• KaiReeve@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I grew up in Florida and anytime there was a hurricane coming people would flock to the stores and buy all the generators and bottled water.

    It was kind of like that, but in December.

    Most people I knew personally legit just ignored it. It was just another doomsday hoax like the Mayan calender scare of 2012. Everybody was talking about it, but nobody actually thought it would be an issue.

    • UnsafePantomime@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It wasn’t really a hoax. It was a legitimate problem. Lots of software could have broke. It didn’t because developers were diligent. There was a long leadtime to New Year’s with lots of people working overtime.

      • KaiReeve@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I understand that it was a legitimate issue for some industries, but at the social level people were saying that all of the world’s nuclear weapons would launch simultaneously and we would enter a post-nuclear apocalypse. At some point a legitimate issue was inflated into a doomsday hoax.

        • Kernal64@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I mean, in your other post you said you lived in Florida. Are you really gonna take Florida Man’s opinion about what would happen at Y2K as a valid one? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Florida Man doesn’t have a great track record on… Well, anything.

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s not that it wasn’t an issue, the problem was it was a big problem for certain industries, and executives in those industries (most executives really) are almost completely helpless, and the only thing they understand is money. So there’s a problem that an executive can’t see. So how do you get Mr. CEO to spend a bunch of money on something he can’t see or understand?

      You have to scare the hell out of him. Explain that he will lose ALL the money if he doesn’t spend this comparatively small amount.

      And as a result, many people were able to come together and install updates to systems to keep them from failing. My brother was even one of them, 15 years old and was told to hit “enter” when a given prompt came up. Because of efforts from people like my father, and thousands of others, we get internet posts 23 years later saying it was no big deal.

      • Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yep, my father too, the family general store’s registers all needed to be updated to new software to keep the dates right, this was actually somewhat important in that rural town before digital book keeping had spread there.

        It’s crazy how many people had a hand in making sure computers kept working after Y2K.