Was Y2K a real genuine threat to human existence that was averted by the blood sweat and tears of IT departments across the globe?

Was slightly different back then, a lot was still paper based and the internet was only just starting to take off, I didn’t even have a mobile phone in 2000

Agreed, the darkest turning point in human history.

Three and a half years - that was how long I worked in a Y2K team in IT. Yes we worked hard behind the scenes.🙄

It’s up to you to clarify if you want to, people can only go by what’s written. Your post went on to say ‘the world is usually due to end for some reason or another.’ so your post came across as a bit blasé.

And the atom bomb did lead to catastrophic results.

It was called the Trinity test, I believe. They weren’t prepared for the mushroom cloud, the light, or the size of the explosion. They had feared it might set the sky on fire. But they did it anyway.

We spent 2 years solidly working on it at my job. I earnt a fortune in overtime, it paid for my first flat’s deposit :)

You misunderstand. When it was being developed/experimented with, they thought it had the potential to set the sky on fire. That was what I was referring to. Not the use of it against those civilian cities.

The fear of the advanced science.

Many cutting edge technologies brought with them fears that it could end the world or lead to catastrophic results.

The atom bomb, the hadron collider, Y2K.

I really resent the way you read my post and made assumptions rather than wondering what I actually meant, given that you didn’t understand it.

This. I also know from experience

Glad it’s not just me.

@PrizedPickledPopcorn comment about the atom bomb must be the most deranged thing I’ve read on here.

It was real but not a threat to human existence in terms of an extinction event for the entire species. There would have been a lot of damage and death, but humanity would have survived.

I think the problem was genuine, and that a lot of work was done to sort it out.

However, the scary ads were counter productive, They were one of many things the media hyped up out of all proportion that made me very, very sceptical of any kind of “emergency” or “crisis”. Soon after that, the papers were telling us our mobiles were frying our brains and giving us cancer, theh it was terrorists and paedophiles round every corner… By the time 2020 arrived, I was thinking “yeah, whatever…” because the media is always crying wolf about some crisis or other.

There were some over-sensationalised reports in the press about what might happen. It wouldn't have caused nuclear missiles to launch themselves, for instance.

But there were genuine risks to banking systems, supply networks, telecommunications and so on that really did need to be tested and fixed.

It was real at its core but certainly the case that lawyers, consultants and so forth added to the hype/ hysteria and made a fair bit of money off the back of it. In Australia/NZ we were very cognisant of the damage the leap year bug had caused at Comalco. I spent NYE in the company of a bunch of IT lawyers who weren’t allowed to drink until after midnight and who had been issued with emergency pagers from memory. Not quite sure what they were supposed to do if anything went wrong but I guess it was possible clients might call for advice!

It does remind me of Y2K, also of the turn on of the hadron collider. And the first use of the atom bomb.

I don’t think you can compare Y2K to the USA dropping the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they didn’t even need to. Sheer evil.

This again. Yes it was a real issue. Of course the media and non-IT knowledgeable people over egged the significance. No it wasn't a money making wheeze for IT consultants. No we didn't just "reset computer clocks".

Programs and systems needed checking to see if they were affected by the issue, and fixed if they did. Issues could range from very minor to quite severe depending on the systems. Planes were not likely to fall from the sky. Slightly more likely was that financial systems might be inaccurate or down, and cause issues for trading and other money related things. People mostly just got on with sorting it out with people on stand by over the millennium in order to quickly fix anything that might have gone wrong.

Yes, we did put a lot of effort in to make sure that we'd fixed everything in time, there were a couple of things that went wrong in the wider industry, but it's so long ago, I've forgotten what!

I do know that my engineer colleagues who'd been made redundant when Thames TV lost their franchise in 1992 got a good lot of work visiting people's homes to patch their video recorders.

You can't think why that didn't happen then?

No they didn’t. Because lots of people worked for years to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.

It does remind me of Y2K, also of the turn on of the hadron collider. And the first use of the atom bomb.

The world is usually due to end for some reason or another. It might be climate change or it might be AI. I’m hoping AI will fix climate change. Glass half full!

I worked on a project getting ahead of it. It really was a real risk - we ran many, many simulations before making decisions about what to invest in to mitigate risks. The reason it wasn’t a shit show is because it was anticipated and planned for.

Couldn’t get my head around the Millennium Bug ads though. They weren’t helpful.

As a programmer this was before my time but all that work done was really necessary.

The next big time related problem coming up is the Year 2038 problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem .

It was real, but it wasn’t ‘all the things’ so much as ‘some of the things and we don’t know which’. Might have caused aeroplanes to fall from the sky. Might have turned off the lights at a salad factory.

Took massive amounts of manpower to cover all the bases.

I hope it was real as it took a lot of time to make all those effing backups of absolutely everything. "Just in case".