I wrote here about 9/9/99. We celebrated with donuts at work.

Then, a colleague at work, Dave LeCompte, received an email from a friend of his suggesting another important day, which he forwarded to the group:

Well! This seemed like a great excuse for some donuts! Various people volunteered $1.11 to support the cause and off to QFC (a local supermarket chain) I went to get a couple of dozen donuts. Fortunately, we received the email from Hugh before 11:11:11 a.m., so we had about an hour to get the donuts and organize the celebration.

Another interesting date was the "odd day", which was passed around in a fair amount of internet email:

As the days rolled on, various individuals noticed other key dates. In fact, we started to notice that pretty much any date could be made into an interesting date with a little creativity. So, the novelty wore off after one or two more donut trips.

On 12/30/1999, I finally got around to testing our computers at Above the Garage Productions for Y2K compliance. I had downloaded a little tool from NSTL.com and stored it away a month or two ago. It runs under DOS and I was too lazy to reboot into DOS to actually run it. I was thinking it would be to fun wait and see what broke on 1/1/2000. My wife persuaded me that it would be good to check out our nine Windows machines before the big event. (She's more prudent than me!)

BTW, I found this huge page of tools and links at CNet. Hopefully, that link, which is very complicated internally, will work for people other than me. (Some sites encode cookie-type identifiers into URLs so they can keep track of you. Those URLs don't always work when you give them to a friend. It's irritating.)

I really only tested six of the eight machines. Two are ancient laptops, and Toshiba said neither would be compliant with out a DOS TSR program to fix the date upon booting (which they supply). In fact, one of the laptops had an updated BIOS and worked fine, and the other, which is a 486-based machine, is pretty much guaranteed broken, so I just put in the DOS TSR without testing. Only one machine had a date rollover problem. The real-time clock (RTC) in all machines I tested was fine. I fixed the one machine with a BIOS update. Finally there is one machine not presently on the network that I was too lazy to test or fix. So, all-in-all, a pretty positive report card.

You're really at risk if your machine's BIOS was made before 1996. My friend Rick has a machine with that was made in 1996 that has a RTC that fails to rollover.

I was amused (and pleased at the same time) that the nation's Y2K rollover went so smoothly. For myself, I'm pretty sure I witnessed one problem last July 1999. An insurance payment we sent in got lost and the insurance company blamed the bank. Either the insurance company or the bank had broken software, no doubt due to trying to fix Y2K problems, I think, because they managed to find the payment and apologized profusely. The only other problem I saw was a couple of years ago when some of our credit cards that expired in 2000+ were replaced with ones that expired in 1999. This was because a LOT of those little card swipe machines were broken and wouldn't accept cards with expirations in 2000+.

In Britain, something like 40,000 ATM machines from the fourth largest bank had a four day window around 12/31/1999 - 1/3/2000 where they failed to work. The bank just let it slide!

In the US, there was concern that there would be a "run" on ATM machines as everyone tried to get some liquid cash. The US Treasury pumped $200 BILLION, presumably in $20.00 bills, into circulation just-in-case. Everything went fine and apparently at least $20 BILLION dollars of it is going to be destroyed. Who says the government can't print money?

Well, while I was writing this I was going to test my crusty 486 laptop, but it's refusing to boot. This is not Y2K related - it's broken internal power supply related, as it happens from time-to-time.

Or is it?

[Note: the reason I was amused that the Y2K rollover went "smoothly" in the US is that while it is true and great and wonderful that our electric grid and water and natural gas, etc., facilities continued to work almost everywhere (or were patched up within minutes), the big problem hasn't come yet! The big problem will be when people start getting bills for huge amounts of money because the billing calculation in lots of software is no-doubt still broken.

Did you know that fully one-half of all the software in a modern telephone routing switch is dedicated to billing? Holy cow.]

[I got my crusty 486/dx2/50 laptop to boot. It was Y2K compliant! I must have updated the BIOS sometime over the years. I think Toshiba assumes that you haven't updated your BIOS, because it is a hard scary thing for most people to do, so they tell you your system is broken even though it might be fixed. Better safe than sorry!]