25 years ago, we experienced a phenomenon known as Y2K. This was the changeover from 1999 to 2000 that was thought to be problematic for technology of the day. You see, in the early days of computing, memory and storage was much more expensive, our hard drives were measured in MB instead of TB. I remember spending $500 on a new 40 MB hard drive, driving all the way out to Rockford to get it. That was a 50-mile trip each way and I was happy to do it. I finally had enough space to store all my files on a single drive.
Programmers of the various systems in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s had the same issues but on a grander scale. To save space on the memory portions of the technology years were expressed with 2 digits, hence 1985 was notated as “85”. While these days that would not seem to be much of a savings in storage space, it really was in those days. Our iPhones today have much more computing power and storage space as the biggest and best computers of the era.
No one really thought about any issues this might create down the road, most of the programmers of these systems would be dead or retired by the time it would matter. The issue that would arise was so far away as not having been considered. Eventually, however time caught up with us and it started to matter. Simple things like sorting by year would be wrong after the millennium changed. (Side note here: For this tale the Millennium starts 1-1-2000. I know that many people consider the Millennium as 1-1-2001 as there was no year 0 but that is semantics.)
At the time I was a police officer in a suburban town and was pretty much the “radio guy”. As part of my duties, I took care of pretty much all the communications needs for the police department and pretty much for the rest of the village as well, including the fire, public works, water and electric departments. In addition, I was in charge of the networks for the police/fire station and coordinated with the IT department to integrate things for the rest of the village. It was a small town, with about 12,000 people but we were heavily integrated with our neighbors in cooperative communications systems so there was a lot of work with other towns as well. I was heavily involved in our regional communications cooperative as well.
As Y2K approached so did the hysteria. It was going to be an apocalyptic event according to some. The “preppers” were digging bunkers and storing acorns while spreading rumors that nuclear weapons would explode at midnight and all technology would instantly fail. The rest of us figured that some stuff would just not roll over properly and we might have a computer or three that needs to be changed manually.
For much of 1998 and 1999 we went through and upgraded older systems and ran scenarios. The village’s IT director set up a test server on an isolated network and tested the various computers, servers and other devices that we could. We found that some older things would have some issues but for the most part we were confident that it would be a nonevent. We updated some equipment such as the video and audio recording systems and a couple of servers. The audio recording system in particular would have some issues, its integrated OS would not handle 4-digit years and so we replaced it with a new system. All the other stuff, such as our radio consoles, in-car computers, radios and computer servers, all seemed to work just fine.
In spite of our confidence that our stuff would work the Village Manager and his staff wanted to be prepared. We were less confident of the utilities that we did not manage, like the phone systems (cellular and wireline), cable TV, natural gas, and the regional electric grid. There were also concerns about point-of-sale systems in the retail sector and pipeline and fuel delivery. Since we had no control over these systems, we had to hope they worked but be prepared if they didn’t.
The Manager came up with an idea. The Village would throw a Y2K party for village employees and their families at the fire station. Key employees such as department heads, line supervisors and tech guys like me would be required to attend, our families and any other Village employee would be invited and even paid OT to be there. It was really a great idea. If there were any problems, we would have staff present, available and sober to handle it. If the projected apocalypse occurred, then we could all die together. If nothing happened, we all had pizza, pop and friends to ring in the new millennium with.
We did of course make preparations. We had backup radios set up in the communications center already so if the consoles failed, we could use them. We also prepared for the phone and 9-1-1 system to fail by having designated Village Contact Centers set up around town, with 4 square miles we decided 4 would be sufficient. Each had a radio-equipped car, with a police officer and a village staffer in each.
We made sure our village fuel station was topped off as well as all our vehicles. We tested the generator systems in the police/fire station as well as Public Works. The power plant was operating on its own generators that were running in case we got disconnected from the regional grid. We doubled the shifts in the 9-1-1 center and had extra guys on the street and in the firehouse just in case.
The party was a great time. While there was no liquor of course, there was plenty of pizza, burgers, soft drinks and comradery. The core tech guys; myself, the IT director, my friend and colleague Ted and the fire department’s “radio guy” all stuck together in case anything happened.
