space Shuttle. Aileen Collins was the first shuttle commander. This was the heaviest payload ever lifted by shuttles fifty thousand pounds wow, and that it was
to be clear, it was successful. Chandra is still operational today, provided it continues to get funding. But a lot of scary stuff happened on this flight. A few seconds after the launch, there was a pin in the right engine that came loose and tore into the side of the bell, damaging some cooling lines that have liquid hydrogen flowing through them.
That's not good, not enough to cause an abard, of course, there's no real good abort modes, but it does mean that they're losing fuel, and so the computers automatically compensate by throttling that engine up further, running it hotter, which runs it out of fuel even faster. It'll end up getting to orbit successfully, just a lower orbit than planned, but that's not the only thing that happens with the engines.
An electrical short happens. It takes out two of the engine controllers, one for the center engine and one for the right engine. Fortunately, both their backups kick in. At that point there are no failure modes left. If anything else had gone wrong, they would have had to do an abort that had been designed but never tested.
And they would have to use thrusters only, right, I mean the worst.
Yeah, that's it. You know, if you're down to minimum life support that at this point you're not quite yet in orbit, but you're so there's only two failure modes possible. Presumably your past the solids. The salids are gone, so you're not going to have a challenger issue, but you don't have enough thrust to make it to orbit. So the two choices are either what they call a transitlandic aboart, where you would continue running the engine enough that you
can make it across probably Despain. There Goza where they had a runaway big enough for shuttle, dump the tank and do an emergency landing of the shuttle there. Yeah, we should be great, everybody's safe. Then payload makes it back. There's a question because it was the heaviest mission ever, Like what that would that would do? Yeah, And also there was a big question about how the heck to get the shuttle back after an abort like that, because you can find the seven forty seven over, but the
equipment to lift it is so large. The more practical thing ultimately to do would be to actually transport it to a dock and put it on aircraft carrier to be brought back. Wow, that's not the crazy abort mode, Carl. Here's the crazy abort mode. It's it's called the return to landing abort mode. So get this. If your boosters, you're gone. You haven't got enough thrust to make it into orbit, so you underpower turn the shuttle around and fly backwards to decelerate the vehicle and try and get
it back to Kennedy. Wow. This only was attempted in simulators, and almost all simulator attempts failed. Once in a while, somebody could manage to pull it off to actually be able to land it. So I don't remember all this drama. They never well, none of this happened. None of it happened because ultimately they made it over. These were contingencies.
Oh, Okay, these were potential agency if they didn't have enough thrust to make it back.
This is what they were going These are the things they were going to need to do. So yeah, Columbia came very close to that particular occasion. In May there was the Discovery went to the space station to bring cargo up for the ISS, which at this point is only two modules, Aazaria and Unity. And in December there
is a Hubble servicing mission off of Discovery. This had been regally been scheduled for two thousand, but were they already had three gyros failed on Hubble at this point in ninety nine, and so they went up to bring them a new set of six gyro, some redundancy, and a new fine guidance computer some other two nups as well. Also, this is the year that China flies the first shen Zou vehicle. This is their manned space program. All this particular test was not manned. It's a derivative of Soyu's
a bit bigger with more modern equipment in it. And so I brought it up because they'll fly their first man mission in two thousand and three. And this is the beginning of manned flight by the Chinese, which you know here in twenty twenty six they have a space station. It is continuously occupied. Very cool. All right, Moving off from space, let's talk about computing. AOL completes the acquisition of Netscape. Hooray, hooray. It's you know, it's twenty ninety nine.
Now everybody's everybody's got mail now.
Well but more saliently like that was the IPO Darling just a few years earlier, and now they're broke and have been acquired for pennies on the dollar. So you know, we see the end of the dot com boom here where the original catalyst of it is kind of tank. In June, Sean Fanning and Sean Parker release Napster. Yea.
As we talked about this last last year nineteen ninety eight, there was the beginnings of that.
