Boy, that's some memories! I was working for a Major City police department, something like 1800+ officers. I was network admin/SQL database admin/database developer. We applied all the patches that we could, reviewed everything we could find the source for, all-in-all we were in pretty good shape. Fortunately all of my databases used date datatypes, so it was pretty much a non-issue for me.
Now, I should stress that there were two sides to our computer group, the PC network and the mini/mainframe network. The latter held all the criminal records, controlled the mobile data terminals (MDTs) in the cruisers, etc. The former, our side, was mainly administrative and held very little actual criminal information. Secretarial use, email, etc.
The "millenium" rolled over, and as far as we could tell, the micro side stood tall.
A little bit after midnight, the dispatch/911 system went down.
While prepping for Y2K, they had identified some non-compliant code and fixed it. This was in the days of edit/compile/link. They fixed the code, they compiled the code, but they didn't do the final link edit.
Fortunately the dispatchers were veterans that pre-dated the new dispatch system and switched over to paper notes to keep track of units without difficulty.
A second story -- all of the MDTs were Motorola 386s with something like a 10 or 20meg hard drives (yes, megabytes) that ran Windows 3.1 or WFW 3.11, I don't remember. But all they ran was a terminal emulator that tied to the radio that tied to the HP 3000s used by Dispatch. Both 3.1 and 3.11 were non-Y2K compliant, but Motorola would have been happy to sell us a patch at something like $500 per unit. I don't know how many cruisers we had, but I think we can safely say 700 or more.
Well, after a little investigating it turned out that when the officer's logged on to the computer, the terminal software downloaded the date and time from the HP. Thus, no Y2K issue on a non-compliant piece of hardware.
C
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RE: A look back at Y2K - Share your WTF stories here