It's a bit jarring to think that the turn of the millennium now qualifies as "history," but here we are, explaining the strange Y2K event for those too young to remember it. By 1999, the world was wired to run on computers, but those computers were running on operating systems that weren't designed with the year 2000 in mind, so the dates were assumed to always start the year with 19. Was this a problem? Yes, but not nearly as big a problem as the media made it out to be. Until the "millennium bug" made the news, many people didn't even realize how much of the world's infrastructure depended on computers running smoothly. As the date grew near, programmers worked hard to fix the problem in one system after another, so that when the time came, it turned out to be a big nothingburger. Personally, I don't recall as much panic as this video illustrates, but I was busy with young children. I did take the precaution of turning off my computer before midnight, just in case. I later found out that Macs were never vulnerable to the Y2k problem because they had always rendered the year in four digits.
This video includes a skippable ad from 4:12 to 5:47.
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It comes sooner than that. Anyone alive in 2037 will hear all about the UNIX Apocalypse..
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Oh, just wait until the year 10,000 comes and all of those 4-digit year-fields go from 9999 to 0000. Think we're going to find any COBOL programmers in the year 9999?
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Yeah COBOL! Hard to forget Y2K if you worked in IT and had your once in a lifetime New Year's Eve millennium ruined. No Drinking. My company did indeed spends millions, maybe tens of millions fixing that. Sure it was important but everyone knew the end of the world stuff was a joke. Still, the [panic] fear, at a lot of levels was real. I was asked to store a couple of 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel for our generator in my garage. The fastest immediate NO to management I ever gave.
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