Yeah. Of course, by the end of the year, the RI will be pursuing them because remember we had the DCMA Act is already in play, so they're not putting up the CMA as what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act digital copyright yeah, which specifically says, hey, you know, you don't have to control the content per se. And remember what Napster actually is is a file sharing strategy. Now that they have the files that you can it's just sharing where files are so that you know they're making
the argument. It's like, it's not us, but that's not going to Google. Google gets their first round of funding and the site is up, so the beginning of their search engine is starting to fly. Blogging already exists, but it's really only for people who are very web savvy. But Netscape releases RSS zero point nine zero, which they call the mean RDF side summary. It's really I think, with titles and links in it for you know, getting summaries of data to auditional reading, and this beginning of
sort of the blog engine. Dave Weiner will take a hold of that specification and improve it substantially with additional information in XML and so forth.
I remember we interviewed Robert Scobel about all that stuff much later, of course, yeah, later on, but this, but he was he was one of the first big blog advocates.
Yeah, it was great and still is great, I know, honestly. Even more relevantly, in ninety nine, a company called Pyra Labs launches a site called Blogger where you don't need to know anything about HTML and so forth. You literally sign up an account, create a blog from them, and just write so you know, beginning of all of those things. Over on the Microsoft side, I E five is released, announced as I E four done right.
Yeah, we see pre release versions a euphour, yah boy boy, we see pre release that's over now, thank god.
We see pre release versions of Windows two thousand, including our first look at active directory. And in November, Microsoft is can declare the pernicious monopoly by the Department of Justice. Na Michel kick off a whole bunch of fun. A little company you may have heard of called Nvidia Releases is one of the first consumer GPUs ever. It's called the g Force.
Twent fifty six, and they will IPO that year if they only knew that graphics was not going to be their cash cow.
Well at least not right now, you know, not now, but who knows what's gonna be Like a little while later, Over in Japan, NTT DoCoMo releases the specifications for mobile data, including a simpl fied HTML. It's only in japad Over in the US, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, the first TVO Wow Divo.
That t I remember one of our first conversations with you was about TVO and you said that in Canada, TVO doesn't get metadata.
Like you can't use it. No, yeah, I used. I had to replay TV with some and DNS redirects.
But yeah, yeah, because you couldn't get metadata in Canada for some reason.
Right, Yeah, it just never was supported. The I Triple E combines their specification known as a TOO two dot one one B alongside of a security protocol a bad one called web and calls it Wi Fi. So the rebrand that name never stick, never got job. A little company called M Systems. We now notice sand Disc releases the first USB flash drives.
Wow, and Kyo.
Sera releases their visual phone known as the VP two ten, which is the first consumer phone with a camera on board with a whole one hundred and ten thousand pixels. What a great idea that was. Yeah. Two more pieces of software to talk about and then we can move on. The first is SETI at Home. Oh yeah, another thing we talked about back in the day. All right, So there's a great joke that you did on one of
your first shows. Maybe it was the show you were a guest on where you were running SETI at home work units to raise the CPU so that your water cooled connected coffee or tea warmer. Yeah, would I would warm your tea. My coffee is getting cold. I got to run some SETI at homework units. Yeah, I had a little of course, it did early water cooling because I'm an idiot and I had this. I found this plate that was designed for sitting coffee on that had the water loop in it. And yeah, you could make
the machine horder if you ran it hard enough. And the last piece of software I talk about is the Melissa virus. Oh yeah, written by David Smith, and it is certainly not the first virus. It was just a propagator, no payload. It was an innocent time back then. But with the innovation that Smith came up with was it was an email propagator. So when you opened an email, it would run a macro that would go through your entire contact list and email everybody in your contact list.
And it was huge. It went everywhere.
I don't recall getting spammed by it. So he avoid eye one. Yeah that's that's did you get it? I think I did.
I think we did see that one go through because it crippled mail servers, right, just it would drop mail service to its knees because all of you, suddenly, each person you know, opening one email sends five hundred more right hanging on the sides of the contact list. And so the real problem is if you were a popular contact and I was, you got a lot of those emails, you got it, and then you know, I think I didn't set it off because suddenly I had fifty of
the same email from all different people. You like, Right, that's not good. That looks bad. That's right, that's not right.
