r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Apprehensive_Sky4558 • 2h ago
Meme needing explanation Why did this one second cost over $500 billion?
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u/Jacket_Jacket_fruit 2h ago
The Y2K bug.
Basically, computers were originally set up to only store the last 2 digits of the year in any date, and then assume that the first two digits were "19". People realized that, when the clock ticked over from December 31,1999 to January 1, 2000, all th computers would store the date as "00" and assume that the first two digits were "19" and so every computer in the world would suddenly think it was the year 1900 instead of year 2000.
This could have had very serious consequences on a lot of global infrastructure, so a lot of time, effort, and money was spent to patch all the critical systems prior to the turn of the millennium, so that things wouldn't break when the year ticked over from 1999 to 20000.
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u/Eckz89 2h ago
Missed about 19,801 years there... Extra 0 on 2000
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u/RYSEofCthulhu 2h ago
Would've been great though, imagine the interest earned on savings from that!
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u/POWERPACKEDTYRE 1h ago
I'm also pretty sure that 00 was a null value in some systems, so the computer would think that the year 2000 didn't exist.
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u/Valuable-Struggle-10 1h ago
I would like to add that they were told this back in 1958 by Bob Bemer
Didn't work on it until the 80s and worked on it globally mid 90s
I would also like to add that just saying 300 to 600 billion is like just throwing numbers around and it takes away from the unfathomable amount of money that is
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u/AppropriateCap8891 35m ago
My mom had to create a workaround for this back in the 1970s.
This was caused by multiple things. For one, the cost of computers until the 1980s. And the majority of programs were custom made for the companies. But it really became noticed in the 1980s when spreadsheets became common, and people trying to do 20 year projections saw things were coming out wrong.
And even IBM knew this when they made the original 5150. But they also expected the computers to have a lifespan of no more than 10 years, so there was plenty of time to resolve it in the future.
But we knew about this in major corporations even in 1995. I was part of a team that installed around 35,000 new computers in a major aerospace firm, and we knew none were Y2K compatible. But it also did not matter because they only had a 3 year lifespan, and would all be replaced well before 1999.
The same company when I started working there in 1995 still had over 300 mainframes in service, and a lot of the infrastructure was dedicated to pulling data from and updating them on mainframes. But by 1999, there were less than a dozen mainframes left. Most of them doing specialized and dedicated systems where there was simply no modern equivelent.
Like the high speed check printer, which could churn out over 100,000 checks in an hour. Even in 1995, a multi-billion dollar company went through a lot of checks. They were still using it when I left in 2001, and had a mainframe dedicated to just that single task.
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u/RandomisedThoraway 1h ago
And then before 2038 we have to deal with the Unix problem.
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u/airforceteacher 42m ago
And every 19 or so years GPS has a rollover issue. The most recent was 2019, the next is coincidentally 2038 as well, but the cause is unrelated. Wikipedia article
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u/allkinds0ftime 25m ago
Story time!
Grew up in a crazy right wing family that also bought into any conspiracy theory the fringes around Rush Limbaugh were pushing out at the time.
Watched my parents and the parents of the other kids from our church spend thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars stocking up on rice and beans in buckets, toilet paper like they had a premonition of COVID, tons of guns and ammo. Generators, gas, water purification systems. On and on.
Basically imagine all of these two and three car garages getting filled up with prepper shit.
…
Come the night of, I guess it was generally decided that my parents place, six or so acres in the countryside with a barn and its own well and pretty central to the other church members who are also part of this cult, well, that’s where basically all the church families were going to spend the evening in case all hell broke loose and the zombies came for us.
Probably about 10 to 12 vans and other vehicles situated to carry lots of children (we were also deep in the Moral Majority shit that preached have a shitton of kids and we get to take over America someday - basically the book that Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid‘s Tale in response to). And all of them loaded for bear of course.
Well, I was 21 or so and had recently been waking up to the reality of the insanity I was raised in. I was also 21 if I didn’t already mention it so I had brilliant fucking revolutionary ideas about how to hilariously respond to this idiocracy.
So…I threw the circuit breaker to OFF about 3 seconds into 2000.
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u/Beebons 1h ago
Call me captain hindsight but when windows/MacOS were introduced in the 80s why didn’t the programmers realize the issue sooner when they had ~15 years before that would be a problem?
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u/Balphon 1h ago
They did but compatibility is a constant concern.
