Yes, indeed! As someone who also sat in a room (with many other people) watching the clock tick until the stroke of midnight I still get pissed off if people remember y2k as the event that "did not happen". Nothing happened because most of 1998 and 1999 was spent running around customer sites checking & patching software.
I work with industrial control systems and the oldest code comment that was found about the year 2000 problem was in code from the early 80s. The programmer long retired but that code was still running oil refineries.
There were very little large chemical installations in the pacific so we waited for updates from sites in New Zealand. After those sites rolled into the new year without problem everybody relaxed and we knew that our software installed in middle east oil&gas sites would work ok so people would have petrol and diesel in the new millennium. Then the rollover in the EU and US region were easy after that.
"I still get pissed off if people remember [it] as the event that "did not happen""
Welcome to the life of any operations engineer, my friend. If we're doing our job right, no one notices that the insanely complex and down-to-the-wire maintenance goes smoothly.
Ever tried cleaning a school? Students can even be heard saying things like "It's their job to pick up after me so it doesn't matter that I throw garbage on the floor".
I was on an island in Sydney harbour sitting behind someone with a handheld video camera. As the first firework exploded, his video camera turned off. Everyone looked around at the buildings, waiting for the lights to flicker.
It was a comment from someone who understood that 2 digit year notation was bad and explained why he used the full year notation. At this time memory was still counted in kilobytes so it probably was an expensive use of two extra bytes.
I work with industrial control systems and the oldest code comment that was found about the year 2000 problem was in code from the early 80s. The programmer long retired but that code was still running oil refineries.
There were very little large chemical installations in the pacific so we waited for updates from sites in New Zealand. After those sites rolled into the new year without problem everybody relaxed and we knew that our software installed in middle east oil&gas sites would work ok so people would have petrol and diesel in the new millennium. Then the rollover in the EU and US region were easy after that.