All right, let's talk about the top ten grossing movies of nineteen ninety nine. Number ten, Runaway Bride, number nine, Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me? Oh Man, Number eight, American Beauty seven, The World Is Not Enough six Nodding Hill. It's a movie my wife still wants me to watch with her, and I'm kind of rolling my eyes. Five Tarzan for the Matrix.
Oh Boy, one of my very favorites nineteen ninety nine.
Oh yeah, that kind of blew. It's only number four. It's only number four because number three is Toy Story two, great great film. Number two is the sixth Sense m I see lots of doll yes, six hundred and seventy three million to be exact, and number one Star Wars episode one, the Phantom Menace, which came in at one point three.
Billion dollars and disappointed so many people.
Yeah, charge our banks kind of killed it for me.
But.
Admitichlorians are a parasite, Like just yeah, yeah, I'm a big believer in the machete order of how you watch the movies, where you actually watch episode four first, then two and three? Are you watch four and five first, right, so you see Empire strikes back, You're like, wow, what's going on? Then you watch two and three sort of the invention of Darth Vader, and then six is the Redemption. You know, you don't watch You don't watch episode one
because it does nothing. You don't need it for anything. It's unnecessary. I remember we took our oldest daughter, Emmy two. She was our only daughter at that point, and she was young, and she got so upset when Anakin had to leave his mom. Yeah, she got so upset she ran out of the theater. Crime fair enough. That's what the kids see, right.
They knew how to Lucas knew how to tug on the kid's heart strings, that's for sure. All right, let's get into better no framework, I got a good one for you.
Awesome, Oh man, what do you got?
So I went looking in the trending repos on GitHub, but I didn't limit it to C sharp, but just the English language, and I found one at the very top called build your Own X and it's basically the repository is a compilation of well written, step by step guides for recreating our favorite technologies from scratch. So the whole idea isn't that you want to replace, you know, something that you have with something you can write. But it's for learning. Oh interesting, Yeah, it's for learning how
to write code. Yea, doing stuff from scratch with an end goal that you already know what it does. So here's some of the things you can build. Three D renderer, an AI model, augmented reality, a bit torrent client, blockchain, cryptocurrency, a bot, command line tool, database dock because everybody needs to write their own database before they die. Okay, I
did that once once. Docer an emulator or virtual machine front end frameworker library, a game, GIT memory allocator, network stack, neural network operating system, physics engine, processor programming language, rej ex engine, search engine, shell template engine, text editor, visual recognition system, a vox cell engine, a web browser, a web server, and then there's a category called uncategorized. But I mean, this is real stuff. You know, it's cool,
it's very cool. So I wanted to give a shout out to these guys. And you know, if there's anybody left on the planet who wants to learn programming, and they should, this is a way to do it.
Let's cool. Yeah, nice, fine, well done.
So that's what I got. Who's talking to us today, Richard.
Knowing this is an unusual show and we're sort of put in pieces together, I wanted to do an unusual comment, call it an erratum or a correction or retractions from episode nineteen ninety six, which was when we did with Dan Roth talking about ASP dot net core. And I mentioned in the history part about Alexa in nineteen ninety six. Okay, and so with the pseudonym eternal twenty one is is comment. I thought the close claiming Alexa was released in ninetety
six was an abul fool's joke. I think you were just able to start ordering books online around that time. Amazon Alexa was officially released in November twenty fourteen, alongside the Amos on Echo smart speaker twenty eleven, under the code named Doppler from Amazon's labs. That makes sense, Yeah, that's the Alexa that I mentioned. What I meant to
talk about was a different Alexa. But I messed up my notes because in nineteen ninety six there were a new website was stood up called Alexa and it was a site for doing web traffic data and global rankings. In ninety six, like right at the beginning of all of this, and just to make it more complicated, it was acquired by Amazon. Oh boy, so my mistake. I mixed up the name of two different things that Amazon ultimately owned. They did shut down the website ultimately in
twenty two. Yeah, but yeah, that's what happened there. My apologies, but eternal thank you so much for your comment, and a copy of music Cobi is on its way to you. And if you'd like copy of music go buy right a comment on the website at dot rocks dot com or on the Facebook. So we publish every show there and if you comment there and I read it on the show, I'll send you a copy of.
