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
In the big picture of things… I think it was generally justified.
It was a real big issue. So many computer programs were written that did not take it into account. You have to take into account all devices that have computers in them, not just your desktop computer or laptop. Computers are everywhere from cars to airplanes to sensors to robotics…
Sadly, far too many industries would just write software and then forget about it. As long as it kept running, no one cared.
In this sense, the ‘paranoia’ to get people on this problem; to find every device that could be impact, to figure out what the impact could be, to update the software or get new devices, to write new software… was absolutely needed.
The ‘paranoia’ was justified just because no one really knew the full scope of the problem. If you went to any organization and asked ‘are you vulnerable to y2k issues and what would be the impact’ Almost one could say anything with any assurdness. You’d never know if you missed some small part of a program or some device somewhere was missed.
Now just knowing how computers *tend* to work, it’s unlikely planes would fall from the sky or nuclear reactors would blow up or something like that. But the paranoia was justified because it really was a ‘let’s hope we got everything’ fixed in time.
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