Y2K wasn’t that bad compared to the rest
If anything it was a misdirect.
When the world/news goes crazy, it’s probably not actually that bad. Surprise mothetfucker!
Whenever I hear a new term I have to figure out if it’s really that bad, or just made up nonsense.
Comparatively, sure it’s small potatoes.
In hindsight. There was some degree of hysteria at the time, which prompted ended at the turn of the millenia when planes did not fall out of the sky and computer systems did not all fail in unison.
the Dot Com bubble burst + World Trade Center in 2001 was another animal
Nothing personal, I try to correct this view everywhere I see it.
Y2K didn’t happen because a lot of talented engineers worked their asses off to prevent it from happening. It is the bane of IT people everywhere that the working state of the systems they create and maintain is being taken for granted by the public, with barely a thought givem to those who fight bugs, spam, cyber attacks and pure entropy every day. It is in fact a minor miracle of engineering that we’re even having this conversation.
A-men
And A-women too 😁
Couldn’t agree more and do not in any way intend to diminish the hard work of those that prevented a widespread systems failure.
That’s true, but it is also true that there was a lot of hysteria… A lot of well designed systems were built without the y2k flaw in the first place…
Reminds me of this funny bit from Louis C.K. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBdwNP7xk_6/ (profanity)
The public should take it for granted, it’s corpo culture that shouldn’t. If IT people had the freedom and option to do the right things early there’s so many situations that would never happen, but oh no profits must increase by 10% yoy or else CEO is replaced.
Thank you. I was on the Y2K team.
Thank you for your service. I mean it.
And thank you! I merely followed directions, my first real IT job. But I’m proud to say I was there! As a private if not a general.
God(or whatever metaphysical force you subscribe to) guard the engineers. Of all types.
There was that one guy who got charged $60k in late fees at blockbuster though.
Y2k was a non event because a lot of time, effort, and money was spent fixing it before the deadline.
The estimated cost of fixing the bug was between 300-850 billion dollars in 2000 - adjusted for inflation that’s about 0.5-1.5 trillion dollars
The estimated worldwide cost of fixing the Y2K bug, according to analysts: Cap Gemini America Inc. — $858 billion; Gartner Group Inc. — $600 billion; International Data Corp. — $300 billion.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1372100/some-key-facts-and-events-in-y2k-history.html
Y2K wasn’t that bad because a billion engineers saw it coming and prepared accordingly. If everyone hadn’t been freaking out about it for years beforehand things could have gone very differently.
Not really as it would just be another Crowd Strike
Gen Z here. Bitch, this shit just getting warmed up, hahaha
You’re forgetting hole in the ozone
The hole in the ozone layer is recovering due to the bans on CFCs in the 90s. Climate change deniers deny this and insist that it is something that would have happened anyway…
See, ever now a than, thangs is cold. And thangs is hot.
It’s in yer bi-buhl buddy. Reed it.
:p
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Ya gawt ta reed yer bi-bull!
It tha werd uh tha lorduh!
It is almost completely gone
Gen Y had all that plus 6 wars (gross estimate) and an explosion of a nuclear power plant.
And a turd king
Add a housing crisis, the construction of a corporate surveillance state, a fascist takeover and the impending employment apocalypse of AI implementation.
Aint it great!
Pretty sure we are in a “unofficial world war 3” considering how there’s like 6 countries at war
Russia vs Ukraine
Israel vs Palestine
India vs Pakistan
Americans vs America.
Does US vs the world in economic war count?
That too economic warfare.
Didn’t you hear? God emperor Trump made that whole silly India/Pakistan thing go away /s
An Indian Pakistan conflict would kill lots of people and create millions of refugees. (And that’s ignoring the nuclear risk)
If the US can stabilize the situation let them
US can’t stabilize itself. And we all know how “good” US is at resolving conflicts.
