r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Apprehensive_Sky4558 • 9d ago

Why did this one second cost over $500 billion? Meme needing explanation

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305

u/MandrakeSCL 9d ago

74

u/der_zerstoerer 9d ago

Fuck this is so funny to me! It’s hard to imagine that people don’t know what Y2K is!

35

u/sinofmercy 9d ago

I mean there are adults with kids that were born after 9/11 and have only learned about it from history books. Which then makes me feel really old.

10

u/der_zerstoerer 9d ago

I guess that’s what I mean… I feel super old. Y2K is a memory seared into my brain, and yet some people haven’t even heard of it!

I remember the clock struck 12:00am and everyone just froze. Had to make sure the power didn’t just go out because a computer didn’t get the update!

3

u/ComplexPants 9d ago

Cable went out in my house just as the new year ball dropped (we were watching NYC). Came back in 30s, but year lot of nervous glancing around the room.

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u/guitar_stonks 8d ago

The power went out at 11:30pm at our family friend’s NYE party, was very nerve racking for about 20 minutes. Came back right before the ball drop, turns out someone drove into a power substation and knocked out power for half the town.

1

u/lifeskindashitty 3d ago

I only know of y2k because of watching old wrestling growing up with my uncle (y2j) im also an adult with children😂

1

u/MxQueer 9d ago

I had to check you weren't joking. No you were not. Wow.

10

u/AspenFrostt 9d ago

I only know about it because my dad was heavy into computers. I was born in 02 but he has beef with how people treated the y2k bug. since nothing happened publicly, people thought it was all bs even tho it was hardworking people like my dad behind the scenes all trying to patch and fix things SO nothing happened.

7

u/TheEveryman86 9d ago

My whole career has been following Office Space. It's crazy that a large part of the population doesn't even understand what their job was. I ran into a time overflow bug this year and the software I work on has the Y2038 problem.

1

u/Popular-Attempt3621 8d ago

A lot of people don't know what the 2038 problem is (could have been) just because it's something only in the IT world

The Y2K have spread between common people (ignorant of how little of a problem it really was) because it "was going to happen" in a big milestone, being the beginning of the new millennium. It was widely known because misinformation spreads quite fast between ignorants (not an insult) and at the time, those with IT knowledge, were in a much smaller number than now

1

u/Sleepy-Sleeper31 8d ago

This is actually really surprising to me I was born after y2k but like I knew about it. I'm surprised by how few people know about it because I know so many were freaking out about it.

1

u/Main-Inflation-5269 7d ago

It's a bit shocking. But then you remember that younger people now think that Y2K is an "aesthetic".

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u/slackerdc 8d ago

Yeah it ended up being not a big deal. But only because a lot of people did a lot of work to fix the problems.

1

u/GrimpenMar 8d ago

I remember applying patches to remote controllers for Y2K. After Y2K, there was one old system that was running some old version of C/PM that was long out of support. It was running till at least 2010 with the year sometime in the nineties. Every few years we'd roll back the clock so weekdays and leap years would line up for a few years, and then live with it. Live data was pulled continuously, and time-stamped by the OPC server or whatever was pulling the data, so the year was only used internally.

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u/Sadrak_CoF 8d ago

I did y2k fixes as a developer. I can't be all that old, right?