My boss demanded that the whole IT team was at work watching and waiting. I think he bought us a dozen doughnuts.
Of course, nothing critical happened at all. Some websites showed a date of January 1, 19100. That was all.
Nothing happened because a lot of effort was put into changing vulnerable systems.
I am old enough to remember Y2K. The media definitely stirred some people up about it, in my experience most people seemed to not be too worried about it.
But we shouldn’t dismiss the hard work that a lot of people did to upgrade or redesign systems that Y2K could have affected.
As a aside, I remember that when the clock struck midnight at the NYE party I was at someone flipped the circuit breaker for the house as a joke, turning out all the lights. I remember a few people gasping and wondering what the hell was going on for a few moments until the lights came back on and the prankster revealed himself. Was pretty funny at the time 🤣
Y2K is one of those stories we look back on and think what a silly old load of nonsense. Truth is, if it wasn’t for the countless hours of overtime people put in to making those outdated systems support the date change, it really would have been utter carnage. You saw how crazy things got when we started to run low on toilet paper for a few weeks.
And all the unsung heroes who fixed it on Linux, but without the media coverage
D