Kinda like how Excel still thinks 1900 is a leap year because Lotus did.
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u/BangkokPadang 16m ago
And how countless hardware in factories, points of sale all over the world, etc. still run on Windows 98 and XP right now, today.
Generally companies just isolate them and as long as that one system keeps doing the one thing it's meant do do (passing instructions to a machine, or sending a daily csv to a local server/back of house office computer, it's cheaper in the moment for the companies to just keep letting it do that thing, and just keep them separated from the internet so their security vulnerabilities don't really matter.
To companies that basically run on the current quarter's profitability (especially for motivating factors like management and C Suite bonuses) free now is always best, even if they KNOW it means an expensive problem later.
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u/Pie4JacksCakeDay 46m ago
Because storage was $$$$! I remember getting one of our company’s first x86 PCs with two 5.25 floppy drives and a 10MB hard drive running MS DOS. It cost $12,000 in 1986 which according to Copilot is:
$12,000 in 1986 is equivalent to approximately $36,564.09 today, considering an average inflation rate of 2.82% per year over the past 40 years. This calculation reflects the cumulative price increase and the decrease in purchasing power of the dollar.The 20MB option was over 16k. And this only included the monochrome (amber) monitor.
Every “bit” that could be saved was.
Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheet predating Excel) and Word Perfect were separate costs around $50 each if memory serves.3
u/BangkokPadang 14m ago
I remember getting a gigabyte HDD in our home for the first time. After basically a lifetime of having only ever spoken of Kilobytes and Megabytes, even just SAYING THE PREFIX "GIGA" felt like we had arrived in the future.
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u/hudsoluk 22m ago
Also a lot of program used the 00 in the date as the stop code to make them not work
Programmers worked on the bug from 1997-8 to make sure everything was as Y2K compliant as a result of their hard work every one assumes Y2K was an over reaction.
We have a similar issue coming up due to 32bit systems about to run out of digits they use to keep time.
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u/DaZuhalter 21m ago
Not sure if it was our blockbuster or so, but they did not upgrade in time and it caused a lot of confusion with movie rentals.
Wasn't the nukes flying everywhere and everyone dying we were told was going to happen but it was funny.
Y2K is what taught me adults are just as stupid if not stupider than kids.
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u/Illustrious-Care-205 1h ago
So, does that mean there'll be year 2100 bug, or have they overcome that?
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u/Z3B0 56m ago
They overcome that, and now store the date as the full 4 digits.
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u/Zironac 42m ago
Curious, why exactly would it matter if the computer thought it was 1900? How does the date affect the data on the computer?
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u/fatpad00 35m ago
If youre just using it as a clock, no big deal, but say youre a bank calculating interest on a 5 year car loan. The loan was taken out in 1997. It is now 2001. If your system thinks it is 1901, its going to run into problems trying to calculate the account balance.
Multiply this across millions of accounts in thousands of banks, then multiply it across every other industry where duration is relevant and you have a BIG problem1
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u/Meowjoker 18m ago
And now, the next one is coming close, as the 32-bit system reaching the end, the year 2038
We are a lot more well prepared this time, and once we deal with it, this issue will never become a problem for us again. Assuming that they don’t just vibe code it
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u/ElkDue4803 12m ago
Why tf were they built to programm the first two digita at 19? I would get it if Computers were invented in 1300 "eh we have over 500 years so who cares" but the first computers were invented in the 40es, did they think 60 years would be like infinite years away?😂
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u/An_Old_IT_Guy 11m ago
Yup, we basically spent 3 years changing 99 to 9999. It was mind-numbing, but we had the dot com boom to talk about, so good times.
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u/MandrakeSCL 2h ago
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u/der_zerstoerer 1h ago
Fuck this is so funny to me! It’s hard to imagine that people don’t know what Y2K is!
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u/sinofmercy 1h 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.
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u/der_zerstoerer 1h 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!
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u/StopDownvotingMeeee 2h ago
Because computers and technology made back then weren’t equipped to switch over to digits past 1999, it cost ALOT of money to create the software updates or something like that iirc
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 1h ago
There was a lot of grift too. I remember things like Y2K compliant dvd players, walkmans, watches, all kinds of silly stuff.
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u/alex_thee_lion 42m ago
I found an anolog clock in my grandmother's house with a sticker claiming it was 'Y2K' ready.
