1 point

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.

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1 point
*

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.

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15 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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5 points

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

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3 points

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.

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23 points
*

Office Space was about fixing Y2K.

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25 points

No, it was a forbidden love story between a man and his stapler.

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22 points

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8 points

But I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven while I’m collating…

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8 points

Porque no los dos

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6 points

Oh man I’m not very good at Latin.

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2 points
*

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.”

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12 points

I would never take that sticker off

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10 points

wtf turn off would do to help??

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4 points

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.

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0 points

but you couldn’t use the computer anymore???

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2 points

Could not deal with the transition. No issues afterwards. So all machines off the evening before was sop for a lot of companies

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6 points

Save all your data. You can just never turn it on again 🤪

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6 points

Probably scared it would crash on y2k

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11 points

I had a guy trying to convince everyone that WW3 was going to start because computers on warships wouldn’t know what date it was.

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12 points

“Hey, what’s today’s date, Bill?”

“What do you mean you don’t know? We’d better bomb somebody!”

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nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia

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