Remember the 1999/2000 rollover?

This was a very ‘big deal’ for us techies in the computer business. The big bosses flew down from Toronto and had a meeting with us in December of 1999 and told us something that we chuckle about now, but we were asked to take very seriously back then. If I remember correctly, they fed us pizza and beer and said, ‘look, if this thing goes bad, your main concern is to take care of your families safety’. They were of course talking about the switch/ rollover of the dates from 1999 to 2000. Remember that? There really was a lot of hype and fear mongering surrounding the rollover.

I distinctly remember talking to a programmer the week before the big day, and the bank paid big overtime to have him and most of his key staff sleep over at the data control center on New Years Eve on 1999. The theory was that if anything went wrong, they would already be on site working like madmen and women trying to recover from the impending disaster.
Well, the sky didn’t fall that day, and it’s still there. The funny thing is that we tend to forget how excited everyone got back then about all of the code in computers that could have had a major impact on the world banking system, not to mention the power grids of quite a few countries.

I also got to talk to quite a few COBAL programmers that were very busy because they were specialists with the legacy infrastructures and they were the stars of the day. In fact, I got to know a COBAL programmer that had a fellow try to sell him some shares in a small start-up company that looked fairly promising, but he just didn’t have the extra cash falling out of his pocket to take a chance on this slightly built man with geeky glasses. That man happened to be none other than Bill Gates. I’ll bet that programmer played out that meeting thousands of times in his mind before looking at another technology start-up the same way again.

Well, this was just a meandering down memory lane from a computer technician that shook the hand of a man that shook the hand of the famous Bill Gates. I hope you keep on coming back and reading our blogs, listening to our podcasts and viewing our youtube videos. Here is a fantastic video I came across to show you just how much technology has changed out lives, and what we look forward to in the future. This really made me appreciate where hi-tech is going. Enjoy, Rick