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
I was working in IT support and software development at the time. It was 99.8% unjustified paranoiia.
The “Year 2000 problem” was *definitely* not a surprise, systems engineers are very forward-thinking, smart folks and realized this would be an issue many years prior and had already upgraded their hardware to support 4-digit dates. As for software, operating sytems like Windows and Unix had also been patched by at least 1998 or so. There was absolutely no reason to think a PC made in the last 5-8 years would just “break” or “reset” or “freeze” when the clock turned over on Dec 31, 1999.
There were exceptions of course. But nothing critical. We’re talking issues that would have affected no more than a handful of businesses using some super-niche software that never got updated, or their own home-brewed stuff.
Latest Answers