You are probably right. However, it is always to good to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Trump is more like to stir up trouble on the thought he could come in and annex the land after everyones dead/weakened.
Nah let them pop off. Push the red button.
laughs in genx. Let’s go get you some fruit.
Hey, at least you didn’t get drafted for Vietnam
Give it time, I’m sure we’ll have Vietnam 2 before long.
I’ll volunteer, on the Vietnamese side
I doubt they’d take the average American. Wont fit in the tunnels.
gets drafted for the resource wars one year away from being too old to draft
What’s the maximum age for the draft? There may well be a war against China very soon.
I don’t see that happening as that would be bad for everyone involved
In general war is devastating for all involved.
And yet, we keep having them.
Funny how that works
I for one would really like to get off this ride.
no way out, once you’re in the ring, ya gotta dance baby!
Please don’t, you’re making it better for everyone else.
Did y’all forget about the Zika, Ebola, Bird flu and Swine flus?
Thanks, but I’m totally wasted on typhoid over here, i couldn’t possibly do any more!
Do people not remember that they didn’t have cars until like 1920? Do people not understand that most roads weren’t paved until like the 50s? It’s foolish to think we’re the only generation living through lifetime events. Motherfuckers they were people that went through World War I and World War II. They were veterans of World War 1 that enlisted in World War II. There are people born in the fifties that lived through the computer Revolution. Do people not understand that the internet is only 30 years old?
deleted by creator
I know he is a fictional character but Colonel Potter in Mash served in ww1, ww2 and Korea… There are real people that had that experience.
as a gen Z I still don’t get why Y2K was such a big deal
Because all software at that point was unable to handle the new date format. Imagine if today, all computer systems had widespread issues at the same time, on the same day. The only reason nothing happened is because people did their jobs.
Hope this helps.
Not even close to all software. There was a broad mix of stuff that used 2-digit years that would have had problems with it, stuff that used 2-digit years where it wouldn’t really impact anything, and stuff that used 4-digit years and so wasn’t a problem.
However, if it drove any sort of critical infrastructure, it had to be audited just in case it fit in the first category.
Fair enough. I was exaggerating a bit. Just trying to emphasize the point of how big of a deal it could have been. Especially since we see issues like crowd strike, y2k38, etc.
There was A LOT of doom predictions… from airplanes dropping out of the sky to power being shut off, to possible missile launches… it was a good time to be a shit talker in those days. Businesses made a butt ton of money selling snake oil “Y2K” checkers for your computer… crazy time
It was actually a bit of a big deal. Luckily it got figured out with enough time to fix it before it really effected anything. They were pulling cobalt programmers out of retirement to fix old systems and auditing anything important for years before 2000.
cobalt programmers
I now classify anyone who knows how to program cobol as a cobalt programmer. XD.
Autocorrect “helping out”
The panic it caused was the worst part of it, which was largely overblown by the media who kept predicting major crashes that would cause riots.
I was 18 in 1999, there wasn’t that much actual panic. At the time people already generally knew the media was overreacting.
There was a pretty awesome shoe commercial a few minutes after midnight. It had a guy jogging down the street, presumably on Jan 1st, while in the background ATMs are spewing cash, planes are falling out of the sky, traffic lights are flashing randomly, and other chaos. Then it had a tag about new years resolutions. That commercial made it all worth it
I was 24. People started panic-purchasing guns and ammunition the minute the whole Y2K story broke. Here’s a CBS News segment from 1999 about it. Here’s a DOJ paper about it. Background checks shot up 15% from the previous year, with over a million background checks in December 1999 alone.
It turned out to be a huge nothingburger with no riots, no looting, no violence… But there was definitely panic, at least in the sense that a lot of people were prepping for some kind of apocalyptic outcome “just in case”. Once the clocks rolled over and people saw that planes weren’t falling out of the sky and nukes weren’t auto-launching, they realized it was a bunch of over-hyped media nonsense.
Don’t worry. The one happening in 2038 should be worse.
