Y2K and other less-than-well-thought-out-soon-coming-disaster hysterias
Minor pet peeve here, but Y2K wasn't some fear mongering - at least not the computer related parts of it (the Nibiru nonsense and other stuff is whole 'nother thing entirely). There was a significant chance and likelyhood that if we did nothing to fix the computer software of the time, a LOT of things would have went wrong. End of the world? Certainly not, but much of the nation's computer systems would have been doing VERY wonky things for a while.
Why didn't it happen? Well, as someone who was working in IT back then (as I still am now, though I was much lower on the totem pole back then), the reason there is simple: WE FIXED IT. We were patching systems like mad. Programmers on legacy apps were recoding virtually everything they could find. Tons of money was sank into it, and yes nothing much happened, because most of our work there was successful.
Saying Y2K wasn't an issue is liking someone saying that the supports on a bridge are about to collapse, so someone takes the warning seriously and goes in and replaces them. Was it alarmist since the bridge never collapsed? Of course not - the warning was heeded and the crisis was averted. It pays sometimes to fix things before they break rather than having an "I told you so!" moment, as satisfying as that can sometimes be.
That said, a lot of the hysteria over Y2k wasn't generated by the people in the trenches fixing this stuff. For the most part we were just saying "This will be a problem if we don't fix it. Give us the people and the funds to do so.". A lot of the end of the world stuff was by panicking people who didn't understand the issue.
Rant mode off
.
PS As an interesting aside, there's also a "Y2038" problem as well. The Y2K computer bug was mostly an issue on PC's and mainframes, where 2 digit year codes were a common way of keeping track of the current year. Macintosh computers used a 4-digit year code so they were never in any danger of malfunction (at least not until the year 10,000
). UNIX based computer systems ALSO had no problem, but for a different reason. Rather than storing numeric digits in a text format to keep track of the year, they kept track of the date and the time together, in a very strange fashion. For standard operations, they keep track of it as the number of seconds past Jan 1 1970. The year 2000 didn't post a problem for these, but for machines with 32-bit processors (many, many systems), they'll run out of space to keep track of the seconds on January 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 (UTC). At that point they will roll back around to 1/1/1970 again. Thankfully, with this being 28 years away, and with many systems migrating to 64-bit processors now anyways, this likely won't be much of a problem. If any old 32-bit systems are still in use then though, we may see some interesting effects
.
Thankfully, when all the Unix systems finally move over to 64-bit CPU's, they won't have any trouble with the time for 292 billion more years (which is when the register would then not have enough space to count the seconds past 1/1/1970 again
).
