OpEd: 25 Years on from Y2K, Good It Happened Way Back Then

Friday, January 03, 2025

Twenty-five years ago on January 1, despite panic and fear that the world was soon to collapse into chaos, nothing much happened.

Posted by LampLighter at 11:31 AM | 13 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry |

Alternate links: Google News | Twitter

A lesson from Y2K: "As we launch ourselves into 2025, one of the key issues of the new year will be whether Americans care that the U.S. government does the hard, slow work of governing and, if it does, who benefits." open.substack.com/pub/heatherc ...

[image or embed]
-- Eric Christiansen (@erichristiansen.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 9:09 AM

Comments

Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

More from the OpEd ...

... Sure, there were issues that hint at the global catastrophe that the Y2K bug might have been, but most, including The Register rolling over to "year Zero," were worth little more than a chuckle.

That said, the fact Y2K rose to little more than a footnote in the annals of the information age is largely due to the hard work and diligence of armies of IT professionals who spent years working out the best way to deploy a relatively simple fix to computers around the world.

If not for the herculean effort with which they greeted a potentially sisyphean task, we might have been way worse off. ...

[emphasis mine]

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-01-02 10:03 PM | Reply

"Twenty-five years ago on January 1, despite panic and fear that the world was soon to collapse into chaos, nothing much happened."

Morality tale? I guess we can hope.

#2 | Posted by Dbt2 at 2025-01-02 10:22 PM | Reply

I was on the night shift on my employer's "Y2K Emergency Response Task Force".

Fun times!

#3 | Posted by REDIAL at 2025-01-02 10:26 PM | Reply

@#3 ... "Y2K Emergency Response Task Force". ...

Ditto.

Yeah, there was an impending, and quite significant problem, but the technical folk seemed to have addressed the problem into, I'll say, almost a non-event?

Major kudos to those nerds who suffered so much from the jocks in high school.

Those jocks may have gone on to make money, but those nerds kept the world running through Y2K.

#4 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-01-02 10:49 PM | Reply

Peter de Jager

A very interesting tale.

#5 | Posted by rstybeach11 at 2025-01-02 11:34 PM | Reply

@#5 ... A very interesting tale. ...

How so?

The search results I see seem to be clogged with money-grabbing sites.

#6 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-01-02 11:55 PM | Reply

You might be referring to Peter de Jager, who was one of the most prominent figures warning about the Y2K (Year 2000) issue. De Jager was a computer consultant and writer who raised awareness about the potential problems caused by computer systems not being able to properly handle the date change from 1999 to 2000. He published articles, gave talks, and worked to help organizations understand the risks and prepare for the millennium bug.

#7 | Posted by rstybeach11 at 2025-01-03 04:10 AM | Reply

The nerds I knew went on to make way more money than the Jocks I knew.

Y2K ... ..we were told to expect to have our days off cancelled and have to work 16 hour days because the apocalypse was likely. I flew in a relative to be here for two weeks to care for my children. Ultimately, I didn't even make a dollar in overtime. It was business as usual before New Years Day was over.

#8 | Posted by Miranda7 at 2025-01-03 08:41 PM | Reply

It was business as usual as soon as Australia celebrated 2000.

Nothing happened.

#9 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2025-01-04 10:43 AM | Reply

Nothing happened.

#9 | POSTED BY LEGALLYYOURDEAD

Nothing happened because we (in the IT community) recognized the problem ahead of time and spent a lot of time and money preparing.

If on the other hand we had denied there was a problem and called it a "democratic hoax" or some such nonsense (like we do today) it would have been a completely different story.

The fact is if we had done nothing to prepare for Y2K a lot of things would have stopped functioning correctly that day and it would have been a huge scramble to correct the cascade of ensuing problems.

#10 | Posted by donnerboy at 2025-01-04 12:08 PM | Reply

We had a few legacy DOS boxes that we couldn't update, so we just advanced the date on them. Still worked fine.

#11 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2025-01-04 12:34 PM | Reply

The problem with many older systems was that there was not enough room to "advance the date". To cut corners and save money they only used the last two digits of the year.

This meant that the number 2000 would look the same as 1900.

#12 | Posted by donnerboy at 2025-01-04 12:45 PM | Reply

How many systems were around in 1900? Just telling you what we did. We had a campus of 3000 PCs in an engineering and manufacturing location. We hired 6 temps to help out and spent a month updating the systems. We had a command center of a dozen workstations connected to generators. I did get a nice Y2K duffel out of the whole thing though. Still have it.

#13 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2025-01-04 09:26 PM | Reply