Context for the unaware – Y2K controversy was a fear in late 1990s that computers would fail catastrophically when the date rolled over from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000.
I didn’t turn off my computer for 2 days straight thinking it would just die 😂😂😂
BRAINSZS on
daaaang blumchen!
realbigamonsta on
I watched the millennium change over drinking at a bar called Trader Vicks in Emeryville, which has a view of San Francisco across the bay. There wasn’t even so much as a flicker. We actually identified a problem as a society and fixed it! My uncle was a COBOL programmer in the ‘70s and made bank redoing code in the couple of years before as it was the backbone of banking/finance at the time and there weren’t a ton of people who remembered the language.
Raheece on
I thought it all glitched and blew up at the end
loftybillows on
Lol this was me as a smol child. I was the only one in my entire house awake, no one else cared at all. I was sitting at the computer watching some website clock countdown, then welp nothing happened!
I’ll never forget the Y2K new year. Me and my family gathered around the computer, anxiously awaiting to see if it would explode.
jaccleve on
We threw caution to the wind.
dikkiesmalls on
I remember at work we had to check if we still had water. Like…what?
omicronian_express on
My parents fully bought into Y2K (well mostly my mom). I was one of 9 kids, we lived a mile down a dirt road on a cattle ranch and my mom was actually hoping we would never have electricity again. We had a massive amount of wheat berries (that we ground by hand for the next 5 years for the heaviest bread you’ve ever had to eat… so heavy it wouldn’t even rise properly), beans, cous-cous, and every other long term stable food you can imagine. We would eat what she called “cream of wheat” which was just rough hand ground wheat berries that was then boiled. It immediately became semi-solid as soon as you dished it up, was like eating a rock if it was slightly toned down on the hardness scale. Part of our garage and the entire breezeway we had between our house/garage was filled with buckets of food. I remember how disappointed my mom was that the world didn’t basically blow up at midnight. I was 13 at the time and she had pretty much never stayed up past 10PM any other new years but she was wide awake and hoping for the apocalypse because she wanted to make sure she had even more control over her kids and that we would never be able to leave the property.
Lisadazy on
It was a glitch fixed because people worked together to find a solution. Being in New Zealand meant we would have been the first to have things affected – which never happened. Now everyone thinks it was a joke and the overreaction was not needed.
Same with the CFCs and the ozone I suppose – there was a solution found and it was fixed.
I too was examining my computer on that night because I was playing Worms with my sister.
Oh_no_its_Joe on
Fuckin “send me your email address so we can IM on AOL” ass computer.
askmeifimacop on
I remember hiding under the bed thinking planes were going to fall out of the sky lol
Smashogre591 on
Nice time capsule- thanks for sharing
Renbarre on
It is amusing that computer engineers did their job so well to correct the problem before it became a problem, that the bug is now thought to be a hoax.
My company had a test run of the corrected code and the server crashed. It took two months to find the old code and correct it. The bug was real, the engineers worked overtime all year long to correct the problem.
meccaleccahimeccahi on
Most of you “yungins” don’t remember. But for those of us in tech, we worked a lot to avoid it. The real reason nothing happened was because of the tireless work that a ton of folks put in to avoid it.
RedditVince on
Thanks to the efforts of thousands of programmers it was a non event.
Hegiman on
Yeah Y2K was a big deal but thanks to computer nerds like myself through hundreds of man hours of work determined which system needed upgraded and which needed replaced to be Y2K compliant.
I personally worked on 4 different Y2K preparedness jobs. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Kaiser permanente, and some local Bay Area company whose name I don’t recall. Those were some of the best jobs I ever had. Fun, high paying, not to hard work that made a positive impact on people’s lives. I really enjoyed doing those jobs.
EvilDairyQueen on
Dear Young people, we really were worried about this! computers just could not handle the big dates! but lots of smart people fixed it before it went wrong.
AnonEMoussie on
Fun fact: a professor in the math dept at uni thought everything was going to crash. He had a whole prepper setup in 1999, with rain water collection, purification filtering, and shelves in his cellar filled with sawdust to keep something fresh. (Fruit/veggies?)
He unfortunately did not pay taxes that year, believing the banks and IRS would fail.
26 Comments
Y2k baby!!
But it’s a Mac. Those were not affected.
The woman on the desktop? Anyone?
