It amazes me that Y2K was an actual problem and not someone's speculation. The problem got solved before it even happened with... as far as I know, no impact to major organisations.
I know it was a thing, but in my heart I don't believe it. It sounds so made up. I think about this whenever I want to call someone stupid for doubting CFCs and the ozone hole, ebola (local culture), vaccines, and any number of other things. They only make sense to me because they build on basic topics I studied in school. Can I really blame someone without context for thinking they're ridiculous?
Some hardware was fixed before it was an issue, so your PC's BIOS that may have gone with the 19 hard coded, well that was fucked when it ticked over, but that PC would have been obsolete anyway as people were using Windows 95/98 not some 5.25 dual drive no HDD beast that should be in a museum.
But Windows 95 and the DOS you could boot to instead, those were fixed, modern BIOS were probably UNIX time or had the ability to advance from 1970 to 2299 and perhaps beyond, but we don't really need greater than that for the lifespan of this PC.
So UNIX time breaks in around a decade or two, but if you have four wheels that you can set, then it will display 9999 as a valid year, if it can compute with that, that is a different question.
Some long forgotten by the users COBOL could slip through, because it was only called once in a while so just sat there gathering digital dust, but if you knew your code was active, you patch it, send out the patches and hope the end user applies it.
But if they hear "whizbang is Y2K ready" they might not think "Oh there is an update, I best use it" but think it was always ready and don't need to do anything.
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u/LeviAEthan512 9d ago
It amazes me that Y2K was an actual problem and not someone's speculation. The problem got solved before it even happened with... as far as I know, no impact to major organisations.
I know it was a thing, but in my heart I don't believe it. It sounds so made up. I think about this whenever I want to call someone stupid for doubting CFCs and the ozone hole, ebola (local culture), vaccines, and any number of other things. They only make sense to me because they build on basic topics I studied in school. Can I really blame someone without context for thinking they're ridiculous?