Us to go by, and so just to lay the groundwork for what you're going to hear next, we have a bunch of just individuals store worries from individuals who worked on the Y two K bug in nineteen ninety nine. Yeah, and so we're going to listen to those now. Hi.
Back in nineteen ninety seven, my first ever professional software development role was working with a company that had the loans, higher purchase and leasing products written in quick Basic seven point one that we needed to make Y two K compatible.
And to say it was painful with being understatement. We had to go through every single dot bass file looking for every usage of dates, and the variable names were pretty consistently bad as you can imagine, like today's date was usually a dollar, and sometimes a dollar was used not just for today's date but for other values as well. On the once all the logic was fixed, and then as a ship all the floppy disks to all the
customers and that was a massive effort as well. So in the end we had all the customers working with smoothly without any issues and they all went to plan, which is quite extraordinary really, So it was Yeah, it was a massive excess though, pretty painful.
I'm Sean Wildemuth and I've been listening to the podcast since the early days. I think it was the early two thousands. Actually, I did work for a Y two K company. Actually they did SNMP audits to find y two k problems. As soon as two thousand were old around, they were out of business and I was out of a job.
Go figure.
Early on, I listened to dot net Rocks to hear about what was new in dot net, because those were the early days of one O beta and eventually one to one. Over the years, I've been invited on the podcast seventeen times. Carl and Richard have been incredibly kind and generous with their time, and it's helped my career tremendously. Twenty years on, it's still worth listening to every episode.
So Richard Guy Royce is here to tell us his experiences with Y two K. Hi Guy, Hey, how's it going good? How are you? I'm doing all right? You know, I always like to say I'm fair to Midland. How was your nineteen ninety nine profitable?
My line for a while now has been I bought a house off the back of what I made.
With Y two K?
Yeah, yeah, It was a great time to be a consultant. It really was. You know, I was fairly young, relatively early in my career, and I was doing a lot of C plus plus and oh man, I wasn't on a C plus plus project that actually needed remediation. To work with Y two k. It was a let's just throw away this old system and completely rewrite it in C plus plush, and that was the solution that they had come up with. But I had a whole bunch of mainframe integration and stuff in it as well.
I mean, great that you're a consultant, because that's just bucks. But from a from an architect's point of view, it's like, is this really the right thing to rewrite? And C plus plus? Yeah?
You know, it's probably worth noting that the company got bought up by someone in the and someone else, and now it's not really a thing anymore. I could probably talk about the company honestly.
Yeah, but obviously somebody got paid like it worked out for them. Yeah, but you weren't actually remediating a C plus plus. It was just to rewrite. Yeah.
They had was The client was Sterling Commerce, which if you've ever heard of them, they were like a EDI broker kind of thing before the Internet really took off.
Sure, it's nine.
And so they had like DN lines coming in from various big clients wow, and various ways of getting data in and out. And then they would take data from say a retailer, which is with a bunch of purchase orders, and then transform it into a format that would be suitable to and over a wire protocol that would be acceptable by some supplier that they bought their supplies from,
and those sorts of things. And so you'd take in like one would come over the Internet using just like an IP tunnel of some sort, and then it would go off over FTP to some other server.
Or rue Goldberg.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so they were just they were the hub and they had all these spokes and so the hub itself wasn't really that complicated, but the spokes were where all the effort was at.
But that means you're bringing other people's data. Are you now trying to enforce four digit years? No?
No, that was all and then we're just we're just carrying the data around, right okay. Yeah, And some of them were integrated through the mainframe as well, so we had to like tie in with we used host Integration server. If anyone remembers host Integration Server, yeah, wow, there's a music story. I don't know if that's podcast safe about that, but.
