Welcome to the Melbourne Community Daily Discussion Thread.

  • TinyBreak@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Dumb question, but does anyone else remember the 90s being a time of feeling like there was so much potential and new shit on the horizon? Or was that just cause I was young?

    • CEOofmyhouse56@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      I can remember the anticipation of the year 2000 and the buzz about if the computers will stop working. Everything was new then it went back to normal.

        • Thornburywitch@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Me too. Was in the insurance industry at that point, working on a mainframe set up in the 1970s. Two digit year field across much of the system, but not all of it. No julian dates. Many many jury-rigged subsystems in 4 different programming languages to cope with all the different kinds of policies. Payments to be credited properly across 7 time zones and 3 different currencies from a myriad of banks etc. There was a real possibility that everything would re-set to 1900. But we got it right and got it done on time and fairly close to budget. Then the general public laughed and said Y2K was a hoax.

          • Jay Stephens@mastodon.social
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            1 year ago

            @Thornburywitch heh.
            Yup, same - Thomas Miller in London (marine mutual insurance). Reasonably coherent code base (entire back end on AS/400, all business logic in RPG, COBOL, or SQL) But the code base was large, all data at rest & all decision logic coded with 2-digit years… And yeah we got there somehow, and woke up tired & hung -over to headlines about how the problem was exaggerated.

            If we survive global warming by rebuilding the entire global economy on renewables it’ll be the same.

    • wscholermann@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      I think social media and the 24 hrs news cycle creates an air of constant doom that we just weren’t exposed to.

    • Seagoon_@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Yes, it was the collapse of Communism and we were so hopeful there would be a new positive world that was freer. But then there was Rwanda and after that Yugoslavia. 😔