I miss 1999
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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My guy over here with a 52 speed.
Load-speed flex.
I didn't know much about y2k, I was just a kid and my family wasn't tech savvy and hated the idea of me ever touching a computer, which given my hobbies now is extremely ironic, but I know enough about the IT field to know a lot of people worked very hard to fix it.
I don't know the extent of how bad it would have been, I'm a Linux hobbyist, not a technical engineer, but I'm sure it would have been bad.
Honestly, there's tons of people here far more qualified than me who could probably tell you how bad it would have been.
It would've been a lot less catastrophic than people made it out to be.
Pro tip: the Unix epoch rollover is coming, too! OOOOooooOOOOOoooo
I worked on an ISP helpdesk in 1999 (including New Year, to my disgust), and we had dozens of people call in during the next few days because systems they relied on to run their businesses had failed.
The fact they were calling an ISP about their accounting software is probably an indicator of the type of thinking that caused their problem.
An insane amount of money and overtime went into changing software and data to make sure that a lot of bad things did not happen. It's not that the Y2K bug was a nothing burger, a lot of people worked very hard to make sure critical systems were changed.
I have been telling people this for 26 years now to no avail. I wish I hadn't busted my ass now so all the motherfuckers since then who claimed IT is useless could eat the giant dick of downtime.
Yep, now we have the 2038 year coming for Linux. It already got me, I didnt want to renew my home NAS certificate every year, so I thought I'd do a 30 year cert. Well after 2038 it rolled the date to the 1960s...
And it's tough to remember just how fast computing was changing in the '90s, improving by leaps and bounds all the time with seemingly no ceiling in sight. Consumer computing power was doubling every one and a half years. And in, say, 1994 it wasn't unreasonable at all to assume that all of that crusty old tech from the '80s and even early '90s surely would have been replaced by the year 2000 anyway without anyone having to do anything special about it. Probably more than once... right?
The crucial disconnect there was that tech people are not necessarily business people and I think a lot of folks grossly underestimated management's recalcitrance in spending money until it was more than clear they were facing a crisis.
As it always goes, they only acknowledge you when your actually fixing problems. The work you did that made everything work as it should was never acknowledged the way it should have been.
A lot of stupid businesses and government entities waited until the last fucking second to fix a problem they knew about for half a century.
The overtime should have been exponential for them kicking the can down the road for literal generations.
We haven't changed. Companies will not spend more than they have to on IT if they think they can deal with it until next quarter. This was no different, plus developers of software didn't expect their stuff to become legacy and not updated with better programs. Memory was premium, so a few less bytes here and there that would work fine for a few years was what they did.
Half a century is a bit of a stretch, but I otherwise agree. It should not have gotten to the level of trouble it became, but I also dislike the implication in the OP that it was just a non-issue meant to scare people; it was a problem that indeed came to a head because many companies kicked the proverbial can, but a potential real problem nonetheless (especially in medical/insurance/monetary systems rather than "planes will rain from the sky" sorts of issues).
Excellent prank by best buy, there's no month 31, silly goobers
Millions of man hours preventing catastrophe only to be met with the perpetual refrain “What do we pay you for?”
Those people deserve to be as honored as those who worked in the space program, but all the recognition they got was the movie Office Space.