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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.
I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”
most of the concern for Y2K was actually about old systems. keep in mind, the IRS, for example, still runs servers with COBOL on it today, as their main database. it works, and it's reliable. They're far from the only group (read: banks, government agencies, hospitals,) who still do so.
those systems... they had no idea what would happen and had to figure something out. most programs at the time didn't actually acount for the first two digits of the year. 1922 and 2022 would have been indiferentiable to those programs. for then-modern systems, it was a simple patch. For the old equipment.... not so much...
Exactly, the systems that were at the biggest risk were the older, more entrenched systems that were spun up by the government, banks, military, hospitals.
This are obviously critical (cyber) infrastructure for our modern society. Imagine waking on Jan 1st and half of Americans lost access to their bank accounts or their accounts read $0.00. Or if all the sudden flights across the country/world were cancelled because air traffic controllers didn't have accurate information or the ticketing systems weren't showing any reservations.
People would have lost their f*cking minds.
Nuclear reactor meltdown was high on my list.
I vageuly remember people kept on going on about planes falling out of the sky. "Welp, it's 1900 now, guess I need to ignore all input and nose dive."
Water treatment for me. There was a water treatment plant test where the computer went "No treatment in 100 years? Better dump ALL the chemicals then!" LA had a problem with raw sewage release.
Scared the hell out me. Water was my #1 priority.