HoodaThunk?

Interesting thread on Twitter is under the hashmark “#10YearsAgo” and it’s getting tweets like mad! So, how about it? Where were you 10 Years Ago?

Me? I was an IT Manager at a firm here in Northern Virginia. I was wrapping up the final items on the Y2K list we’d been working on since I joined the company in May 1998. In spite of my recommendations, the company had pressed forward with an effort to re-engineer all of the company’s proprietary programming (in FoxPro 2.5 for DOS, no less) to handle the Y2K issue. In those systems, the Y2K “bug” was a reality, not a theoretical exercise. As a final, stopgap measure to keep anything from blowing up in mid-run, the decision was made to literally power down the entire company’s core systems, coast-to-coast. (We weren’t a 24 x 7 operation, at least not on the major holidays.) At about  this time 10 years ago I was standing in my HQ server room issuing the shutdown commands. In about 15 minutes, the room was nearly completely silent and the lights on the racks were all off, a situation that would not occur again until the company closed down years later.

Y2K was a disaster-flick bust and our systems suffered not a single hiccup the next day. We ran into a minor problem at the end of Q1 in 2000 because a program that was only run at that time of year was missed in the re-write but it was a minor issue by then. All told, not much happened and, yes, everyone’s microwaves and VCR’s continued to function. Ah, those were the days.