I most strongly disagree with the Y2K being hype. As someone who worked with several other individuals in our company for seven months rewriting dozens of programs for a major banking software company, I can say that if that had not been done all hell would have happened. It was not hype for Y2K. It was the dedicated work of thousands of individuals rewriting hundreds of thousands of pc and mainframe programs which averted the disaster. It was real and deadly. For instance if nothing had been done, on January 1, 2000, every savings account would have automatically accrued interest from 1900 to the opening date of the account. At the same time every loan would have had the similar interest charged to it. Since federal law requires the bank(s) to be in complete balance before opening the doors for business every day, no bank would have been opened. Instant collapse of the financial industry, not the blip we are going through now.
And this would have been a problem because . . . . . . . ????
At least we would have gotten OUR bailout BEFORE Wall St.!! LOL!!!
Well said.
Every few weeks some bonehead “journalist” or clueless poster remarks that Y2K was a scam, a hoax or in this case “hype” because nothing happened. Sometimes I’ve wished we techno-geeks hadn’t worked so damned hard for so long preventing that “hyped” disaster.
Had we waited and fixed it after the fact, say, after a few dozen big cities had burned to the ground due to rioting, after personal fortunes were wiped out, after national defense was compromised, after transportation was disrupted and the whole supply chain crashed, after every damned home PC I flashed bios on locked-up and after countless humans died due to the collapsed infrastructure from the electrical grid to sewer and water plants, just maybe we’d all be heroes now instead of out-to-pasture chumps who toiled with our tin-foil hats to avoid the hoax and perpetrated that “hype”.
You think we would have forgotten how to keep a paper record of things?
Other than banks, there were people saying that cars would not start, gasoline would not pump, heaters would not heat, electrons would not make electricity. Don’t tell me that you were busy rewriting that stuff, too?
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I, too, spent literally years of my life in re-writing and testing code to avert the problem that absolutely would have occurred had we not corrected it. I get so tired of people who now try to say there never was a problem in the first place.
The best analogy I've heard is this:
You are driving your car and you step on the brake and hear a squealing sound. So, you take your car to a mechanic who replaces your brakes. Now, because you never had an accident does that mean there was never really a problem? Or did you just fix it before the problem occurred?