Well yeah, my first question was going to be were you dealing with code or data or both? I mean, it sounds like it was in memory, but what about persistence? And I thought that was where the real problem was.
It was mostly it was dealing with code and data, but the data itself. They had data themselves that need to be remediated for their application, but the code was really the bulk of the work. The data that we were carrying on behalf of the clients. We just carried it.
There was no and you I presume we carried it as string, so you don't care what's in it? Really like bytes, you're not actually doing any data. That's okay.
Yeah, someone wasn't even strings. It was just bytes like some of the health I don't know if that. I don't remember if we did healthcare data or not. I don't think we did. I remember we had like various EDI formats, but it was really more about taking it and there was a transformation. But there's no Y two is K compatibility in there. Right then, at least not
in any of the parts that I worked on. The thing I specifically remember spending the most time on was a obscure protocol that was popular in Europe called OFTP, the ODEBT file Transfer Protocol, which god, I don't know if that exists anymore or not if anyone's still using it. It's some standard. It goes like back to the seventies or something.
Oh oh, debt dot Org. Dude, I'll include it in the show notes for people who.
Will have it's still out there. Yeah, wow, good news. They're up to version two. Up the version two the seventies have called they want their version one back. Yeah, but yeah, it was. It was a really weird time though, because I mean, some companies took advantage of y twok to get budget to do rewrites that they kind of needed to do anyhow.
Sure.
Yeah. Tact it was a cover for all kinds of technical debt.
Yeah yeah. It was like a tech debt slush fund. Yeah yeah. And some companies were and consulting companies were happy to take the money to do those projects. And it was it was weird because it was one of those times when it absolutely positively had to be done by a hard deadline that was completely inflexible.
So this was the us FED deadline of June thirtieth, no no or voices. It was literally that nineteen ninety nine. Like you will know you got January first.
Yeah, yeah, of twenty of two thousand, it's like, well it's not done by then, then we've got a problem, right, Yeah. And so everyone just sand bagged all the estimates on everything and you know, and then threw a lot of money at it, and then everyone met the date. And I was happy to be a part of it. You know, I was young, making money. It was great, good, good times.
Nothing wrong with that.
Yeah. You can also see from a C plus plus point of view because the way you did data structure, especially back then, like it's just no easy migration path. You have to build new structures to store data to the dates differently, right. Yeah.
I think I think that was even before like STL was a thing, right, or at least it was popularized because I remember the first C plus plus project I did professionally was for a a Central Ohio based lingerie company who has a secret.
Okay, not just one secret, yeah, we got more than one. Yeah, many secrets.
Yeah, and the first thing we did on that project was okay, well we got to build our link lists and our hash tables and all of our conventional trastructures because they weren't baked in. This was really before the standard template libraries became part of C plus plus. Yeah, you know, I haven't really been in this plus plus world a lot since then. I don't know if they're there anymore or not.
But inflexible memory structures.
Yeah, yeah, that was just a nature of the beast. Yeah, sdls from the mid nineties, So by two thousand you may or may not have implemented against it yet, right, Like, it's just still early.
So your structure has basically had two bytes for a date? Just why why is that? Can we boil it down to that?
For the parts I worked on, I didn't really have to. It was it was y two K, And it wasn't y two K in a way because a lot of was just faring the data along or transforming it from one standard to another. And I don't remember, honestly if the standards how they handled dates. Some of them, I'm sure I mean n C plus plaus Land, I'm sure a lot of these dates were being handled by just unix states, which means the problem is coming back up here real soon.
Right, And that's the second since nineteen seventy. Yeah, or two bits solution that needs to has been that has been converted to a sixty four bit solution if you've done the conversion.
Yeah, But I just remember the weird file protocols that we were are not file the weird wire protocols that we were implementing to send these things, these files around. Had we built this one big core though, that did something that wasn't on that part of the project. Specifically, this big core that did so take like an EEDI thing and turn it into some other format that is amenable for that company.