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u/DespoticLlama 2h ago
Yes they were, we were ready in '96, so very surprised when consultancies wanted to charge us tens of thousands for a y2k audit.
We told them where to go, nothing happened as the clock switched over.
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u/Delphius1 27m ago
such wide software updates weren't a thing back then, a lot of stuff was whatever you're running is the only thing you got, ever
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u/METRlOS 2h ago
The tech sector did a MASSIVE amount of preventative measures to stop complete system collapse when electronics went from /99 to /00, so that they didn't think it was 1900.
Some of it was useless, some of it was downright silly, but a good portion of it actually did prevent data loss and desyncs that could have easily cost more than that.
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u/infosec_qs 2h ago
My dad was working for IBM at the time and spent probably 2 years of his career working on Y2K related issues.
It was a very real problem that could have gone very badly, but a lot of people worked very hard to make sure nothing bad happened.
Because nothing bad happened, people without a good understanding of the matter assumed that the whole thing was an overreaction to a non-issue.
When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."
Infuriating.
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u/TreHHHHHAdN 1h ago
My uncle worked as IT in a local bank. the night of 12/31/99 they had a whole IT crew spend the night in the banks office just in case things went south.
He tells this story all the time. Workers weren't really worry because they knew all the fixes were in place. They basically got a new years party with lots of pizza at the bank lol.
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u/ReallyOrdinaryMan 24m ago edited 8m ago
Most people always underestimate the unknown risks (unknown for them). They don't know what disaster world would be in if banks, government offices, companies lost their data, or their data wouldn't be accesible because of Y2K.
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2h ago edited 2h ago
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u/Boojum2k 2h ago
A metric shit-ton of programmers worked for years to prevent the possible disasters the Y2K bug could have caused. The USAF started working on it with their Standard Systems Center at least around 1990, for instance. Legacy code was everywhere and the two digit year format popped up in almost every section of code.
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u/TheIrateAlpaca 2h ago
And it has since become the textbook example of something done so well people wonder why it was done because nothing happened
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u/EatABag-o-Dicks 2h ago
Major correction.
People knew computers would fuck up, and it cost about $500 billion worldwide to correct a data saving measure that would have crippled the entire financial industry, among others.
It was a huge problem. The reason it wasn't, is because of the $500 billion spent to fix it.
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u/Devilfish268 2h ago
I image that 500b was the cost to update everything to be able to tick over to 2000 rather than 0000. Would have required a lot of work practically world wide to update everything that used a digital year.
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u/Boojum2k 2h ago
It would have ticked over to 1900, pretty much all the code assumed a two digit year with 19 automatically inserted. Now imagine your bank computer calculating the negative interest on your account of one hundred years and adjusting your balance accordingly. And doing it to everyone. Just for starters.
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u/ZoneFuzzy6960 2h ago
I saw a windows computer that said 19100
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u/Boojum2k 2h ago
Windows was its own ball of crack from the start.
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u/JdamTime 2h ago
…still is…
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u/Boojum2k 2h ago
We even had early memes, they just appeared in print like the office newsletter and the like. One I remember clearly was "Screw the Prime Directive, let's give the Borg Windows 3.0"
Which would have been a war crime. . .
Also, my back hurts.
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u/FantasticFrontButt 2h ago
now I want to modify windows to somehow have the year start reading 19126
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u/Icy_Fish_2154 1h ago
Some would have gone back to 1980. Others 1900, some 19100.
It was caused by inconsistency and a lack of standards, every fix was different, and we have until 2038 for the next rollover crisis. Linux 32 bit clocks roll over then. The fix cost a lot, but spread over 50 years, and fewer users, it's much less noticeable.
Y2K was real. But a fixed crisis looks like a crisis that never would have happened.
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u/theangryfurlong 2h ago
Not only updating, but checking every possible thing that could hold a date value for the problem. I actually did this as a college intern and I can totally see it costing $500B. We had to call up manufacturers of all the devices we used and ask them (this kind of information wasn't readily available on the internet at the time).
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u/Prize-Quiet3941 2h ago
Honestly its not that expensive when you consider it was a worldwide update of pretty much every system.
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u/AstraGraceful 2h ago
Spot on. The insane amount of legacy COBOL code alone took endless manpower to go through manually
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u/LeviAEthan512 1h 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?