Thanks for bringing this up; I hadn’t heard of this issue. I just looked into it and the Year 2038 problem is similar to the Y2K issue, for anyone else curious.
The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038, Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse) is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
It’s less about the y2k bug itself and more about the cultural phenomenon. It was everywhere, and it was huge, and then absolutely nothing happened. It was the best possible outcome AND the funniest possible outcome.
With stuff like that, it hits different when you live through it and it’s part of popular culture for years. It leaves grooves in the ole neurons.
In contrast I could think about how terrifying the Cuban missile crisis must have been. The fiery end of the world could happen at any moment and everybody knows it. And we even find out afterward that the world was basically saved by one Soviet service member. I can empathize with living through that, but since it happened long before I was born, I don’t have the vivid memories of the actual emotions invading my normal day to day.
Computers were not designed to roll over the year. This would have caused the dates to roll back to 1900 or some day in the past, breaking any logic doing math on dates.
The programming community made huge efforts to fix this problem, and they did across many sectors.
The fact that people don’t understand how big of a deal this was is due to the efforts of those that did and were able to correct it.
The media talking about power outages and nukes launching due to Y2K was standard news hype/fear mongering during a crisis with rather boring (to the layman) causes and fixes.
Computers were not designed to roll over the year.
I get that, but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems? Didn’t programmers in the 80s want to make sure that their code would last for more than 20 years? And people knew Y2K would be a problem so they had plenty of time to fix the issues right?
It had to do with memory and storage limitations on computers back then. It didn’t make sense to store two extra digits for the date when that space could be used for other data. It affected pretty much every system made before a certain date. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems?
You might be shocked at how much of our infrastructure ran on those old systems. But thankfully, yes, the rest of your comment is exactly what happened. Programmers knew what was up, and jumped on the problem early enough to avoid any major issues. However, this didn’t stop the media from selling panic for ratings, which became the worst part of the entire Y2K experience. If you’ve ever seen the 1995 movie ‘Strange Days’ with Ralph Fiennes (and a great cast overall), it’s only a slight exaggeration of what the media was hyping for Y2K.
the people problem of any crisis.
If you did nothing, and it becomes a big problem, everyone riots over why you did nothing about it.
If you raised awareness, busted ass, and prevented the issue from happening… then everyone riots over how much of a “waste” it all was since nothing happened.
What year comes after “99”? People would way “00” meaning 2000 but a computer might say “00” meaning 1900 potentially breaking a lot of data systems/bases
It honestly wasn’t. Like yes, it was a real problem, there was a lot of bad, often legacy, code that had to be reviewed and maybe patched. Industrial control code tends to be notoriously bad, and so you never know if this traffic light or that power station is going to glitch out until you dive in
But even as a kid who just knew how to take things apart, I knew it was a nothing burger. Real work went into it, but the fact people in the industry were taking it seriously means there was little actual danger
I mean, people who were born in early 1900’s would have spanish flu + 2 WW’s just in one life time(if they reach the second one)
/+ in Germany there was the biggest hyper Inflation imagenable.
WWIII has been looming on generations before millennials. Millennials weren’t alive during the 1980 cold sweat of Russia and the doomsday clock. Everyone had nukes. Lots and lots of nukes. We’re not talking small nukes. We’re talking like what happened in Hiroshima. Only everywhere.
Also recession isn’t new, its been happening at least once every 10 years if not more. Although usually they are only when something happens that isn’t preventable. This recession is entirely preventable.
It’s when it’s a depression that it gets real bad. Like your bank closed and your money is gone and it won’t matter what kind of insurance you had, you’re eating leather boots.
Additionally there’s been bird h1n1, sars, various flus prior to Covid.
Just be grateful none of us have to necessarily live through polio and a plethora of other diseases because we have vaccinations now….
Oh wait…
Ok so just be grateful there’s A CHOICE to not live with it.
