In article , Edward Reid wrote:

So, your car would still have run -- the microcontroller there was not
date-dependent.

Correct.

Traffic signals might have worked, but many vary their
patterns on weekends -- they might have gotten the day of the week
wrong, or the software might have crashed and left all the lights
blinking.

Nonsense. *What* software? Think mechanical timers.

The Internet would have stayed up,

Correct.

but most web sites would have gone down.

Absolute nonsense.

And this is before we even start talking about banking,

More nonsense. Nearly every bank in the world that didn't already know
about the Y2K problem became aware of it no later than the first business day
of 1970; that is, the first time they tried to write a 30-year mortgage that
terminated after 1999.

all business systems (including point of sale), etc.

Even industrial control systems,

Maybe.

airplane control systems,

Garbage. Aircraft control systems are no more date-aware than car computers
are. The only thing the system cares about is how much time has elapsed since
power-up. I used to work with that stuff back in the 80s when I worked for the
Navy; the systems don't even know what time of day it is, let alone what the
date is. They don't care. There's no need to know. Elapsed time is the *only*
thing they're concerned with.

medical device
controllers, etc had the potential to fail

Only in the sense that someone is capable of *imagining* ways in which they
could fail. The simple fact is that *no* device that was not date-aware had
*any* potential at all for failure.

You're doing nothing more than regurgitating some of the less ridiculous scare
stories that circulated in the y2k newsgroup in 1998 and 1999. The *more*
ridiculous ones included the notion that common kitchen appliances such as
microwave ovens and toasters would cease to function after 31 Dec 1999. No,
I'm not making that up.


-- many of these embedded
systems would have been OK, but nobody could tell until they were
analyzed.

Yes, and in most cases, the analysis consisted of asking "Does this device
know what day it is? Do we have to set the date as part of its startup
procedure?" If the answer is no -- as it is in the overwhelming majority of
cases -- then it won't be afffected.

Again, Y2K just wasn't in the field of view when much of
this was written.


Realize that in general, even a minor error in a computer program can
make the entire program fail.

Only if you write brittle, poorly constructed programs.

It's as though omitting one nail from a
rafter might make an entire building collapse. Digital systems are far
more sensitive in this respect. Thus even minor date-related errors
had to be found and fixed because they had the potential to bring down
the entire edifice.

So, people who say "January 1, 2000 wasn't a big deal, why did we
spend all that money" are wrong. January 1, 2000 wasn't a big deal
*because* we spent all that money. Without the remediation effort, the
human world, the first world anyway, would pretty much have come to a
stop that day.

Oh, bull****, it would not have.