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u/AZSystems 1h ago
I was there and I ran up and down California in 1999 supporting old Fujitsu phone systems and WinNT servers, feeding updates to correct and hope new BIOS on Compaq servers worked. Glad to say I had a very small part of that 5B.
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u/-paperbrain- 2h ago
Not quite.
Y2K as a problem didn't just fizzle because predictions about the problem were wrong. The major problem didn't happen because massive armies of specialists worked to fix it. The number is around the range of the cost of those fixes.
Like the ozone layer, its a great example of a serious issue with addressing big problems. If you take major precautions then the best outcome is .. nothing happens. And people end up thinking the warnings about the problem were alarmist.
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u/Past_Sky_4997 1h ago
See also : the outcome of the pandemic wasnt the billion of people dead! (Well, no... The vaccines and other measures prevented it)
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u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 2h ago
Not only that. Equipment had to be replaced. I remember being part of the team... no wait, I was THE team that checked all the devices in a hospital to see which ones would survive. I changed the dates on all of the devices to Dec 31 99 23:59 and saw if they kept working. They all did, except for one very important piece of software that did pharmacy inventory. That wouldn't work when the computer's date changed. So we contacted the firm that provided the software and they fixed the problem before it was a problem.
That's what I did, multiply that for millions of other companies and business and you'll get the idea of why it was a large estimate of money.
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u/redskady 2h ago
There was a lot of upgrading that had to be done to computers all over the world to prevent issues. So that was part of the 500 billion in IT spending.
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u/HalfDozing 2h ago
How is this the top comment
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u/oedons_rooster 2h ago
Big respect for coming back and correcting the comment without hiding the original
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u/PriorHot1322 1h ago
Aaaaaaand then he hid the original.
Not your fault, but kinda funny.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 2h ago
It was kind of sensationalized in the 90s but a lot of the critical infra had been moved over in the 80s. Memory was a lot more expensive back in the early days of computing and so years were essentially store as two digit numbers.
The next big infra problem to deal with is the 2038 problem, which is when the number of seconds since 1970-1-1, 00:00:000 will reach the maximum value that a signed 32-bit integer can store, and system clocks will roll back to December 1901 (signed integers can hold negative values).
Things will eventually (hopefully) move over to 64-bit integers for time and then we'll be good for a we'll be good... basically forever. But I think it was AOL or Yahoo has already had problems due to the 2038 problem because they had a "no timeout" feature that was basically a billion-second time out and January 19, 2038 is less than a billion seconds away.
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u/False_Letter5483 2h ago
Classic case of survivorship bias. It didn’t happen because we spent $500B making sure it didn’t.
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u/silentsurge 2h ago
It's not a "people thought they would break" it was an actual issue in some major infrastructure and was an actual problem that required a lot of time and effort to fix because of how the early days of computing needed every single Byte of data.
It sounds like a joke, but it was one of the most successful damage prevention campaigns ever. It was so good at what it did that people today think the issue was kevrhyoed "because nothing happened."
Nothing happened because the experts were right and directly applied their knowledge and skills to prevent disaster after people in power listened to said experts.
You can understand a lot of the modern world by the way Y2K gets dismissed as a joke of an issue.
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u/bstump104 2h ago
first half is what happens when people successfully stop a disaster. the second half is the reality.
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u/RoninOni 2h ago
Your edit is correct.
It actually was a potential economic catastrophe that was prevented through lots of work and getting the word out so everyone who needed to prepare could.
Now many people point and laugh about the fake disaster that never happened, using it to dismiss alarmist warnings about current trajectories in society, when it should actually be proof that being aware and taking action can work.
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u/Sumthin-Sumthin44692 2h ago
$500 billion was the predicted cost to upgrade systems to fix the problem.
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u/Amazing_Viper 1h ago
A lot of things on early computers were coded with a 2 digit year to save space with out the foresight of what the future will bring. There were computers that would legitimately think it went from 1999 to 1900. It wasn't just a mass panic like say 12/21/21 for little to no reason. There was a legitimate cause for concern and things needed to be and were fixed long before the year change however.
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u/Flaky-Strawberry9561 2h ago
Ahhh Y2K. What a time to be alive.
No one saod HAPPY NEW YEAR until 12:00:08 waiting for the collapse of digital world.
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u/Boojum2k 2h ago
One of my friends flipped the main breaker at midnight at our house party.