Context for the unaware – Y2K controversy was a fear in late 1990s that computers would fail catastrophically when the date rolled over from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000.
https://preview.redd.it/bmlef7lg8zag1.jpeg?width=3200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b02c642e6e5bfb165f4ff1470d48e50a2b7082d
I didn’t turn off my computer for 2 days straight thinking it would just die 😂😂😂
daaaang blumchen!
I watched the millennium change over drinking at a bar called Trader Vicks in Emeryville, which has a view of San Francisco across the bay. There wasn’t even so much as a flicker. We actually identified a problem as a society and fixed it! My uncle was a COBOL programmer in the ‘70s and made bank redoing code in the couple of years before as it was the backbone of banking/finance at the time and there weren’t a ton of people who remembered the language.
I thought it all glitched and blew up at the end
Lol this was me as a smol child. I was the only one in my entire house awake, no one else cared at all. I was sitting at the computer watching some website clock countdown, then welp nothing happened!
https://preview.redd.it/q6rp2cdn9zag1.jpeg?width=794&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=366f42ddc208d69ec5bd542244f796aec629ef83
I’ll never forget the Y2K new year. Me and my family gathered around the computer, anxiously awaiting to see if it would explode.
We threw caution to the wind.
I remember at work we had to check if we still had water. Like…what?
My parents fully bought into Y2K (well mostly my mom). I was one of 9 kids, we lived a mile down a dirt road on a cattle ranch and my mom was actually hoping we would never have electricity again. We had a massive amount of wheat berries (that we ground by hand for the next 5 years for the heaviest bread you’ve ever had to eat… so heavy it wouldn’t even rise properly), beans, cous-cous, and every other long term stable food you can imagine. We would eat what she called “cream of wheat” which was just rough hand ground wheat berries that was then boiled. It immediately became semi-solid as soon as you dished it up, was like eating a rock if it was slightly toned down on the hardness scale. Part of our garage and the entire breezeway we had between our house/garage was filled with buckets of food. I remember how disappointed my mom was that the world didn’t basically blow up at midnight. I was 13 at the time and she had pretty much never stayed up past 10PM any other new years but she was wide awake and hoping for the apocalypse because she wanted to make sure she had even more control over her kids and that we would never be able to leave the property.
It was a glitch fixed because people worked together to find a solution. Being in New Zealand meant we would have been the first to have things affected – which never happened. Now everyone thinks it was a joke and the overreaction was not needed.
Same with the CFCs and the ozone I suppose – there was a solution found and it was fixed.
Damn hat [Blümchen](https://youtu.be/R5QJVUMARLc?si=Jr02FsIISkPJADKx) wallpaper is giving me a throwback.. And makes me feel old.
I too was examining my computer on that night because I was playing Worms with my sister.
Fuckin “send me your email address so we can IM on AOL” ass computer.
I remember hiding under the bed thinking planes were going to fall out of the sky lol
Nice time capsule- thanks for sharing
It is amusing that computer engineers did their job so well to correct the problem before it became a problem, that the bug is now thought to be a hoax.
My company had a test run of the corrected code and the server crashed. It took two months to find the old code and correct it. The bug was real, the engineers worked overtime all year long to correct the problem.
Most of you “yungins” don’t remember. But for those of us in tech, we worked a lot to avoid it. The real reason nothing happened was because of the tireless work that a ton of folks put in to avoid it.
Thanks to the efforts of thousands of programmers it was a non event.
Yeah Y2K was a big deal but thanks to computer nerds like myself through hundreds of man hours of work determined which system needed upgraded and which needed replaced to be Y2K compliant.
I personally worked on 4 different Y2K preparedness jobs. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Kaiser permanente, and some local Bay Area company whose name I don’t recall. Those were some of the best jobs I ever had. Fun, high paying, not to hard work that made a positive impact on people’s lives. I really enjoyed doing those jobs.
Dear Young people, we really were worried about this! computers just could not handle the big dates! but lots of smart people fixed it before it went wrong.
Fun fact: a professor in the math dept at uni thought everything was going to crash. He had a whole prepper setup in 1999, with rain water collection, purification filtering, and shelves in his cellar filled with sawdust to keep something fresh. (Fruit/veggies?)
He unfortunately did not pay taxes that year, believing the banks and IRS would fail.
Needless to say the IRS was very cross with him.