I wasn’t programming much in 1999 but I knew more than enough to understand what the so called Millennium Bug was all about and why it would be a huge problem. I was even lucky enough to get to fix the “bug” in a couple of DOS programs that were written in the mid-1990’s.

Because of the sheer hype and terror that surrounded the issue I was fairly certain that most companies and governments would get their excrement together and fix the problems before the critical date. So I did my best to ignore the hysteria and assumed all would be OK. However, I do remember taking money out of the bank and filling our bath with water just in case the much prophesied Bad Things actually happened on January 1 2000. Of course nothing particularly serious happened and it probably ended up being the most reported and hyped up non-event in my living memory.

It occurs to me that the Leap Second that was inserted into the worlds timing systems a couple of days back seemed to have a bigger effect than the Millennium Bug did. Here in Australia it caused problems with some airline check in systems and I’ve read that some websites had some issues too, including Reddit. This News.Com.Au story even suggests that the mighty Twitter experienced some problems because of it.

I’m not going to rag on programmers that allow these problems to occur because I am guilty of it myself. It’s been three years now since I started trying to find an elegant way to handle the day light savings transitions in Time Clock MTS. I’ve failed miserably to this point and it still causes problems for anyone who actually clocks in across the DST transition times.