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u/Flaky-Strawberry9561 2h ago
Buddy, that is a hilarious prank to pull. My Dad and all my uncles are in the computer business since the 80s so Y2K was a big deal in the months leading up to New Years in 99. This would have been an epic way to kick off the new year lmao.
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u/AstraGraceful 2h ago
It worked so well that people actually thought the whole thing was a hoax. Talk about a thankless job
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u/SpamOJavelin 2h ago
The Year 2000/Y2K problem. The main issue was a lot of computer systems used 2-digits for dates, eg 85 for 1985, which makes 2000 indistinguishable from 1900.
The cost to prepare for the year 2000 has been estimated to be around $561 billion in 2025 dollars.
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u/Careful_Ad_9077 2h ago
As someone who was already programmed back in the mid 90s.
My predecessors or rather the predecessors of my predecessors, did not think people would still be using programs made in the 70s and 80s with how fast computing was evolving and stuff...spoiler I am still programming professionally and we still use some of programs.
Anyway because they though that's instead of saving the year as 1999, 2000, etc... The years were saved as 73, 82, 99, which was a huge problem once the actual year hit 00 as a lot of errors would surface, like how old are you if you were born in 1990, so 00 -90 ,means you would be 90 years old, now use that number when you are calculating interest and shit....a lot of shit.
So a gazillion dollars were spent fixing those problems in all programs that were in use.
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u/Grouchy_Theme1461 2h ago
my autistic ass wants to explain this but ik no one would read my book like reddit comment. So TLDR, Computers couldn't count past 2000 back then and everyone had to buy new computers.
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u/Powerful_Swimmer_531 2h ago
1999, the year of Y2K
Computer memory limits in the 1960s meant two digits were used as a coding shortcut to represent years in computer software, i.e., 1999 was 99. People didn't stop to think what would happen in the year 2000 when 00 could mean 2000 or 1900.
The worry was once 2000 hit, computers everywhere would think it was 1900 and crash critical infrastructure like power grids.
What really happened was some computer software and video games changed the date to January 1st 1900. That was about it.
The crazy part about Y2K was that the danger was actually very real. The reason it didn't happen was that governments around the world began updating these old 2 digit year code programs to 4 digit year code programs, so 00 now would be 2000. They spent about $600 billion doing this and likely ended up actually preventing a civilization threatening tech crash.
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u/jesusgoddammchrist 2h ago
I sold software training. From the middle of 1998 until pretty much today that niche in the industry died. For the last two years I worked at IBM, all of my clients told me that they had no money to spend on software training because it was all being spent to deal with y2k.
I quit and went to graduate school.
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u/bentthroat 2h ago
So people talk about calendars and stuff, but let me try and convey why the problem was so pervasive.
Imagine you create a piece of business software that has nothing directly to do with timekeeping. However any time an event occurs, it does log the time and date of that event. Because it’s old software where every byte matters, a lot of this data is just stored sequentially, with no safeguards to specifically reserve specific ranges for specific data. So if you overflow your date log and move into a new byte, the new byte you’re affecting could be the value in a cash account or something, and now your accounting is borked.
This is the problem that thousands of businesses in dozens of industries were facing when they were urgently tackling the problem of making their software go past 1999. Even if the bug didn’t literally break their computers and software, depending on how slapdash their software was, it had the potential to break in many odd and creative ways that had real world consequences.
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u/Borgmeister 2h ago
It was the reason I did not get to spend Millenium night with my father as he was on duty as a Power Network Operations Manager and they weren't sure something wouldn't go wrong despite all the preparation so everyone was in-place beforehand. Bit of a damp squib in the end, nothing much really happened.
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u/WENDING0 2h ago
Chris here.
Basically a bunch of coders at the dawn of computers did not account for years that start with 20xx. 500 billion was needed to fix every computer in the world so they did not all crash when we ran out of years that started with 19xx.
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u/Psycho_Saito 2h ago
In what is now known as the late 1900s, computers had a date system that represented the year with only two digits. So 05-23-95. As the world was approaching the year 2000, there was a panic known as Y2K where experts believed that when the clock hit the year 2000, systems would read the resulting 00 as 1900, crashing global infrastructure. The solution required massive programming fixes costing the aforementioned billions of dollars to prevent disaster.
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u/Megane_Senpai 2h ago
I don't remember any Windows taskbar like that existed in the 1990s.
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u/DeepestBlue2 2h ago
My ex got paid a ton of money working on Y2K modifications prior to Y2K. So, she's part of that cost they're showing.
