REMEMBER Turn Your Computer Off Before Midnight Orn 123199 BUY Theangrymunchkin Musicalluna Cumaeansibyl All-Things-Olicity Forloveofreason Shananaomi Jaybushman Spytap Ralfmaximus Faisdm The-Most-Calamitous Jibini Top-Lotad-Breeder Chocogoat What Why? Someone Pls Explain to Me Pls I Wasnt Born Yet in 1999 Why Turn Computer Off Before Midnight? What Happen if U Dont? Y2k Lol Everyone Was Like “the Supervirus Is Gonna Take Over the World and Ruin Everything and End the World!!!” This Is the Oldest I’ve Ever Felt Right Now WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN’T BORN YET IN 1999 Ahh the Millenium Bug It Wasn’t a Virus It Was an Issue With How Some Old Computers at the Time Were Programmed to Deal With Dates Basically Some Computers With Older Operating Systems Didn’t Have Anything in Place to Deal With the Year Reaching 99 and Looping Around to 00 It Was Believed That This Inability to Sync With the Correct Date Would Cause Issues and Even Crash Entire Systems the Moment the Date Changed People Flipped Out About It Convinced That the Date Discrepancy Between Netwoked Systems Would Bring Down Computers Everywhere and Shut Down the Internet and So All Systems Relying on Computers Including Plane Navigation Etc Would Go Down Causing Worldwide Chaos It Was Genuinely Believed That People Should All Switch Off Computers to Avoid This One or Two Smart People Spoke Up and Said “um Hey This Actually Will Only Effect a Few Very Outdated Computers and They’ll Just Display the Wrong Date So It Probably Won’t Be Harmful” but Were Largely Ignored Because People Selling Books About the End of the World Were Talking Louder in the End Absolutely Nothing Happened Oh Gosh I’ve Been a Programmer Working for Various Government Agencies Since the Early 1990s and I Can Say With Some Confidence NOTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE WE WORKED VERY HARD FIXING SHIT THAT MOST DEFINITELY WOULD HAVE BROKEN ON 1-Jan-2000 One Example I Personally Worked on Vaccination Databases My Contract Was With the CDC to Coordinate Immunization Registries — You Know Kids’ Vaccine Histories What They Got When They Got It and Most Importantly Which Vaccines They Were Due to Get Next and When These Were State-Wide Registries Containing Millions of Records Each Most of These Systems Were Designed in the 1970s and 1980s and Stored the Child’s DOB Year as Only Two Digits This Means That — Had We Not Fixed It — Just About Every Child in All the Databases I Worked on Would Have SUDDENLY AGED OUT OF THE PROGRAM 1-Jan-2000 in Other Words These Kids Would Suddenly Be “too Old” to Receive Critical Vaccines Okay So That’s Not a Nuke Plant Exploding or Airplanes Dropping From the Sky in Fact Nothing Obvious Would Have Occurred Come Jan 1st BUT Without the Software Advising Doctors When to Give Vaccinations an Entire Generation’s Immunity to Things Like Measles Mumps Smallpox Etc Would Have Been Compromised and Nobody Would Even Know There Was a Problem for Months — Possibly Years — After You Think the Fun Games Caused by a Few Anti-Vaxers Is Bad? Imagine Whole Populations Going Unvaccinated by Accident… One Case of Measles and the Death Toll Might Be Measured in Millions This Is One Example I KNOW to Be True Because I Was There I Also Know That in the Years Leading Up to 2000 There Were Ad-Hoc Discussion Groups Particularly Altrisk of Amazed Programmers and Project Managers That Uncovered Year-2000 Traps… and Fixed Them Quietly Without Fanfare in Many Cases Because Admitting There Was a Problem Would Have Resulted in a Lawsuit by Angry Customers but Mostly Because It Was Our Job to Fix Those Design Flaws Before Anyone Was Inconvenienced or Hurt So Yeah… All That Y2K Hysteria Was for Nothing Because Programmers Worked Their Asses