Right.
But I didn't get too deep into that specific aspect of it. It was more just building a lot of the protocol adapts to allow these files to be transferred across different wire formats.
Right. So it sounds like you were a transport guy, Yeah, deal with all the different ways and stuff moving around and just C plus plus or another languages floating around.
There was some COBAL involved, but I didn't touch it.
Of course, because you had the main frame stuff. Yeah.
Because well, one of the integration points was the main frame.
I was gonna say, cob I think Cobol is the star of nineteen ninety ninety.
Yeah, in terms of Y two K, there was so much, so much Cobal that had to be redone.
I'm actually really surprised that I didn't find myself doing more of it, because it is it is something that I can do, well, could do. I don't know that I could do it today, maybe a couple of weeks get up to speed. But I did do Cobyl early in my career.
And well, you know, chat ept you could do anything.
Yeah, yeah, whatever, I did do Cobyl in my career. My first job out out of college was as a Cobal developer on DOS, a DOS based Cobyl system. So but it just never didn't line up that way. But yeah, it was, it was, it was fun, it's awesome.
Only Cobal I ever did was in college. I have computer science class. The tests, right, yeah, just to pass the test, I mean, couple is not hard. It's just it's actually it's pretty easy.
Yeah, it's just everything's just a text file. Man, it's just like it's it's batch processing. It's fine.
It wasn't even it's not even any more for both than modern Java.
So I'm a couple doesn't have a lot of dot notation I think some ways is less for both. Well, guy, thanks for your viewpoint on this. It sounds like it was a cool project. And look a mitly twenty six years ago. Twenty seven years ago, so a long time ago.
Yeah, it's it's hard to believe it's been that long.
Yeah, and thanks for making sure the world didn't blow up.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Well, you're welcome to make sure that home Depot can get their data routed to their wholesalers so that they can you know exactly.
Do you ever wonder about how much of your code is from then he's still in use?
I do, actually, and I think there's a little bit, but not a lot.
You would hope, right, Like I kind of want to kind of I'm hoping people aren't using that code anymore. Yeah, I met that guy. He was that right, you know, like that's a long time.
I was really an idiot back then. Yeah, and it's a bit more that I'm still an idiot, but.
A very experienced idiot. Yeah.
Excellent guy, Thanks a lot, Thanks a lot, good chatting with y'all. We'll see you out there. Yeah at the conferences for sure.
Ye see you the next thing.
And who should appear before us, Richard but Rick Hapworth, Hi Rick, Hello, What.
A marveless, marvelous introduction that was? That was I want to go out at the door and come back and hear it again, quick and dirty.
We understand you have some experience.
With the Y two K bug I might have been around.
I worked for university, so so life was entertaining, right because it wasn't just like, hey, here are the computers that you know make our business work or do our banking transactions.
It was hey, we got.
Chemists and physicists and engineers and you know what they're like mechanical chemical, chemical engineers, biomedical engineers and the computer scientists guys and the computing guys. So yeah, it was it was fun.
So it's not just dealing with the student data. It's all of the laboratory data. It's huge a rate of different things.
Yeah, the students were actually kind of easy. I mean we so I worked for a pretty small university in the UK, but we were actually pretty switched on. We were really early adopters of things like the Internet and the web, we got a web server before anybody else had. We kept turning up in those sort of web magazines, you know, that kind of stuff. And we had student
labs for the students. We'd got connectivity from holes. But at the end of the day, we chose what to give students, and we controlled the machines and you know, we disinfected them after they logged out physically and and electronically, you know. And it was a closed environment, whereas the the rest of the university academia is a crazy place because academics have freedom, right and it's like all right now and I've bought this thing and I'm going to do some research with it, or We've got this.
New Sure it's there. It's their grant money, right, Yeah, they're just going to get stuff. Yeah, and we go in and expect you in it to manage it for them.