As the big moment approached, we watched the ball drop in New York, an hour ahead of us. We already had seen that places further east like London and Berlin had not had any issues and after New York survived we were very confident that we would live to see another day. When our Midnight came and went, we went and checked everything we had and aside from the video server, everything turned over just fine and dandy. The video server clock display went from “12-31-99” to “01-01-73” for some reason but when we changed the date to “01-01-00” it took and seemed to work fine. The next day we checked, and the video files were sorted properly except for the 2 with the 1973 dates. We affixed a Post-it note on the server to remind us of those files just in case.
As for the radio systems, we had no problems. The Mastr-II repeater system had no time and date info to be disrupted and the other radio base stations, mostly Motorola Micors, didn’t either. The consoles were DOS based but the workstations and server had been upgraded and had no issues. Over at the power plant the SCADA system worked fine, they upgraded it during 1998, and it turned over with no issues.
One of our neighboring towns had a server fail, but we weren’t sure if it was date-related or just coincidental. We provided a spare server and helped them restore from a backup later in the afternoon, meanwhile our dispatcher ran their plates and the like for them.
All in all, Y2K was pretty much a yawn. It did, however, serve to allow us to upgrade many older systems. All we had to say was that we needed to upgrade something “for Y2K” and we were given the money to do so. As a self-reliant community we did most of the work in-house; this helped ensure it was done right, and we would know how to fix any issues down the road. We learned a lot about our various tech.
The Y2K party was a masterpiece of an idea. It was a lot of fun and ensured that the right people were available if there was an issue. Many of the preparations for that night, while unneeded as it turned out, became part of the emergency operations plans for any potential future catastrophes. With luck they will never be needed but if they are we are confident they will succeed.
While I have been retired for almost a decade now, I still have contact with and provide advice when asked about systems. Most of the stuff I set up in my time has since been or soon will be replaced. Our radios have gone from analog UHF to P25 on 700 MHz. The computers have all been replaced as have most of the servers since I left. Our dispatch center has been closed and operations consolidated with our neighbors at a regional dispatch center. Most of the people involved with Y2K have died or retired, the IT director retired just last year.
Like the saying goes: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst”.
Programmers of the various systems in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s had the same issues but on a grander scale. To save space on the memory portions of the technology years were expressed with 2 digits, hence 1985 was notated as “85”. While these days that would not seem to be much of a savings in storage space, it really was in those days. Our iPhones today have much more computing power and storage space as the biggest and best computers of the era.
No one really thought about any issues this might create down the road, most of the programmers of these systems would be dead or retired by the time it would matter. The issue that would arise was so far away as not having been considered. Eventually, however time caught up with us and it started to matter. Simple things like sorting by year would be wrong after the millennium changed. (Side note here: For this tale the Millennium starts 1-1-2000. I know that many people consider the Millennium as 1-1-2001 as there was no year 0 but that is semantics.)
At the time I was a police officer in a suburban town and was pretty much the “radio guy”. As part of my duties, I took care of pretty much all the communications needs for the police department and pretty much for the rest of the village as well, including the fire, public works, water and electric departments. In addition, I was in charge of the networks for the police/fire station and coordinated with the IT department to integrate things for the rest of the village. It was a small town, with about 12,000 people but we were heavily integrated with our neighbors in cooperative communications systems so there was a lot of work with other towns as well. I was heavily involved in our regional communications cooperative as well.
As Y2K approached so did the hysteria. It was going to be an apocalyptic event according to some. The “preppers” were digging bunkers and storing acorns while spreading rumors that nuclear weapons would explode at midnight and all technology would instantly fail. The rest of us figured that some stuff would just not roll over properly and we might have a computer or three that needs to be changed manually.
For much of 1998 and 1999 we went through and upgraded older systems and ran scenarios. The village’s IT director set up a test server on an isolated network and tested the various computers, servers and other devices that we could. We found that some older things would have some issues but for the most part we were confident that it would be a nonevent. We updated some equipment such as the video and audio recording systems and a couple of servers. The audio recording system in particular would have some issues, its integrated OS would not handle 4-digit years and so we replaced it with a new system. All the other stuff, such as our radio consoles, in-car computers, radios and computer servers, all seemed to work just fine.
