I was born in 2000. I’ve always heard that Y2K was just dramatics and paranoia, but I’ve also read that it was justified and it was handled by endless hours of fixing the programming. So, which is it? Was it people being paranoid for no reason, or was there some justification for their paranoia? Would the world really have collapsed if they didn’t fix it?
In: Technology
Tl;Dr, yes, it was, but not for the reasons you might think.
Y2K posed an actual risk to major systems glitching out, deleting or corrupting databases, and some system could’ve genuinely collapsed if they rolled back to 1900 instead of 2000.
The reason nothing major happened was roughly 20 years and about half a trillion USD worth of work going into rewriting those systems from scratch, patching ones up that couldn’t be rewritten, and switching out a LOT of computer code in general.
Not everything got patched, and there were some megative consequences. Some hospital systems in the UK misdiagnosed a lot of children with either having or not having Down Syndrome, and so a lot of potentially healthy babies were aborted while a lot of children with Down Syndrome were born because their parents and doctors couldn’t know that the database got corrupted.
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