Oldfags

It was a big nothing burger.

y2k was the dumbest fucking shit i ever lived through and I was just 13 years old. I held all adults around me in terrible contempt.
Whyt?
Because even before then I could set the computers date to 2001 and the fucking thing didn't explode.

People thought planes were going to fall from the sky. But almost everyone knew it was going to be a nothingburger.

no one gave a shit we just listened to that prince song a lot and I had this sweet watch that lit up and made noises at midnight on nye 99'

Unfortunately programmers fixed almost all the bugs and we missed out on an epic happening.

There was a lot of hype, but it was mainly to generate jobs for consultants to patch old software. Maybe if no software updates had been made it would have been a big deal, but every major company literally poured millions into consultant payments for mitigation and "disaster recovery" planning in the leadup to the cutoff date.

It was also anti-climactic in the US because we got to see Australia roll over to 2000 a full 24 hours ahead of us. When nothing bad happened to Australia in the first couple of hours, it was clear it was a nothingburger.

Had Yas Forums existed then, I'm sure there would have been a huge contingent of "disaster porn" fans posting here openly hoping for a wave of destruction - and when that didn't happen there would have been much salt.

The dumbest 75% of the country either did not depend on computers or didn’t know they depended on computers. Computers were mystery boxes, that ran in magic. People didn’t know if planes would fall out of the sky like rocks once their anti-gravity device was turned off. People are idiots, people back then we’re idiots too, they just knew even less. The media was not a fear machine though - at least nothing like after 9/11. Very little happened. Almost nothing.

This is different because in a few weeks the elderly will be dying without ventilators to help them. They are mostly old and useless anyway, but still, hundreds of thousands will die. Then people will actually start distancing for real - and it will probably go away by July. The world is not going to end. Everything will be fine. 50 million or 100 million could die, and the world will still be fine. Nothing is going to stop me from fucking and truckin.

Lmao didn't people say the nukes would launch uncontrollably. Seem to remember people being worried Russia would be completely unprepared for it

youtu.be/Xm5OiB3CPxg if you want a basic idea of what the prepping looked like.

I was 19 at the time. It was thought of as a joke. Not very many prepped for it at all. Somethings were run on computers, but those things didn't really matter. Highly dangerous things controlled by computers (missiles, water treatment, etc) had patches made for them and it was made well known that nuclear missiles wouldn't start flying. I got to feel some tittys that night.

Pretty awesome. Got drunk and laid. Woke up on the 1st and everything was as I had left it.

Except Putin was in charge.

>Because even before then I could set the computers date to 2001 and the fucking thing didn't explode.

YES. You've brought me back to a memory of setting my dad's office computer to a few minutes before 1/1/2000 and watching it pass by without a problem.

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>was it just like this?
No dipshit. Nobody died. I was working in government at the time and all I can remember is the smug looking IT contractors travelling around for months putting little "Y2K certified" stickers on anything electronic while collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for this scam.

My buddy is the king of Y2K.

> Be me. Senior in HS.
> Buddy has parents out of town on NYE
> Closest neighbors a mile away
> Party time.
> Bad weed and Natty Light
> Whole high school (90 kids) plus assorted friends show up
> Music is pumping youtu.be/sc5iTNVEOAg
> Buddy grabs me "be ready to scream"
> ??? Ok
> Countdown 3...2...1
> Everything in the house goes dark.
> People screaming, girls crying, everyone runs outside
> Too far away to see any other houses
> Y2K is here, time to die.
> After about 60 seconds everything turns back on again
> He had killed the breaker box.
> People legit shook
> My crush kept going on about how scared she was.
> Finally hooked up with her that night.
> Hey Philly, to this day that is one of the best nights if my life.

It was nothing like this. The main effect was that a bunch of programmers and admins got extra work updating software and systems. There were serious concerns, but the important stuff got fixed, and the rest could be dealt with manually. A lot of it wasn't that important: if an invoice said it was due in 1900 instead of 2000, who cares. Things like that weren't nearly as computerized and automated as they are now. If it happened now, it'd be much worse.

On the actual night, everyone watched to see what would happen when the clock rolled over in Sydney. When the lights didn't go out, everyone relaxed.

You raise a good point. I remember the news saying nothing had happened in timezones ahead of us. What a weird scam it was.

Not even anything like this. Just a sitcom punchline. This is unprecedented in history since the black death (even though not as bad as the black death). No one living today has ever gone through this and anyone who claims otherwise is a lying sack of shit and a blowhard.

