Do any of you remember back to Y2K?

[Srkdqltr]

All the people on all the shows for over a year giving dire warnings that at the turn of 2000 we will go back to the stone age as everything will stop. No electricity, no water. Planes will fall out of the sky?
Because the computers will all fail. Elevators would stop mid floor and kill people. It went on and on.
As I was in computers at the time I knew that would not happen as computers would go on into 2000. But the hair on fire people got great mileage out of what they said.
January 1 they were all gone. Not a one said they were wrong. Not a word was spoken about what was said and the people saying this stuff were never heard from again.
We will see what happens in the election. It will be interesting if it will be another Y2K. I sincerely hope so.
We live in interesting times.

[luvs2sing]

1. My husband works in IT, too.

I remember him saying he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. His band played early on NYE that year and, instead of sticking around the event, the band got together at the mandolin player’s house for a private party..you know..just in case..

[SharonAnn]

32. I was in IT and took a red-eye flight from Seattle to Ohio on New Years Eve

Friends couldn’t believe it because they thought “airplanes would fall out of the sky” at midnight.

I knew we had worked hard on the issues, there was never any danger of planes falling from the sky, so I flew home on a nearly empty plane.

[PJMcK]

2. Great analogy

Although, if a certain airplane were to fall out of the sky on January 20, 2021, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

[CaptYossarian]

11. It would kill a lot of thugs.

[rzemanfl]

3. After Y2K I got a large selection of flashlights with batteries in a carrying case.

It was a Y2K prepper thing on clearance. I paid less for all the stuff than the batteries would have cost. Twenty years later, some of the flashlights still work. The plastic case is in fine shape.

[marble falls]

4. Yep. I bought up everybody's Y2K supplies for practically nothing. Storing them up for Y3K ...

I'm going to make some big bucks.

[lpbk2713]

5. My employer at the time was expecting an apocalypse.

I had all I could do to keep from laughing out loud.

[Eugene]

6. In the 1990's responsible people did the work to prevent a meltdown.

I was a computer programmer back then, and there was a lot of stuff to fix.

Yes, there was some hype, but it was a real problem that didn't just go away by itself.

[soothsayer]

16. This. It was the preparation that prevented bad things.

Same thing would have happened if we took Covid seriously in the beginning. Could have contained it, then everyone would have griped that it was nothing big, I think. But it would have been better.

[ihas2stinkyfeet]

25. yup. at the cost of about a bazillion dollars.

that was a biiiiggggg part of what fueled the tech bubble. when those contracts ended the bubble burst. had little to do w 'over exuberance'.
ex was still a grunt at a financial exchange then. they sweated it. big time.

[JI7]

31. Just like the Terrorist Attacks that Clinton Admin Stopped which could have been similar to 9/11

if not bigger since one of the attacks they stopped was at a major international airport.

[Cracklin Charlie]

7. I sent my husband and son to get Y2K supplies.

A case of water and a scrabble game.

My son recently borrowed the game back for coronavirus quarantine.

[LeftInTX]

8. We have to win first!

[unc70]

9. Remember how much work was done so that "nothing" happened

It took an enormous effort throughout the computer industry to find and fixed the pervasive points of potential failure in systems ordinary and exotic. We were implementing Y2K-safe functions and procedures from even before 1990, and we converted date formats in existing data starting in the mid 1990. And we tested, tested, tested. And we turned off anything nonessential when the time came.

And we mostly got things right; when not, we mostly fixed our problems quietly and out of sight.

[Srkdqltr]

10. Yes.. that is what happened.

And there are people in most states who take all this seriously and are safeguarding the ballots.

[Silent3]

21. There wasn't, however, any substantial interest in sabotaging Y2K preparations

People either took Y2K seriously or they didn't, but no one (aside from perhaps some rare random kooks) wanted to exert extra effort to make Y2K worse.

When it comes to voting there is a large, concerted effort of break the voting system, an effort those who wish to protect voting have to fight against. And in states with Republican majorities, the saboteurs have better access to the system than the people trying to protect it.

[Silent3]

19. I dearly hate it when people use Y2K as an example of "getting worked up over nothing"

Yes, some of the worries were overstated, like the idea of planes just falling out of the sky at the stroke of midnight, but without all of the hard work that went on for years ahead of time to prepare for Y2K, the financial chaos would have been quite real, and probably some other areas of automation with time-critical functionality would have caused serious problems.

[Srkdqltr]

26. I'm not really saying that. At least that's not what I wanted to say

I just was saying that most people didn't know that the fixes were being done behind the scenes. The ones with the "hair on fire" talking points probably thought they were doing good alerting the public to a threat.
The people who did the due diligence on the computers all along knew and probably were not listened to or not taken seriously. As today the people in the states saying "we know and are fixing" are the quieter voices not taken seriously.

[Silent3]

33. I didn't think you were saying that, and I was agreeing with you, as far as Y2K

I'm not so sure how well the analogy works for the election problems we're facing, however, because Y2K-solving engineers weren't facing Y2K-make-in-break-even-more-badly engineers working against them.

Trump and the Republicans, by analogy, are hunting down all of the software that was already properly designed to handle 4-digit years, and cutting those systems back to two digits.