Off to Make Sure It Was for Nothing Bolding Mine Absolutely True My Mom Worked Like Crazy All Throughout 1998 and 1999 on Dozens of Systems to Avoid Y2K Crashes Nothing Major Happened Because People Worked to Made Sure It Didn’t Now if We Could Just Harness That Concept for Some of the Other Major Issues Facing Us Today This Meme Came So Far Since I Saw It This Morning God I Love Tumblr Teaching Tumblr About History as a Young Sys Admin During Y2K I Can Confirm That It Was SRS BZNS I Worked for a Major Pharmaceutical Company at the Time They Spent Millions of Dollars on Consultant and Programmer Hours Not to Mention Their Own Employees’ Time to Fix All Their In-House Software as Well as Replace It With New Systems Sys Admins Like Myself Were Continually Deploying Patches Updating Firmware and Deploying New Systems in the Months Leading Up to Y2K Once That Was Done Though the Programmers Went Home and Cashed Their Checks When the FATEFUL HOUR Came Along It Wasn’t Just One Hour for a Global Company With Offices in Dozens of Countries It Was 24 Hours of Being Alert and On-Call I Imagine That Other Large Organizations Had Similar Setups With Entire IT Departments Working in Shifts to Monitor Everything Everyone Was on a Hair Trigger Too So the Slightest Problem Caused ALL HANDS ON DECK Pages to Go Out Yes We Had Pagers for Hard Numbers IDC’s 2006 Calculation Put the Total US Cost of Remediation Before and After at $147 Billion - That’s in 1999 Dollars That Paid for an Army of Programmers Including Calling Up Retired Grandparents From the Senior Center Because COBOL and FORTRAN Apps From the ‘60s Needed Fixing Also Note That There Were Some Problems Including $13 Billion in Remediation Included in the Figure Above Some of These Involved Nuclear Power Plants Medical Equipment and “a Customer at a New York State Video Rental Store Had a Bill for $91250 the Cost of Renting the Movie ‘The General’s Daughter’ for 100 Years” Y2K Was Anything but Nothing Tfw You Do Your Job So Fucking Well That Everyone Thinks You Weren’t Necessary in the First Place Salute Our COBOL Cowpokes and Other Y2K Wranglers They Saved All Our Asses Another Important Lesson We Learned a Shitload of Stuff in the ‘90s Was Still Running Programs From the ‘60s and ‘70s It’s Hard to Justify the Expense and Trouble of a Massive Upgrade When Things Are Working “fine” – Easier to Say “well I Suppose We’ll Need to Change at Some Point but Not Now” and if Things Really Are Working “fine” You Can Let Them Go on for a While but Every So Often You Run Into Something Like Y2K Where the Software Simply Wasn’t Designed to Handle Certain Eventualities Can’t Really Blame the Programmers Either if You Were Writing Shit in the ‘60s Would You Expect People to Still Be Using It in the Science-Fiction Year of 2000? That’s Not a Real Year! You Might Be Dead by Then! So Y’know You Don’t Always Need the Latest and Greatest for Everything You’re Doing – How Much Power Do You Really Need for an Inventory System? – but Regular Upgrades Are a Good Idea Nerds Quietly Saving the World This Is Superhero Nonsense I Love It Y2K Is a Large Reason Behind the Tech Boom of the 2000’s Think About It Tons of Programmers and Such Suddenly in Demand? That “oh It’s Ok for Now We Don’t Need to Update” Attitude Thrown Out the Window? You Get a Turn From the Let’s Keep Updating What We Have to Let’s Get Something New We Have to Update Less Except That Doesn’t Stop With a Single New Thing It Becomes a Trend Oh You’re Having That Issue Well Buy This New One It Will Never Have That Issue Oh You’re Having Issue X Buy This New Version We Fixed Issue X as Well as That Issue and So on Not Saying It’s a Bad Thing at All Just Saying It Really Kick-Started the Hastened Technological Path We’re on Now