Remember the Y2K scare?

[Richard Cranium]

Hard to believe that was a quarter century ago now!

 

[66 Sat]

I was in the US on holiday for the Millennium. New Year's Eve in Fort Lauderdale (Hooters!), woke up the next day to drive to Tampa, completely forgot about Y2K.
We were driving along, stopped to get gas and realised everything was working as normal.
Some would say fuss about nothing, others say if they hadn't put all that work in beforehand it would have been a disaster.

 

[1967coronet]

Crazy it was 25 years ago. About the only thing I did to prepare was having a little more cash on hand.

 

[T2R9]

It's what started my IT career. Was hired as a Y2k Coordinator in 98 by a newspaper. Spent the next year and a half testing, replacing, and modifying pretty much everything that ran on computers. On New Years eve they rolled back the deadlines to 11:30 so the paper was printed and then we waited. Nothing and the next day things operated as normal. Wether there was any of the work I did was needed we don't know but there was a lot of that heading up to New Years so I am sure it helped make it a non issue.

 

[Skytrooper]

I was on “manned” alert along with a second aircraft and crew. Spent 3 days that way, sleeping in makeshift bunks, eating MRE’s, and running up the aircraft every 4 hours.

 

[Don Frelier]

My daughter had just turned 8 and she wanted to stay up until midnight.
We played games and waited for the ball to drop.
I'll never forget what an enjoyable time we had together that evening.

 

[AR67GTX]

I remember it well. I worked for the Corps of Engineers building military base facilities and suddenly our Contracting Office started panicking over messages coming out that a lot of equipment computer systems were not capable of dealing with the calendar year turning over to 2000. They started to believe that all the computerized mechanical equipment we had installed in the facilities recently, were all going to crash at midnight and create a huge issue with our military customers and mission readiness in some cases that would blow back against our Commander. They wanted me to direct all our contractors to come out and inspect their equipment and be on standby at midnight. I replied no, I wasn’t going to do it - which was a bit of a rebellion. If there were any problems I told them, which I greatly doubted, they would be handled by normal warranty or contract actions as necessary. Fortunately I guessed right and the new years entry was a non-event.

 

[Armyvet25]

Crazy it was 25 years ago. About the only thing I did to prepare was having a little more BEER on hand.

There, fixed it for ya

 

[Don Frelier]

Hard to believe that was a quarter century ago now!

Much of what Nimoy said was illogical.

 

[3sloppydogs]

Yes I do
I worked for a local county government then in the utilities division. We had to work overnight to make sure all the water pumping stations didn't fail and the tanks stayed full.
The crazy thing is all of those controls were still mechanical as they hadn't been converted to digital yet including the emergency standby generators. So they would have operated regardless as though a storm came through and stayed online
We told the chain of command nothing would happen but the politicians in charge wanted to show how they were in command so we never got to celebrate this event

 

[moparwacko]

I worked the entire night for an electric utility. We were each assigned to a substation in case " the grid" went down, specifically the controls. We went full manual control at 9pm, and started to switch back to auto/remote at 3 am.
Absolutely nothing happened. It was a long 16 hrs, but the pay was fantastic. They even provided a delivered hot meal to each substation. I remember it well, as we had training for months preceding "the event".

 

[moparmarks]

I was an electrical contractor then I spent a lot of time installing and wiring backup generators. You know, because the world was going to go dark.

 

[SlingLow]

I was a financial advisor at Moron Stanley. Of course we were all anticipating and dreading that the stock exchanges would break, as well as our systems going down. The 1st was on a Saturday and by the time markets opened on Monday the 3rd it was already a non-event. We had donuts that day.

 

[68BabyBlue]

My wife's kid brother is an accountant who specializes in IT for auditing. He made a killing in consulting fees prior to Y2K, and employed 25 people in his firm. Then his firm went broke in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, which most "experts" didn't see coming.

 

[WileE]

Oh yeah ? You know what tomorrow is ? Y2.025k !!! Hunker down !!!

 

[Scott Engelhardt]

I was an electrical contractor then I spent a lot of time installing and wiring backup generators. You know, because the world was going to go dark.

I bought and sold some of the backup generators

 

[qkcuda]

My wife was a flight attendant and scheduled to work a flight to London and layover on New Year's Eve. The company offered anyone who wanted to take family members with them to do so, and set up a party room at the hotel. I guess they figured we would go down together. Of course nothing happened but it was a nice mini holiday.

 

[Pops1967GTX]

Is this a Quiz about how many times has the Govt lied.

"We are awash in lies from people who lead us"​

 

[bm02tj]

Some make up their own lies but most make a mistake with information and will not admit they
are not as smart as they would like you to believe

 

[maxwedgechar]

I had enough canned food, instant coffee, powdered milk, sugar and water for 2 weeks. I figured if anything happened I thought it would all be over by then. My big question was whether they would let me across the bridge into New Jersey to see my girlfriend!

Rumor had it that CoreStates bank merged with First Union Bank because the IT department was afraid the computers wouldn't handle Y2K!

I was taking computer admin courses in the late Nineties and one of the homework assignments was finding a job. I remember seeing big money being paid by companies looking for people with Cobol and other pre-desktop programming experience. My late wife was taking programming courses in 1972 and '73 and I watched her using the HUGE punch card machine! I tell people she learned programming on wood fired steam computers!