It led to the death of IT contracting in the UK due to all the scamming that went on.

Fuck yeah. Who else here used to slay AIM slags?

>I was 14 and don't remember super well.
Are you retarded or something? I was 10 and I remember all of it.

>the best night of your life was peaking in high school
I feel way better about my life now, thanks.

Well, it wasn't exactly a scam. It really could have caused buffer overflow type problems, and the worst part was you couldn't tell unless you actually dug through code and checked it, basically line by line. Most companies updated their software and called that good enough, which wasn't a bad thing.

But the fear of nukes melting down and airplanes falling out of the sky was overblown, because those things have fail-safes so that one program going haywire doesn't take them out.

The worst scams were probably people selling books and videos about Y2K preparedness. I know there's one video out there starring Leonard Nimoy.

I bought a bunch of canned spaghetti and hid them in my drawers. I was a hapooner in 7th grade because I read david icke.

Trust the plan yo

I would characterize this atmosphere as something similar to after 9/11. It's really the only thing in my lifetime that has come close.

If you go back and watch old yank talk shows like Leno or Letterman, they were out for blood the first show back. Not even joking.

Y2K was a bunless nothingburger.
A lot of the shit they were worrying about didn't even know what day it was, the rest of it was billing systems that used 2-digit years. So the real morons simply monkey-patched years to be 1920-2019, and there were still things that broke early this year. There were also a few Feb 29 problems, but then Sony got hit by Feb 29 in 2010.

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I was 19, we partied like it was 1999

I remember earlier in the year I set the time and date to 23:55 12/31/99 and waited five minutes. yolo

Big ole nothing burger.

>most people couldn't give a shit because we didn't depend on computers

except that all of the banks and stores did for their POS systems and accounting

that's why people were concerned, not because they thought it would wipe out their home computers. dumbass.

NO.....nothing like this. This is REAL !

I agree, I really am stuck in a Quarantine that they won't openly call a quarantine

i was hired to "reprogram" computers for a large union corporation. ended up sweeping floors and sleeping in the breakroom after it was proven to be a big nothing burger until i found something better to do.

it was the first nothin burger I remember

It kept a bunch of Boomer COBOL programmers employed at high paying jobs for several more years.

My dad switched the circuit breaker at midnight so i thought the power went out.

I flipped the circuit breaker at a large party 5 seconds after the ball dropped. Good times were had.

fucking idiot

This. My uncle was one of those programmers.

My dad bought a gun and a generator in case the power grid went down. That's about it. People were worried about the stock market and other major financial and infrastructure systems all crashing at once.

I think I got laid that night.

It was dumb. I don’t remember anyone i knew being actually freaked out about it. Midnight passed, and we laughed about how nothing happened

>was it just like this?
nah, some months before the end of the world people realized they could jut change data system and everything would work fine, no more "world reset, new stone age habbening"
The fact is that, nowadays, everything is amplified by (((social media))) and people end up on a terror-porn neverending loop. which makes them scared as fuck cuz they don't consume any other info other than those that athe algorythms give them
In 99' people actually had real offline lives, and everyone knew the sun would be rising as always on the next day.
Humans are not naturally designed to possess a hivemind, and we shouldn't.
t. just received a call from muh scared as fuck mom

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sup Epstein, hows your retirement? How many you've already snitched?

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nobody really cared because nobody really knew much about computers anyway. downloading a porn jpeg at 15 minutes was bad enough.

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The problem was that a lot of software was not using the full 4 digits for the date. So for 01-01-1999 they would use something like 010199 and get the last two digits for the year. The real problem was that when the year turned over suddenly a lot of software would have issues with date comparison functions because now it was 010100 which if you were comparing something by dates 00

one positive side effect is that every organization got their computers upgraded and pushed the computer / internet revolution forward. most computers were old pieces of shit up to that point.

i remember waiting for nye midnight for everything to go dark. everything stayed on. we went out and got drunk and stoned at the bars after.

>Computers were mystery boxes
>1999
Sure!

>In 99' people actually had real offline lives, and everyone knew the sun would be rising as always on the next day.

Fucking A. Times were good.

Mostly dumb but very funny. People had recently fallen for the horror movie hoax (blair witch project) also.

It turned the new years into an end of the world party, that was alota of fun.

how were you 14 and not able to remember what it was like?

I was doing 14 yr old stuff. I wasn't watching the nightly news. I wasn't working at a company with an IT department.