this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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as a gen Z I still don't get why Y2K was such a big deal
Computers were not designed to roll over the year. This would have caused the dates to roll back to 1900 or some day in the past, breaking any logic doing math on dates.
The programming community made huge efforts to fix this problem, and they did across many sectors.
The fact that people don't understand how big of a deal this was is due to the efforts of those that did and were able to correct it.
The media talking about power outages and nukes launching due to Y2K was standard news hype/fear mongering during a crisis with rather boring (to the layman) causes and fixes.
I get that, but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems? Didn't programmers in the 80s want to make sure that their code would last for more than 20 years? And people knew Y2K would be a problem so they had plenty of time to fix the issues right?
You might be shocked at how much of our infrastructure ran on those old systems. But thankfully, yes, the rest of your comment is exactly what happened. Programmers knew what was up, and jumped on the problem early enough to avoid any major issues. However, this didn't stop the media from selling panic for ratings, which became the worst part of the entire Y2K experience. If you've ever seen the 1995 movie 'Strange Days' with Ralph Fiennes (and a great cast overall), it's only a slight exaggeration of what the media was hyping for Y2K.
It had to do with memory and storage limitations on computers back then. It didn't make sense to store two extra digits for the date when that space could be used for other data. It affected pretty much every system made before a certain date. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem