I think we can defederate that company’s name from our personal vocabulary instances.
The Y2K issue wasn’t just a scare though. If the Devs and IT in general didn’t had a strategy to overcome that ridiculous windows issue, things could have go bad. Media did media things and pushed it to a world ending scenario though.
I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t Windows that was the main offender, but instead legacy systems of all kinds made since 1970, where people were not expecting for their programs to run for more than 30 years.
Surprise! Businesses don’t care whether the code is old, as long as it works - so that data type you store the year in only held two characters, and hard-coded the 19 onto it.
1999 would be written as 99. 19 + 99 = 1999 = computers were happy.
2000 would be written as 00. 19 + 00 = 1900 = computers went to shit
It wasn’t Windows, as someone else already explained, but yeah general media spread misinformation as usual when it comes to technology.
I work in IT and I was there, it was a serious problem that, if not fixed, would have indeed ended up in worldwide disaster, but we knew exactly what it was many years earlier, and exactly how to fix it, and we did so nothing actually happened obviously.
Media spread fear for nothing, instead of accurately reporting the situation and all the hark work IT people were doing all over the world to make sure everything would be fine.
In a way, the media hype was not completely bad. It helped ensuring there was budget to fix all those systems.
Preparedness paradox - if effective action is taken to mitigate a potential disaster, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused.
Very relevant in the context of COVID - “we’re not seeing spikes, why are we still locking down and masking up?!” - and a significant driving factor feeding into those radical anti-COVID-protection “no new normal” ideologies.
I made so much money in the 90s working on Y2K stuff. I don’t know how bad it would have been if we didn’t, but people like me fixed a lot of shit in the late 90s to make sure things went smoothly.
You are one of our unsung heroes.