In spite of our confidence that our stuff would work the Village Manager and his staff wanted to be prepared. We were less confident of the utilities that we did not manage, like the phone systems (cellular and wireline), cable TV, natural gas, and the regional electric grid. There were also concerns about point-of-sale systems in the retail sector and pipeline and fuel delivery. Since we had no control over these systems, we had to hope they worked but be prepared if they didn’t.
The Manager came up with an idea. The Village would throw a Y2K party for village employees and their families at the fire station. Key employees such as department heads, line supervisors and tech guys like me would be required to attend, our families and any other Village employee would be invited and even paid OT to be there. It was really a great idea. If there were any problems, we would have staff present, available and sober to handle it. If the projected apocalypse occurred, then we could all die together. If nothing happened, we all had pizza, pop and friends to ring in the new millennium with.
We did of course make preparations. We had backup radios set up in the communications center already so if the consoles failed, we could use them. We also prepared for the phone and 9-1-1 system to fail by having designated Village Contact Centers set up around town, with 4 square miles we decided 4 would be sufficient. Each had a radio-equipped car, with a police officer and a village staffer in each.
We made sure our village fuel station was topped off as well as all our vehicles. We tested the generator systems in the police/fire station as well as Public Works. The power plant was operating on its own generators that were running in case we got disconnected from the regional grid. We doubled the shifts in the 9-1-1 center and had extra guys on the street and in the firehouse just in case.
The party was a great time. While there was no liquor of course, there was plenty of pizza, burgers, soft drinks and comradery. The core tech guys; myself, the IT director, my friend and colleague Ted and the fire department’s “radio guy” all stuck together in case anything happened.
As the big moment approached, we watched the ball drop in New York, an hour ahead of us. We already had seen that places further east like London and Berlin had not had any issues and after New York survived we were very confident that we would live to see another day. When our Midnight came and went, we went and checked everything we had and aside from the video server, everything turned over just fine and dandy. The video server clock display went from “12-31-99” to “01-01-73” for some reason but when we changed the date to “01-01-00” it took and seemed to work fine. The next day we checked, and the video files were sorted properly except for the 2 with the 1973 dates. We affixed a Post-it note on the server to remind us of those files just in case.
As for the radio systems, we had no problems. The Mastr-II repeater system had no time and date info to be disrupted and the other radio base stations, mostly Motorola Micors, didn’t either. The consoles were DOS based but the workstations and server had been upgraded and had no issues. Over at the power plant the SCADA system worked fine, they upgraded it during 1998, and it turned over with no issues.
One of our neighboring towns had a server fail, but we weren’t sure if it was date-related or just coincidental. We provided a spare server and helped them restore from a backup later in the afternoon, meanwhile our dispatcher ran their plates and the like for them.
All in all, Y2K was pretty much a yawn. It did, however, serve to allow us to upgrade many older systems. All we had to say was that we needed to upgrade something “for Y2K” and we were given the money to do so. As a self-reliant community we did most of the work in-house; this helped ensure it was done right, and we would know how to fix any issues down the road. We learned a lot about our various tech.
The Y2K party was a masterpiece of an idea. It was a lot of fun and ensured that the right people were available if there was an issue. Many of the preparations for that night, while unneeded as it turned out, became part of the emergency operations plans for any potential future catastrophes. With luck they will never be needed but if they are we are confident they will succeed.
While I have been retired for almost a decade now, I still have contact with and provide advice when asked about systems. Most of the stuff I set up in my time has since been or soon will be replaced. Our radios have gone from analog UHF to P25 on 700 MHz. The computers have all been replaced as have most of the servers since I left. Our dispatch center has been closed and operations consolidated with our neighbors at a regional dispatch center. Most of the people involved with Y2K have died or retired, the IT director retired just last year.
Like the saying goes: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst”.