[Kaleva]

12. On the other hand, climate change is real but few are preparing to adapt to it.

[mcar]

13. I remember it well

I was the public relations director for a community hospital. The IT guy asked me to come up with a communications plan to fit in with their IT plan.

Let me just say that the IT folks at that hospital were, to be kind, not very tech savvy. The leadership was IT illiterate and went for anything these IT guys suggested, because they knew nothing - literally never used a computer.

I came up with a detailed crisis communications plan that covered all aspects, from my position, of the potential crisis.

They were gobsmacked. Had no idea what to do with my plan - which took the threat seriously, because I had to. I think they expected a 2 paragraph document.

[Maeve]

14. Hubby is also in IT--he was late getting home New Year's Eve

He was fixing a client's system that would have glitched badly, but his work meant they were fine. He had been working on similar systems for months to prevent problems. A lot of smaller businesses needed software fixes.

He got a better job in 2000 because of the work he did in 1999 and we still have a "Y2K" stuffed bug on a shelf in the living room. Yeah, the fears were overblown, but part of the solution was the work people like him did in 1999.

[Arkansas Granny]

15. For Y2K I bought a case of water and went to celebrate with friends.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

17. I remember it very well.

And I know that a lot of the fears were totally overblown. Especially the nonsense about airplanes falling out of the sky.

Yes, there were people who did a lot of work to fix things, but everything was not going to come to a screeching halt.

Which actually makes me wonder, was there a similar Y2K thing in Europe? Or anywhere else?

[unc70]

22. Y2K was a worldwide issue

We were all on alert that New Year's Eve, which started early for us because we had so many clients in Asia, then in Europe. Many of these clients were using my products to control electric grids, pipelines, and such.

[Srkdqltr]

27. I figured when Sidney crossed New Years Eve with no problem things were OK LOL

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

29. And how many things shut down entirely because of Y2K?

I bet none of them.

For one thing, not every computer system, not even a majority of them, was going to zero out on January 1, 2000. Heck, drivers' licenses were already geared up to have birthdates prior to January 1, 1900. And insurance companies were selling insurance policies with end dates well after 1/1/2000.

And airlines were already booking flights some 11 months ahead.

[Nederland]

18. I hope this is another Y2K

I've been a computer programmer in the industry 30 years now. I too remember Y2K, and I agree that in the year leading up to that date there was an awful lot of hype. However, I also remember that the first time I read about the "Y2K Problem" was in the early 1990's in some article called Doomsday 2000 or something. By that time other people had already been talking about it and raising the warning signs for years. I also remember that in 1994 I worked on a piece of software used with ultrasound equipment, and having to demonstrate to the FDA that it was Y2K compliant before they would approve it.

People love to say "look at all the money we spent on the Y2K problem, and then nothing happened". The simple fact is that nothing happened because we spent all that money. It wasn't a bunch of chicken little's making up horror stories about non-existent problems. Yes, by 1999 a lot of people in the media cashed in by talking about a problem that by then had been mostly solved, but that doesn't mean it wasn't real. The problem was very real and if we had done nothing the shit would have really hit the fan. We were lucky in that the people in powerful positions in corporations and government listened to the warnings very early on and spent the money that needed to be spent.

I hope that this time around the same thing happens. I hope this is another Y2K. I hope that the people in power listen to the warnings, take the time they have to do something about it, and as a result of all their hard work nothing happens.

[Srkdqltr]

20. Yes.. exactly

People who know about voting and how it works inside already have/or should have done the due diligence to make sure it is all secure. The people talking now don't know what has to be done or has been done already. They just see the outside.

[Silent3]

24. Unfortunately, this is a situation where too many of the "people in power"...

...actively want a breakdown to occur. It's not a matter of getting them to take the problem seriously. It's getting them to make a moral choice about the outcome they want.

A lot of the people in power are Republicans with demonstrably no moral compass whatsoever, just greed and ambition and a thirst for power.

While I've have long thought Republicans had a twisted set of values, I still gave many credit for at least having a set of values of some sort. The ascendancy of Trump has crushed that belief. With precious few exceptions, only out-of-office Republicans have shown much courage in standing up to Trump. The rest have demonstrated a stunning level of capitulation, and nothing more than a desire to cling to power no matter the cost.

That's a different kind of problem to solve than Y2K, because while the Y2K problem was a thorny technical problem, it wasn't actively fighting against being solved.

[Silent3]

23. That's not really a proper retelling of the Y2K problem

While there were certainly people with overwrought, irrational fears of the problems that Y2K might cause, most of those weren't technical experts, but media people hyping to story and magnifying all of the "what if" worst-case scenarios anyone ever imagined.

But the people who thought there was nothing to worry about were also very wrong. They just never had to face the real problems that might have happened, because other people did take the problem seriously and put thousands of person-years into solving the problem.

[Elwood P Dowd]

28. I remember a computer illiterate republican neanderthal telling me my computer

would do all kinds of nasty things, and it was all because of the Bill Clinton Y2K conspiracy.

[CabalPowered]

30. There was nothing to worry about because

the field responded. I personally installed close to 2000 of those pci clock fix cards while working at HP. That was preventable through science. This train wreck is not.