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
It’s a bit of both.
There was a genuine risk that something important could crash or fail because of the date issue, but it was something that was known about for years beforehand. Loads of work was done in the run-up to make sure that older systems had their date comparisons updated. Pretty much all systems built from 1995 onwards (and probably before then) were all already Y2K compliant.
So that’s the reality of it.
And then you’ve got the media. Oh boy. There’s nothing better than a good panic to sell advertising space, and the media really ran with the worst of all worst consequences which were never going to be a thing, because people who worked with software were onto it and had been for a long, long time.
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