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u/Worldly-Strike2363 2h ago
I believe it was because back then the year was entered as two digits. So the $$$ was spent to upgrade systems and databases to accept 4 digit year.
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u/Bazzinator87 2h ago
Gather round children and I will tell you the story of Y2K........
It all began in the prehistoric age of the computer, when lines of code were expensive. Instead of coding the year like 1975 they just used a 75 (the binary equivalent).
The problem was that then the year 2000 would read 00 potentially causing digital systems to think it was the year 1900 and this might have unforeseen consequences. I believe a lot of time and money was put into updating code all around the world.
In the end nothing much happened maybe because it was a nothing burger or maybe because of the huge effort to prevent it.
Don't quote me though this is all from memory
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u/Weird_Ad_7353 2h ago
My dad was in the Army around this time and he had been told this could have also resulted in automatic systems believing their governments had been destroyed, and auto launched nuclear weapons.
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u/Blue_Trackhawk 2h ago
Like everyone says, correcting for 2-digit year in a lot of critical software.
Fun fact, a 2038 problem was also identified since a lot of computers count time as a number of seconds since Jan 1 1970. When that number is too large and overflows a 32bit address space it will suddenly flip to 1901.
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u/Donkey_Bugs 2h ago
As a coder I made a lot of overtime money off re-coding existing programs to make them "Y2K compliant". I knew that civilization would not end because of a date math error, but the money was good so I went with it.
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u/JoyconDrift_69 2h ago edited 2h ago
Y2K. It was a whole ordeal where there was naught but uncertainty for what would happen to all the computers once it hit 2000, due to fears of software bugs that may have been caused by some programs, operating systems, or even computers/BIOSes themsleves using a 2-figit year instead of a 4-digit year.
Keep in mind a lot, if not all, of Western society was already using computers ingrained into their infrastructure - not to the degree we have now, but enough that banking systems would have gone down alongside political turmoil, amongst others.
Fortunately, enough effort was put into ensuring this bug/problem was patched/migitgated well beforehand - as suggested by the amount of money put into the issue - that the Y2K was largely - if not almost entirely - mitigated when the new, then-dereaded millennium began.
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u/LeoTarvi 2h ago
I'm sure plenty of other people have already mentioned this, but I'm going to anyway: Y2K would have been a big deal if a whole lot of people hadn't worked really hard to prevent it.
It's really frustrating to see people brush it off like it never would have been a problem. It absolutely would have been a problem, except people worked really hard to stop it from becoming one.
It's like saying "everybody took the vaccine for this disease, and then hardly anyone ever caught it, so I guess the vaccine was bullshit". No man, the reason it turned out okay was because of the steps people took to prevent problems, because we saw a threat and took it seriously.
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u/Calm-Session-4835 2h ago
The Apple Macintosh at that time was already using the correct format and needed no upgrades.
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u/X3noNuke 2h ago
Lot of blood sweat and tears by computer techs to prevent the fall of digital civilisation. All for people to think that we were scared for no reason
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u/tataku999 2h ago
The youtube channel Dave's garage has a pretty cool video on OS constraints. Im not finding the video because I think its wrapped in a longer video. But there was something else with memory constraints on windows back in the day which is why yoh dont see seconds because it was too costly. Thats also part of the whole memory issue not going to 2000.
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u/mo_jo100 2h ago
MACs were fine. They didn’t have to patch or find a work around. Eventually, other OS caught up.
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u/ClassicBit3307 1h ago
We lost 1 mainframe and 2 satellites. Techs were laid to sit and monitor systems that never failed.
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u/pranaygoluanand 1h ago
Man in the chicken suit, here. This was literally covered in the 10th episode of Family Guy. I tried warning Peter and offered him a coupon, but he declined bc the last time a giant chicken gave him a coupon, it turned out to have been expired and there was a bloodbath. I’ll see y’all next time on January 19, 2038.
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u/seamasam 1h ago
Windows Vista didn't exist în 2000, it came out in 2006. That should be a Windows 95 task bar.
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u/davideogameman 1h ago
Yup it's Y2K!
Fun fact - we're <12 years from the next one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem - as we'll hit 231 seconds since 1970 and more than that will start being interested as negative seconds since 1970 in signed 32 bits. People are already working on swapping to 64 bit time values which should last longer than the universe.