Yeah, you know, what does it do? What does it need? Have you read the man you all, have you read the system requirements? And just not after midnight? So yeah, I mean Y two K for us was a combination
of several things, really, right. So we got the administrative side of the house that was one sort of computing department and they were the guys who were looking at our HR systems and our finance systems and our student coord systems, and that's that's very similar to all everybody else is white to get.
Yeah.
And then we got the sort of estate side of the house, which was a bit more challenging because they tended to have less budget, and it was things like, well, what happens if that fails, Well, the air conditioning goes off in all of the buildings at once, and and you know, it's a combination of bespoke physical hardware card and I remember once at the time it's like, what's that. Well, that's that's the control system further heating. That's an eight
bit icer card. I haven't seen one of those for quite.
A while, vintage gear.
Yeah. And we also had the telephony switches, which by the way, were not digital telephony switches at that point either. And we were a campus, right, so we got several of those. And then we got the general academic populace, which is mostly what I was dealing with. So I was part of the Academic Computer Center, so provided compute for the students and compute for all of the academic departments except computing, who were their own fiefdom and non
shall pass and we'll do what we like. And they had their own stuff, right, and they managed.
Very much.
Yeah, but but the bit in the middle we were pretty switched on. So we've got we've got netwear Service and I still maintain NDS is a better directory than ad will ever wish it was. And all of our academic departments had netwear service and they were all netwere five one big NDS. But then departments had their own compute. So our electronic imaging department they did computer graphics and that kind of stuff. They got silicon graphics, really nice
shiny stuff. And it was like people and the organization knew how they worked. What's that's an indigo? Well it looks cool, no idea. Kem Inge had a dusty old deck vax that was set in the back of a room that somebody had bought, that was still sort of ticking along, you know.
And it was still running, like I've've seen plenty of those as paper weights, but it was still running.
Yeah, I'm hearing like the list of hardware, So how much of the preparation was replaced the hardware and how much was Oh, we had the source code to this, let's we got to fix this code or this database. How much of it was software versus hardware?
Surprisingly little actually was replaced the hardware. So again as an academic computer center, we were organized. We had a thing we called rolling replacement, so we replaced twenty five percent of our computer estate every year. So we didn't have that much in terms of legacy gear ourselves. Right, some departments had older compute and we helped them try and work out budgets and replacement plans for desktop PCs.
A lot of what we were doing was very much cataloging in a state of applicationations, which was well into the hundreds, right, with everything from like weird scientific chemical modeling applications and finite element analysis and CAD and compute all the way down the word processes an office and that kind of stuff. Sure, and it's like, well, we've got a catalog at all, We've got to check with all of the distributors whether this stuff is y two K compliant and if it's not, is there going to
be a patch? And if there isn't a patch, well, what's our contingency?
Yeah, what's the work around? Or does it is it relevant? Like if you're not analyzing data across from ninety ninety two thousand. Does it really matter exactly?
You know, if the lab is out partying, does it matter if the mass spec isn't why two K compliant? If it switched off? Right, So it was very much a lot of spreadsheets, right of what have we got? Does it tick the box?
And then but a software inventory is something you probably needed anyway. This was an excuse to get one.
Yes, I mean we had again, we knew what software we had, right because we maintained the student clusters. We've got this huge list of applications that we had to install for students to learn on. But the further away from our own stuff, we got the thicker the fog, right, and you could kind of walk into any office you like, in any department and go what have you got? And you'd learn about three new things and one of them they only used on a Tuesday, and one of them
they bought. It was still in the box and three years ago killed Let's make a note and what's important?
Yeah, no kidding. Did you get to a point where there was applications that you had to fix yourself? Or I mean academics also tend to write software in certain spaces too. I've seen this software written by a chemical engineer. It looked like an engineer wrote software right only.
