Posted on 08/11/2018 12:29:20 PM PDT by SamAdams76
I was remembering today the big Y2K scare we had during the late 1990s. Does anybody remember that? All the computers in the world were to shut down at midnight January 1, 2000 because apparently the computers would not be able to recognize "2000" as a valid year and go haywire, thinking it was 1900 instead.
As with many conspiracies, there was a grain of truth to this. There were many software programs at the time that had to be re-programmed to accept 2000 as a valid year. My wife was a COBOL programmer at the time and she had a few banner years as a contractor, fixing this bug. One one project, they were paying her nearly $150/hr.
I remember many Freepers here that were stocking up on canned goods and such, expecting the modern world to come to a sudden halt, forcing us back to a more agrarian way of life.
I was a Y2K skeptic but I do remember my heart skipping a beat as we turned the clock to midnight on December 31, 1999.
Yes. This was a concerted effort by the left to de-emphasize the real meaning of the year 2000: Christ!
Well there ya go.
It obviously didn’t have Y2K compliant filaments.
Apparently I had the only non compliant bulb in my apartment at the time.
The house I moved into later with my wife had some flaky wiring and I’d go through bulbs in bursts every so often.
Eventually the place was rewired and cut the bulb blowings way down.
So, what happened of major global consequence in March of 2001?
I think you mean 2000 not 3001.
On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ composite index peaked at 5132, the end of the dot-com boom.
Y2K was the Perfect Storm, the year Global Ice Age met Global warming.
Yet again all the concern was for naught.
Exactly. It is so easy to get stuck in the conspiracy mindset in this world, solely because there really is an overwhelming amount of collusion between the globalist “capitalist -socialists”, the government, the “democrats and Republicans”, the crony capitalists, etc. Y2K was not a conspiracy, it was a real problem which was averted by real remediation efforts. But how is one to know the difference nowadays? If Western Culture ever manages to return to some semblance of ethical behavior and traditional values, I believe the conspiracy nuts will effectively disappear.
I work IT (over 20 years) The big issue here is we knew about the 2 -4 digit date issue for years. 2000 was not a surprise we knew (by owning a calendar) it was coming. The 2 digit date was used to conserve space when storage was expensive by the 90’s this was no longer an issue.
Only ignorant or low budget people had any trouble implementing a fix.
It was a completely testable outcome. No need to wonder just bump clocks forward. Machines don’t tell time they count from where we tell them too.
The bigger surprise was the linux Unix 9/9/1999 issue. 5 “9” Is used as a stop code in programming. A lot of people missed that one
It like this crap we can’t block hackers or online thiefs. The second someone in an IP block causes a problem mask them from the routers The rest of the IP block will police them very quickly.
Someone where they shouldn’t be kill the block it will fix its self.....
“it was all an innocent mistake”
y2k was an incredibly well crafted ploy to extort money from the global economic system. Truly amazing, and whoever came up with the idea, other than having been executed...brilliant.
Wait. till the year 2525. That will be sumpthin.
There still should have been massive failures because, people being human, a lot of computers would not have been updated. I don’t think I heard of one instance.
I worked on code and programs for y2k fixes.
There were definitely things that these programs would have gotten wrong, and if they involved databases it couldmhave been a pain. probably fixable but still. real time stuff getting wrong calcs or weird data could be bad, could be unpredictable what the overall results would be.
Its also considering compounded misktakes across glitching programs and sysrems that talk to each other and rely on the others data.
I definitely saw things that required code fixes to ensure and eliminate problems.
Imagine nothing was done until everything started cascading failures due to inter-program and cross-system dependencies.
I remember there was a web site that watched around the world as the clocks passed midnight, watching for any news of problems. As I recall, I quit watching about 3am.
Watched several movies while waiting for the world to end :)
The occasion was a non-event. I have since wondered how bad it would have been had not so much money been spent fixing the bug. Would the grid have crashed, banks lose track of account info, retail stores be unable to sell food, traffic signals go haywire, etc.? In other words, was it overblown all along, or did huge efforts avoid a disaster. I tend towards a middle ground, that some bad things would have happened, but it would not have been as big a disaster as was being portrayed. Sounds like you know whereof you speak.
My posts #38 and #48 describe quite well what happened.
However, the dot.com bust had nothing to do with the Y2K problem.
No doubt injected with vidka
I wonder how many of them are still living in caves.
I was thrilled to get 1k for working NYEve......as NOC managers we stood around and stared at each other at midnight.....when nothing happened....
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