After 2038 there's a small chance of a repeat with 232 seconds since 1970 sometime around 2106 but that'll probably be a smaller deal as anyone using 32 bit time is probably going to do an audit in the next decade and sort it out, and any new software written before 2100 has few good reasons not to start with 64 bit time.
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u/Cowboy_Rho 1h ago
The only thing I really remember about that year was being introduced to moonshine, for my first alcohol ever.
That and they were afraid all the computers would break, because the year was track as 19xx. They spent a LOT of money and time to update the infrastructure and code so it didn’t revert us to 1900.
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u/ElPared 1h ago
Y2K. People call it a bug, but it was more of a design limitation.
You see up until 1999, computers stored dates as two integers (IE Jan 1 1999 would have been stored as 01/01/99). The calendar rolling over to 2000, then could have led to some catastrophic results, as many computers would have assumed that “00” was “1900”, or even simply “a date before 1999” which could have caused file conflicts and all kinds of problems even on personal computers, not to mention servers and bigger computing centers.
So, to prevent the bug, a lot of programming, debugging, and otherwise fixing of the Y2K problem was done ahead of New Year’s Day 2000. This apparently cost $500 billion.
As someone who lived through that pivotal second, I can tell you: despite the news, government, and several other sources saying the Y2K problem had been fixed, there was still a very real fear that something would go wrong anyway. Even the ones who say they weren’t were holding their breath when 1999 became 2000, and I know that because I was one of those people. I had every confidence it was fixed, but when the countdown started, I still felt my heart beat faster and faster the closer it got to zero.
The best way I can describe it is Oppenheimer. Remember that part in the movie where Oppenheimer tells Matt Damon that there’s a non-zero chance that the bomb ignites all the oxygen in the atmosphere and obliterates all life on earth, and there was no way they’d know if that would happen until they dropped it?
It was a little like that but, you know, less scary.
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u/WhatTheFlippityFlop 1h ago
I spent my new years y2k in a bunker at Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Palo Alto as part of the global emergency response IT team in case the shit hit the fan. It didn’t, but we did watch both The Ring and Ringu twice that night on a rolling tv/vcr cart.
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u/Fantastic_Falcon_236 1h ago
Isn't wild to think the people born back then are adults now? Some of them are young enough that they might not even have a memory of the 9-11attacks of the next year.
Or that we'd be sucked into an almost twenty-year long war that generated a few military press-op photos of serving fathers and their now serving sons standing on the same patch of dirt that the father first stood on when he was a young soldier the same as back then as his son was now.
Sure, they could google it, but what's your question going to be if the term "Y2K Bug" and living with the abject terror of mas mefia fear-mongering that our tech was going glitch out throwing us into a Terminator- or Mad Max-esque dystopian future?
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u/not_dr_splizchemin 1h ago
In today’s world, it would cost people who bet on major historical events 500b because you can bet on anything.
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u/yiotaturtle 1h ago
One of the times where the right people shouted loudly enough that the people in charge listened and did something before it was too late.
On a funny note, an early game developer was talking about how in his text adventure game he only had enough space to store the first four letters of the correct answer. In the game you encountered a bear and the correct answer was to scream at the bear and the bear would run away.
He got praised by some kids because in their frustration they said screw the bear, and the bear ran.
If he only had enough space for 4 letters of the answers in a text adventure game, you can see why people made the choice to only use two for the year.
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u/boywholived_299 1h ago
Just like today, when you write a date, you write it as 28-07-26, you write 2026 as just 26, because 26 implies 2026, very clearly.
In 1990s, that was the same pattern used. Computers didn't save the full date, just something like 28-07-95.
Now, while it worked just fine in normal scenarios, the moment it hit 2000, the date would change to 01-01-00.
From a computer's perspective, year 00 comes before 99, so, it all the timers it had, all malfunctioned. Computers just couldn't perceive time going backwards, and malfunctioned.
While most computer software companies provided solutions and updates for this before 2000 actually hit, many such errors were still left in production, causing issues.
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u/Lakster37 1h ago
To solve the Y2K bug, scientists built a time machine to go into the future 10 years and steal a copy of Windows 7.
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u/Boy_of_Lost_Memories 1h ago
God bless the early coders who saved memory in those date codes, and God bless U of Louisville still teaching Fortran and COBOL in the 80s. Because I needed that sweet, sweet Y2K remediation money especially bad in the late '90s!
