Sunday, January 26, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 386: Biomythography - Note 123, The Y2K Bug in People's Minds, Pt. I

The Y2k Bug (in People's Minds)

When the year 1999 arrived, I was not employed on a moon base. The television show Space 1999 lied to me. Instead of driving a spaceship, I piloted a desk in a facility that supplied scientific services to eleven research institutes. The place seemed as good as a moon colony, though, in some ways. The air was dusty from construction. The technology around me was interesting to learn, it made for exciting problems to solve, and always, it was new. We invented some of it on the spot. Plus I could carpool home, which wouldn't have been as easy from the moon.

A few months passed between the previous system administrator leaving and the facility hiring me, which meant I arrived barely in time. Things were starting to break. The tape backups had stopped working and my first restore test from them didn't work. We hadn't needed them so no one knew. Also, the previous sysadmin built the facility network from nine unmanaged 10BaseT hubs. One of the hubs had failed. I had to rewire the network closet and pull in a separate power cable. In the walls around us, I found old twisted-pair phone wires. They supported CAT3 half-duplex connections, nothing more, so I knew I was going to upgrade the building itself.

"Get up to speed fast," announced the co-worker who trained me. "You supply all the computer services."

"Just me?"

"And the Y2K bug is coming."

Everyone knew. I leaned over my Sun SPARCStation 20 and felt its warm hum. It was a wonderful machine but, even then, the pizza-box style of computer was a few years old. No one had patched it. I'd rescued it from a shelf, found the fattest CRT monitor available, grabbed a clone keyboard and mouse, scrounged a few SCSI cables, attached an external drive, and called it a workstation. With a little shell programming, I could control all the other computers in the facility from my desk.

From room to room, I logged in on workstations and set up remote procedures. I configured situation monitoring on each so I could know before anyone else when a job was overclocking a CPU. X Windows was my friend because no platform was the same. I connected to SGI workstations, Macs, Linux, Sun, and Solaris clones. Each office room had grey paint and padded sections on the walls where patients sat waiting to get screened. Even in those rooms, we didn't yet have a Windows PC.

The hallway floors were white tile, marked with yellow and black hazard tape where the magnetic fields of the NMR, MRI and fMRI instruments exceeded the dimensions of the rooms. The shielding around the instruments wasn't good enough to contain the power of the magnets. You couldn't carry most metals around there. Bronze was okay; I had a set of bronze tools. With regular metals, you had to never use them or, in a paranoid way, you had to dodge the hazard markers. If you miscalculated,you could get stuck to a wall by your toolbelt or worse. Magnetic objects could reach the MRI at speeds faster than a bullet, so you could kill yourself or someone else in a careless moment.

I always grabbed the non-magnetic tools as I made my rounds.

Within a month, I had not only taken inventory of the equipment but I'd tested every computer. Some of the firmware in older models needed to get an upgrade to be compliant with new date formats. Fortunately, the manufacturers of Sun, SGI, and Linux workstations had already posted firmware for installation. Beyond the motherboards, though, I could see the operating systems, databases, and specialized medical applications also used dates with only two numbers, like 10-12-99. When 12-31-99 turned to 01-01-00, a lot of the systems were going to stop working.

"How do you know these are going to break?" my new boss demanded. He wanted me to work on the research instruments. He studied me as I tested our firmware.

"If you move the date forward, you can see which computers have services that stop." One of the first things I did in October, as I started Y2K preparations, was assess which systems were going to crash. The answer was: all of them. In some form or another, all our systems had internal applications that would break down when confronted with the year zero.

"What about mine?" he asked. That was quick, I thought, from skeptic to concerned scientist.

"I already upgraded your Macintosh desktop."

"But I have two Macs. I have a laptop."

"Oh." Well, crap. Folks were bringing up this sort of thing more and more. "Can I make an appointment to upgrade your laptop?"

"You can do it right now," he replied.

And so I did. Maybe thirty of our machines were shared workstations; they were capable of supporting four or five scientists running their calculations simultaneously. (Most of the scientists logged in remotely. Some of them liked to run six calculation jobs on six workstations at roughly the same time. Their jobs took hours, sometimes days to calculate what they wanted to know about a flattened CT brain map or a study of fMRI data.) I upgraded the smaller, personal machines, too, whenever they came to me. Unlike the workstations, they were mostly new.

Well, our oldest Macintosh computers couldn't support firmware fixes. They were done. After Y2K hit, they wouldn't be of any use to anyone. But the recently-bought Macintosh computers could run a date patch to upgrade their AppleOS. And the Apple utilities and apps mostly understood the year 2000 was not 'nothing.'

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(to be continued - here

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