Ah, the nostalgia. There really were people who drained their 401k’s and bought cinder block houses in the middle of the desert to ride it all out. If you were a journalist of any stripe back then, you were finding the most freaked out people you could find and putting them on camera to talk about the ‘extremes’ that they were going through to prepare.
Good times, good times. That was twenty years ago this Tuesday. My how time flies. The most interesting thing to come out of it all? John Titor. Well, that and some really interesting garage sales for the next few years. That Y2k legacy of garage sales still rears its head once in a while.
Ah, Y2K. Enfields were still only $100. I could go to Wal-Mart every night and get two heaping carts of dry foods, without depleting the shelves, and the next night could do it again. And disposable propane was about $2.75 a two pack. On $20k salary, which was entry level pay. Last of the good times.
I worked for the fire department back then. The department bought three 5 ton military trucks, so we would be able to use them to respond if computer systems went down.
We all look back and smile about Y2K, now.
To be truthful, there WAS a problem with some (mostly UNIX ) systems.
Windows did not have an issue. Some Bios chips had a problem.
I was starting out in IT and one of my jobs was to test systems by changing the date (or attempting it) in the bios to 3/1/2000, or similar, then see how the machine behaved. Most were fine, but some (3 servers, in our case) failed. Either they did not accept the date on the bios, or the OS would not boot.
Obviously, we swapped them out.
I think that, in the USA, Y2K is perceived as a bust because most IT shops took it seriously & worked on the problem for a year. 1/1/2000 came in with a whimper instead of a bang.
I think preparation created our good luck.
Many IT departments started years before Y2K. We required compliance certification of all outside software. It consumed mucho time and resources.
I wasn’t concerned about Y2K problems. Not too long before that I was a computer programmer, and I put code to handle the change into what I wrote, just in case that software was still in use. Maybe I SHOULD have been more concerned that fellow software engineers might not have considered the possibilities. That was back in the day, though, when people seemed to think about things more.
I was an on-site vendor fix-it guy who had to stay up and babysit our gear “just in case”. Upside: the customer’s command bunker had a life-size cardboard cutout of Chewbacca to look at. Downside: insufficient sleep and the bums ate all the cheese ‘n crackers ‘n meats before I got to it.
I wasn’t too concerned, a good friend who was a computer guru assured me that the whole thing was overrated. My elderly mother had come to live with me and my daughter after my dad died and we were discussing y2k, I rather flippantly mentioned the possibility of civil unrest. My mother in her best Mississippi drawl asked: “do you still have your daddy’s shot gun?” put it here beside my chair and go on to work, I’ll keep sarah safe.