Throwback Thursday: Y2K - where were you on January 1st, 2000? #TBT

[#1]

It's Thursday!

Remember Y2K and all the fuzz and panic? I was in Iceland during that time. We had just finished college in America and moved home the summer of 1999. And, actually, we had just purchased our first home. Moved into it on December 27th of 1999. We went to a Christmas party at some family member and it was cold, snowing. Got back home and the baby room was freezing cold! But it wasn't Y2K. It was just old fashion radiator with a stuck pin. Needed some grease to fix it :)

What about you, where were you on that New Year's Eve?

Let’s make it a great Thursday!

KGM

[Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck]

Dude! How the heck should I remember that? I don't even remember where I was yesterday 🤣

[Gary Baird]

I was sitting in my customer's (largest reservation system in the world) datacenter waiting for something to happen and offer my assistance. It was event free. Not necessarily because of over-hype. They had prepared well and corrected all of their code.

[Andy Gladstone]

I can remember it like yesterday. It was a Friday night, I was 21 and in my first year of marriage.

The anxiety was building throughout the autumn and into winter, Christmas, New Year's Eve. All anyone was talking about on the radio (remember when we used to listen to them for actual news - before social media) was the Y2K bug. Some were convinced that every computer in the world would fail - mass blackouts as electric and gas grids shut down, no infrastructure, phones, government. It's as if the world would be plunged back into the year 1900.

But like I said earlier, it was a Friday night. My wife and I were spending the weekend at her grandmother's on the north shore of Long Island. As an Orthodox Jew, it was Shabbos and we were completely disconnected from any last minute drama from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. I went to bed at 10PM Friday night and said to myself - if the traffic lights all work tomorrow morning, I'll know that civilization has not ceased to exist. When I awoke in the morning, the lights that were left on were all still on (no grid decimation), and when I left the house to walk to the synagogue and turned on to the main road, the traffic lights were all working (not blue like Jimmy Hendrix sang) and the cars were all humming along. 

My first thought - disaster averted - and then a huge sigh of relief.

Post Script: It's only later in the 2000's when my career took me deep into UNIX that I truly understood the entire Y2K issue...

[Kristin Lyons]

I actually remember exactly where I was and what I was doing, and I'll probably show my age but I was in my bedroom watching MTV's TLC countdown to the New Year :) I knew about Y2K and had a computer but was definitely not as concerned about it at my age.

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

@Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck  hahahahaha - too funny. What's your name?... 

@Kristin Lyons  and @Andy Gladstone  thanks for sharing, very insightful and fun to read.

[Fun Man Andy]

OMGosh... that old chestnut! I genuinely haven't thought about Y2K since... well... Jan 2nd 2000, when over 99.5% of the world confirmed

"It has not impacted us: thanks for the memories & the t-shirt!"

And I genuinely am sorry to be 'that person' but I wonder if in 20yr, once everyone is fully vaccinated and it's well under control, if people we be like:

"Hah! Corona? Why did we every worry about it?"

🙇🤔

[Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck]

@Kristján Geir Mathiesen depends on where I am. many places I'm Tex and some know me as Señor "el Feo" Bastardo (it's a long story 🤣) but since I'm home I think I can safely say I'm Þórhalla since my son has never ever called me "mom." 😁

[Roseli Honório]

@Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck you can be sure. if you lived would you remember kkk

[Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck]

@Roseli Honório I'm sorry, maybe I am just tired but I fail to see the relevance.

[Jimmy Seddon]

Haha!  Good times @Kristján Geir Mathiesen!  Much like @Kristin Lyons I was in my bedroom, only I was playing Diablo 2 (the original one ;) ).

What I remember about Y2K was a number of my friends telling me I missed out by NOT signing up for the COBOL programming class in high school because it was "going to be a gold mine".

As it turns out we were way too young for it to matter by the time we graduated, and I really didn't miss out in the long run!

[Patrícia Fortunato Montenegro]

Hi @Kristján Geir Mathiesen

Great question! A fantastic time for sure with my family. For sure, I was at home with my parents, grandparents and so on. But at the same time, I was scary a bit was waiting for the Big Bang hahahahahahahaha! A funny period in our lives, isn't it? 😁😁😁😁😁

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I was at home in the morning, and at work in the afternoon.

Because my employer at the time had been hit with a y2k bug that crippled their networks and I went to the main data centre to set up machines so that people could go there to do their jobs - the servers running all the trading, finance and provisioning systems were only accessible on the local network there.

This was why I want to hit people who say "y2k wasn't a problem" with a big stick.  We had a minor failure we could easily work around while we fixed it.  But we'd spent millions on looking for and fixing the other things that would have failed.  in '98, I was part of a testing team that did a y2k test run  on some of their systems to see what would happen if we didn't do that work alongside partners and competitors, and the conclusion was "socio-economic disaster as the Americas and Europe run out of fuel in a couple of days"

It wasn't a New Year's day holiday for me.  On the bright side, I got a very very generous overtime payment (about 5 times what I usually got paid for a day's work)

[Fun Man Andy]

Ouch @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- ! That sounds so rough 💥🤕 

Being well compensated for it sounds nice though. 👍

[Taranjeet Singh]

That's a great topic, @Kristján Geir Mathiesen !

I was surely at home on Dec 31, 1999 and Jan 1, 2000 (Saturday) and only came to know about this Y2K term and some relevant problems from our national private and public news channels.

But since I was in 10th grade in those days, I was more concerned about my CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) Board final exams than this Y2K problem.

But, I was definitely in a mood to enjoy the New Year 2000, than worrying about the Y2K problem :-)

[Huwen Arnone _Deiser_]

Lol! What a good memory @Kristján Geir Mathiesen. 

I remember I was enjoying the NYE with my family with an eye on my desktop "family's" computer (I was ending high school, and at that time, a personal computer was not "something").

And well... nothing happened (beyond the paranoia). 😂