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Working in IT at the time, we were fairly sure things would be fine by the time New Years Eve rolled around,. Even going so far as to camp overnight outside at the Rose Parade, a wild time on a normal year and ridiculous in 1999 with Colorado Blvd packed with partyers.
The moment came and, of course, nothing really happened…except some GENIUS thought it would be a good idea to set off a giant firework at the college next door, scaring the living shit out of a few thousand people. Good times.
We had a LAN Party!
486 proxy box using RedHat and ipchains sharing dialup Internet for about 8 of us in parents basement.
Enjoying looking up websites and seeing odd dates like 19100 show up. Nobody died, outside of Starsiege Tribes CTF.
91 years before Dune
Shazbot!
I need an APC pickup!
My sister hosted a party, I was testing my local machine to see if it’d survive, but some asshat party guest decided to pull the house’s master breaker at midnight. My test was ruined, and nobody enjoyed the joke.
wtf turn off would do to help??
A lot of software was updated prior to y2k to be able to cope with dates. But the transition was still difficult for some software.
but you couldn’t use the computer anymore???
Could not deal with the transition. No issues afterwards. So all machines off the evening before was sop for a lot of companies
Save all your data. You can just never turn it on again 🤪
Probably scared it would crash on y2k
I never understood why those stickers were put on computers because it just scared technologically illiterate people which back then was basically everyone.
They 100% knew it wasn’t going to be a problem for at least a year before the event because they fixed it. The only computers that would really be affected was anything that wasn’t networked, because it couldn’t download the update. But if it wasn’t networked, then you could just change the time to some earlier point to avoid the issue. Then download the patch as and when you can get it on a disk.
I would never take that sticker off
I remember people I knew stockpiling canned goods and everything. What a weird time.
And yet still not as weird as people stockpiling toilet paper and boycotting Corona beer in 2020.
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Boycotting Corona beer? Here in Germany I have heard that their sales went up when Corona happened.
I’m referring to news items like this one.
But, while looking for a source on that, I found a couple of articles (Snopes and PolitiFact) that say it’s fake news.
So, this much 🤏 faith in humanity restored, I guess.
Here in Germany, Corona Beer was never that big, so I guess the amount of people who bought it because they had just noticed it for the first time is higher than the amount of people who would have bought it but didnt because of the disease.
It was probably just Trump supporters. Those guys eat all the gloom and doom stuff up because they actually really hope the world’s going to end, as it’s the only way they’ll ever end up on top.
December 31st 1999, I was at a house party in Lexington, KY. We had a few radio stations playing for ambiance. Once we realized that at least 2 were playing Prince “Party like it’s 1999,” we tuned as many radios as we could. Turned out that 6 stations ended 1999 with Prince, and started 2000 with “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” by REM.
On December 31, 1999 I saw a truck loaded up with possessions and “HEADED TO THE HILLS GOOD LUCK EVERYONE” painted on the side.
We knew that the problem was already solved, but the media kept leaning into the sensational doomerism. That was the first time in my life that I realized that the media might not be unbiased or truthful.
My bank said that like 20% of their clients emptied their accounts lol
went over to my friends house on new years eve around like 6 or 7pm. His step dad was in the living room cleaning all this guns. He was absolutely convinced that as soon as midnight struck society would crumble and mass looting/killing would begin. he also stocked up on can goods, TP, beer, etc. I was like 16 at the time and he offered me one of his guns to take home to “protect your family”. I kindly refused.
Got that one on pretty much all of my computers
I am pretty much against buying unnecessary shit like this, but… where can I get one?
got mine at the last chaos communication congress so you’ll probably wont be able to get the exact one. These look very similar and even have a 100% licensed best buy logo on them
Which timezone?
Is that when the unix time int overflows? If so, I gotta get this sticker lol
Edit: confirmed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem, I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000
You can search for Y2038 stickers.
I see BB has a long history of stupid.
I remember some 20 years ago I bought a LaCie Porsche external HDD. It died. Just wouldn’t turn on. The enclosure was pretty firmly built so getting it open wasn’t really trivial. I was at BB and just out of sheer curiosity in what they’d say, I went up to their repair department. Three kids who were supposed to be trained professionals claimed it was not possible to open without damaging the drive. They said they tried several times and all HDDs were DOA out the enclosure.
Not sold. I went home. Took about an hour of prying (I didn’t want to damage anything) but I got the case open to reveal a bargain basement Seagate. Connected. Worked just fine. As I had originally surmised.
Always wanted to see just what they did to theirs to not salvage the internal drive.
HDDs are not consumer serviceable. They were right about that. They shouldn’t be opened outside of an industrial clean room. But the actual enclosure? Of course you can open it. Best Buy mostly employs kids who passed the CompTIA A+ exam. So they do know stuff, but they often lack experience.
The enclosure. There was nothing wrong with the drive itself.
Office Space was about fixing Y2K.
No, it was a forbidden love story between a man and his stapler.
Porque no los dos
Oh man I’m not very good at Latin.
But I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven while I’m collating…
Millions of man hours spent preventing a total disaster, and the only recognition they got was that movie. It’s the epitome of “When you do things right people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
I remember a friend of mine learned some outdated programming language, and got a lucrative temp job preparing mainframes for Y2K.
Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.
At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn’t support 4-digit years… But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn’t process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators’ terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.
That “outdated” programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it’s like a cockroach.
Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.
I still can’t believe this shit was real.
Like the massive oversights that happened. The blatant incompetence of like every single computer nerd in the world.
All because not one fuckin person thought about what happens when you run out of number space for the date.
I feel like someone should’ve been excommunicated over this shit.
What was it that Bill Gates said as late in the game as the 90s?
“500Kb of memory should be enough for anybody.”Moore’s Law sucker-punched everybody.
But yeah, they all seemed to be thinking small. And really narrow.
The blatant incompetence of like every single computer nerd in the world. All because not one fuckin person thought about what happens when you run out of number space for the date.
I take it you were still in nappies back then. Because it wasn’t incompetence at all, it was a simple trade off. Storage space and memory on early computers was expensive and very limited. This is rather like IPV4 - who would have guessed WAY back then that there would be more than a bajillion individual IP devices? For Y2K, we’re talking mainly 1960s-1970s, so it’s partly “hey, we have 40 years to deal with this”, which programmers in the late 70s and 80s were well aware of and began dealing with. The issue with the Y2K scare was way over-hyped… it was really just legacy systems that were any kind of actual problem. The whole “turn off your computer” thing was utter nonsense.
This is rather like IPV4 - who would have guessed WAY back then that there would be more than a bajillion individual IP devices?
Except the response to this wasn’t “Let’s figure out a timecode that uses letters instead of numbers and has accuracy down to the femtosecond and enough space for 10^20 years.” IPv6 was massive overkill.
I remember hearing all the hype and decided to take my poor 486 running win 3.11 and checked the date in the bios, went further in the future than that pc lasted, set the date to 2000 then booted to windows. the only issue I saw was that the stuff I saved in 2000 had the date 19;0. Fun times
Naturally! I did the same. I was administering a bunch of servers so of course we ignored the hype and just… shocking, I know… tested it.
When 52x read was top of the line. If we compare SSD to CDs it would be exponentially faster.
How am i JUST NOW realizing that their y2k warning is not y2k-compliant!?
Me too, and I came into the comments to mention what had just occurred to me, despite having seen this exact image shared at least a half dozen times before.
Meanwhile, rebels like me were on a long-distance call just to see if we’d get billed for 100 years.
I was there, 124 years ago
