[myknowledge]

Ten years ago, the crazed and unsaved paranoids were overconsumed by their hysterical belief that mankind's computer-structured civilization would collapse into total disarray precisely on January 1, 2000 at 0000 hours, all because of a 'computer bug' or software date programming error, where the last two digits of every year were written.

It is analogous to fearing that your car, secretly rigged with a bomb, would detonate upon reaching 100,000 kilometers on the odometer, incinerating you inside.

How outlandishly insane is that? What's next? December 21, 2012. The 13th count on the pagan Mayan calendar.

All right, back to Y2K. There could be dozens of crazed Y2K 'survivalists' living in the woods of the American Northwest for a decade now, and they still wouldn't resurface from hiding.

The 'predictions' preached and espoused by the Y2K 'survivalists' was that when the clock precisely struck 0000 hours on January 1, 2000, everything that ran on computers was virtually rendered useless. Economies, stock exchanges, banks, cyberspace (Inernet), power grids, other forms of critical infrastructure, would shut themselves off. Modern jet aircraft, civilian and military, that ran on computers, would not take off.

What if military generals and admirals took hold of the Y2K hysteria? There would have been mass troop and naval deployments in every corner of their countries to prevent invasions. Jet fighters of the period that ran on computers, like the F-15, F-16, F/A-18 would not take off because the Y2K computer bug had disabled their computer-controlled flight control systems.

In cities and possible towns across the globe, people would have scrambled to every food store they could find and loot the food supplies for survival. There would have been mass bloodshed and starvation between people untrained in survival skills because they would have killed each other.

People's life savings and 401ks would have been eliminated entirely overnight, because the computer bug had frozen their bank accounts.

National economies and stock exchanges would have been driven to the ground overnight, because Y2K killed the computer-based commodities exchanges.

Y2K 'survivalists' across the world, living in rural areas, separated from human civilization, would have fared much better off had the Y2K computer bug did its work...

...BUT Y2K DIDN'T HAPPEN!!!

The events that the Y2K conspiracy theorists never came into fruition. Human civilization coninued as normal when the clock struck 0000 hours on January 1, 2000, cities across the world welcomed in the New Year with 15 minutes of fireworks displays, the first year of the 3rd millennium A.D.

No civilization collapse, no destroyed national economies, stock exchanges, foreign invasions, mass starvations, critical infrastructure shutdowns, loss of 401ks, life savings and frozen bank accounts, etc.

What did you think about Y2K?

[Cyber Liberty]

The dreaded 2.012K bug?

[mamelukesabre]

Y2k makes more sense than the mayan calendar scare. Way more.

[massmike]

As it turns out,the Y2K bug would have been the least of our problems.

[Safrguns]

Y2K didn’t happen because programmers like me were paid to fix it.

Bad comparison.

[DieHard the Hunter]

> ...BUT Y2K DIDN’T HAPPEN!!!

(snip)

> No civilization collapse, no destroyed national economies, stock exchanges, foreign invasions, mass starvations, critical infrastructure shutdowns, loss of 401ks, life savings and frozen bank accounts, etc.

There was a pretty good reason for that. A lot of time and effort and bucketloads of money went into making sure that it didn’t, in the two-or-three years leading up to Jan 1 2000.

That is significantly different to saying there was never a threat — there certainly was. And, fairly early on in the remediation projects, these threats were identified and fixed, starting with the mission-critical systems and moving back to the silly, unimportant stuff.

> What did you think about Y2K?

Y2K was probably the one and only time the IT Industry has had the money and the senior management attention necessary to get one of its most important projects right.

Alot of very hard work, against a difficult deadline, was necessary to get the perfect result: NOTHING BAD HAPPENED.

And for this reason it is perceived as a non-event.

The IT side of it was quite separate to the frenzy that surrounded it, with survivalists buying up bullets and sacks of dried beans and moving up into the mountains.

That was plain nuts. And that is similar to what these Global Warming / Climate Change hoaxters are trying to get everyone to do.

[DouglasKC]

Of course many people in government and business now know about the problem, and are spending many billions of dollars to fix it. Estimates of the global cost to reprogram or replace computer systems range up to $1 trillion. At best, Y2K will cause interruptions and a decrease in productivity as resources become devoted to repairs and replacement rather than new technology.

Y2K was a real problem as evidenced by the fact that business and government did spent trillions of dollars to fix it. If that money and effort wasn't spent then there was a real chance that yes indeed things would have been bad.

In contrast 2012 is based on a bunch of hooey. No science. No evidence. Just false prophets.

[Domandred]

Perfect place to bring this back!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYxLd8O9lA

[groanup]

Y2K was the greatest hoax/faux jobs program ever created. I remember going outside to smoke in the 1990's and seeing the computer nerds out there and they were all talking about how dangerous Y2K was. Bull shirt. It wasn't even close. And when the whole world realized they'd been taken by a bunch of propeller heads the dot com markets tanked and the technology revolution paused and then crashed.

Two years of down markets and devaluations. The real crash wasn't even scheduled yet. That came in 2007 and 2008. The dot com was a computer nerd setback only.

[FReepaholic]

Y2K remediation was probably the largest non-military project in history. The project worked and nothing bad happened so the lay person just laughed and ridiculed it.

I worked in IT at a financial institution and had the flaws in the code not been fixed a lot of people would have been very upset with their account balances.

[packrat35]

Y2K, the first Trillion dollar scam.

[MarkL]

I was hired out as a consultant by my company to a large financial company to make sure that every application and piece of hardware they owned would be able to run properly through the transition. That company had to upgrade an awful lot of software, and a tremendous number of computers and servers to ensure that there were no problems. Many of their programs were written in-house, and some did need to be recoded.

But we had documented that every piece of hardware and software they relied upon would not fail. If we hadn't done all that certification they would have had some serious problems.

BTW, for those who think that nothing would have happened, another client of mine, a municipal government didn't quite test everything. On January 1, 2000, the fuel pumps at the fire station which fueled all the diesel fire trucks as well as the gasoline powered fire vehicles and police cars stopped working. It took 2 days to get someone from the manufacturer out there to replace the electronics in the pumps.

Mark

[jbarntt]

It didn’t cause major problems because a lot of IT folks spent a lot of time to make sure everything was patched up and tested.

Where I worked, every PC, (mostly W95), had the BIOS tested and fixed, if needed. Older OSen, like Netware 3.11, 4.10, and 4.11 were updated and tested. Remember synthetic time on Netware when you rolled the date into the future, and then rolled it back, (NDS) ?

Accounting software had to be tested also, dates are pretty important in that regard.

It was a big deal.

[kalee]

ping

[Free Vulcan]

Hey newb, all those who did prepare are prepared now, when things look like they may really get bad. Ya think we weren’ thinking about that when we prepared?

[discostu]

I knew Y2K was silly when I got my first driver’s license with an expiration after 2000. I figured if the DMV had managed to figure it out so had everybody else. Actually won an argument about Y2K by throwing my license on the table, “see DMV’s OK” turned out to be pretty compelling evidence.