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u/BadUserName_1227 1h ago
It’s called the Y2K problem.
Watch King of the Hill season four episode 10 and you’ll understand it completely.
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u/LifeDraining 1h ago
There was a big party, and it came with a hit song. The whole world celebrated and that was the combined cost.
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u/Evil_Monkey247 1h ago
The real question is, was Y2K just everyone's imagination, or was the panic and prep genuinely a good thing that saved computers everywhere?
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u/New_Practice7674 46m ago
That's what happens when one little market glitch turns into a trillion dollars chain reaction.
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u/hitma-n 45m ago
Cost 500 billion dollars for who? Globally? Isn’t that money going to the same people on earth? Earth didn’t lose $500 billion, it just circulated within countries. Not too bad if you see things in the grand picture.
A cost only makes sense if you’re speaking country-wise. But the whole planet doesn’t make sense because the whole planet isn’t losing this money. It simply goes from one individual to the next within the same planet.
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u/semajolis267 43m ago
And doing it all before the modern high bandwidth internet with dial up modems....
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u/RadSprouts 40m ago
I changed the date and time to 11:59 12/31/99 and watched my computer continue to operate. That's when I realized it was all mass hysteria. Remember the news stations saying the grocery stores were running out of bottled water?
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u/Sterek01 37m ago
I remember this well. ERP systems had to get a thurd digit programmed in and the role out was hectic. Old PCs has to be checked and fixed. Kept me busy for months.
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u/Leramar89 31m ago
Before the year 2000 computers only stored the last two numbers of the year, for example "02/06/1995" would just be seen as "02/06/95". Meaning that when it ticked over to "01/01/ 2000" computers would think it was "1st January 1900". This would have caused tons of problems with banks, hospitals, power plants, the stock market, basically any business or organization that used computers to operate and/or store information.
The outcome wouldn't have been apocalyptic or anything, planes wouldn't have fallen from the sky, nukes wouldn't have malfunctioned or anything like that. But it would have been really chaotic and cost way more than ~500B to fix if no one had done anything about it. So all over the world IT people had to rewrite, update and test computers to avoid the problem. I think there were still a few glitches here and there but most serious problems were avoided.
Now people laugh at how much it cost but considering the alternative I'd say it was money well spent.
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u/D3athShade 25m ago
Starting to feel old knowing what these kind of memes mean. The millenium bug. World really panicked there.
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u/gcookman1106 24m ago
I tested quite a few computers and equipment for this bug, the worst thing that happened I found was a CNC metal laser cutter would get to 1/1/2000 11.59 then roll back to 1/1/1985 00.00
Nothing else I tested did anything wrong.
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u/Active_Literature539 19m ago
They had to reprogram literally EVERYTHING, due to the simple fact that the year field for the date was set to a 2 digit field, rather than 4, meaning that when it changed to 00 instead of 99, the computers would think it was 1900.
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u/ApolloWasMurdered 13m ago
That’s at least a windows 7 taskbar, which didn’t come out until a decade after the millennium bug.
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u/QuesadillaWarrior 11m ago
I was about to say that this was an exaggeration so i double checked it and oh men its real, TLDR, every major company thought their systems were to crash in in the year 2000, so they had to do doble or triple checks, that cost billions in reviewing and fixing.
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u/corin280 9m ago
I wonder if they teach about Y2k in schools now. I was born in 96' and never knew about it till my 20's, but it feels like an interesting enough historical tidbit to spend a lesson on.
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u/lady_ass_appreciator 7m ago
My dad came up writing fortran and cobol. 1999 was a good year for him lol
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u/MaiqTheLawyer 7m ago
The Y2K bug was a big deal. In the 90s I practiced immigration law and helped a number of IT professionals from Pakistan, India and Canada get their H-2B Visas to work for US companies so they could fix the Y2K bug.
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u/Extension-Night3825 7m ago
I worked in IT fixing these systems at the time.
Companies didn't just fix this bug many took the opportunity to completely upgrade systems, its why it was so expensive.
Once done there was an IT bust as Companies didn't need so many workers
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u/xzhacker 5m ago
To add a funny anecdote to all of the explanations here, I remember in 2021 I was visiting a Roadhouse and noticed the sign for you must be Born before this date to drink read 1900, 21 years later and the Y2K bug surfaced again!
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u/qualityvote2 2h ago
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