So so stuff like that we we genuinely did, go well, it's your problement now. So we had several people in the computer center who did application support. Right, So we'd got like a couple of Fortrend specialists and a few other guys who were into certain languages, and part of their job was to help both teach it and also to support departments if they were trying to write their own stuff. Most in house developed software, though, was like Fox pro and Access. You know, there's two great pillars
of solid foundational computing. Our admin computer team had written stuff, but they started with quite a long run up and examined their stuff very careful and had programs to fix it as they needed to. Most of the academic computer centers stuff was you know, we need patches for Windows ninety eight, ninety seven, eighty five, Office ninety seven, that kind of stuff. We had some in house written software. We had a magnificent student printing system that was entirely written in Perl.
Languages.
Yeah, but I mean, so I did some research before coming on right, I actually went and looked up things like pearlam and Pull's statement on y two K is pearls? Why too compliant? Like a pencil is y two K compliant? You can write good stuff with pearl, you can write bad stuff with sure?
Got it? Well? I ran in this all the time with the projects that I was dealing with, where they just didn't use the date structure, which was why too compliant. They were storing dates and strings and they weren't compliant to anything, and they were almost impossible to validate. So you know, part of this is just untangling what have you done with your dates?
Stuff that I was doing was all just using standard date fields which were y two K compliants. Yeah, I didn't have too much trouble.
I think a lot of our stuff, honestly, was like that. We struggled more with departments simply running old stuff because they'd never been bothered to upgrade, rather than actually stumbling upon something that genuinely wasn't competitive.
So now there are four versions behind.
Again, once we'd moved away from the yeah, because well it works, why we need to work gread?
Yeah?
You know, well word style was good enough.
Enough, like January first, two thousand rolls around and all the software bursts into flames either. Right, it's just if you have to do something spanning across those the ninety ninety two thousand, if it doesn't do date Maath properly, dumb things are going to have.
Yeah, that's the gist of it.
Fundamentally, we checked everything as we approach the Christmas break because we're a university, should we we shut down for a week? Yeah, you know, the core services were all running on some Solaris, Our network servers were fine, most of the desktop machines would be turned off. Anything people weren't sure about was turned off, and it was much more a focus on how do we make the system safe than necessarily how do we continue doing business over
the year termination? Right, because we're university, so we're closed to learn first thing on January first.
Which makes me think the week back after the Christmas break would have been the hairy week because now you're turning stuff back on again. You don't know what's going to happen now, or you know, you're not sure, and it's every department probably got a little bit of it, so you're just sort of staring at the phone waiting for it to go off.
Yeah, basically. But again, I think the problem is we all did such a jolly good job of the planning and the lists of things we had to be careful with, right, The Y two K was such a non event for all of us, and it's well.
You suddenly had a deadline to get all your updates done, and if you did them, you're probably fine.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean the cool thing is I was looking at the way back machine before I came on and you can still see our Y two K page for departments, and it's literally just a list of updates. Download this install, this install, this install.
Listen, you'll be fine, right.
The actual Y two K plans sadly are locked away between behind authentic K, so lost in the.
Midst of time. Yeah. What's hidden is the sheer amount of work it took to get that list right.
Yeah, yeah, and the number of trees we killed in finding the list of software, checking all the hard ware, making sure all the departments had a plan and they'd all signed it off, right.
That's right. That's where they knew. They knew what to turn off, they knew what to update, and they knew who to call. The week of the first week of January. Yeah, that's a good plan. Yeah, well done, Rick. It's a great story, and it's just sort of a reality of this was a lot.
There was a lot of housekeeping and a bit of firefighting. H Yeah, good story, good stuff. Thanks for sharing it with us.
You're very welcome with the pleasure as always.
All right, So that's our show, Richard. Yeah, I'm glad.
We got a few different stories from different folks and where they were and how they dealt with these issues. I mean, some of it wasn't that big a deal to software updates, but sometimes you had applications that needed to be fixing. You had to go through them line by line. That's certainly the work I did the first half of ninety nine was doing line by line fixes, although we wrote partiers and things to do it as quickly as possible, because there was a lot of code of you.
That's right, and you know, the world remembers nothing happening.
But as we did, we did a good job. It a good job, that's right, became a non event. All right.
Well, I guess that's all we have for today, and we'll see you next time on dot net.
Rocks for episode two thousand.
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