4 ms·

I was only 9 years old then, but nowadays I find it interesting that a number, which was arbitrarily chosen, caused so much fear and stuff. It's just a random n

I was only 9 years old then, but nowadays I find it interesting that a number, which was arbitrarily chosen, caused so much fear and stuff. It's just a random number. Why were people scared of numbers?

Retr0id 2y ago
Y2K was not an imaginary problem, there were real bugs, which for the most part got fixed in time.
- dailykoder 2y ago
  I much rather meant the fear of the unknown and people thinking that the world would end in pure chaos, not as much the technical background. And all of that because a number of a birth year from one person was chosen.
  - theoreticalmal 2y ago
    Must’ve been an important person
  - iamflimflam1 2y ago
    The unknown was just how many systems would be impacted. I don’t think there were many people (I’m sure there were some) who were scared simply because of the number. It’s very hard for developers nowadays to comprehend this kind of problem as date handling is now much more sophisticated (though still seems to cause a ridiculous number of bugs). A lot of systems that were developed in the 70s, 80s and even the 90s(!) just assumed that storing the year using 2 digits was more than sufficient. The same attitude as now was pervasive back then - don’t worry, this will be replaced in a couple of years time. It was the realisation that many of these systems were still in use as the year 2000 approached that trigger the effort and education needed for Y2K. The education was needed because many businesses did not even know they might have a problem. The fact that there were no massive disasters is down to the effort that was put in.
    - philistine 2y ago
      I just feel lucky we won't have to deal with the year 10,000 problem.
whilenot-dev 2y ago
I think that's a bit of a weird take... date and time are all about numbers, and there just isn't infinite storage, even non-technical people understand that with ease. I think paranoia comes into play when people throw their hands in the air to soon. We usually encode text into numbers, not numbers into text. Numbers are understood across languages: 12 is more applicable than December and even makes the arbitrariness of things more visible (being off-by-one is usually just a matter of specification). Numbers and computers are among the most reliable and predicable applications of concepts we have, no? All that being said, I'm looking bright into our future[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...
Izkata 2y ago
It wasn't arbitrary. In some older systems, years were stored using only the last two digits with an implied "19" for the first two digits. So 1978 was stored as 78, 1996 as 96, and 1999 as 99... And in that scheme, 2000 didn't exist. When it would roll over to 00, that meant 1900.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  I agree. Also, some system assumed that 99 was a special code like not-available. [1] And I have a faint memory that some apps assumed that xx<20 means 20xx and xx>20 means 19xx. So the risk of a transition into caos was smoother and weirder. [1] The national ID numbers here in Argentina for foreiners started from 95, then 96, ... My university gave them fake internal ID numbers starting from 99 until they fill all the paperwork to get a real one. The national ID numbers used all the range do they decided to jump to 60, 61, ... (I'm not sure what happened with the 99 duplicates. I expect to see some weird collisions reports.) Anyway, the ID number for newborns reached 59 and then, the ID number for newborns jumped to 70.

Retr0id 2y ago

Y2K was not an imaginary problem, there were real bugs, which for the most part got fixed in time.

dailykoder 2y ago
I much rather meant the fear of the unknown and people thinking that the world would end in pure chaos, not as much the technical background. And all of that because a number of a birth year from one person was chosen.
- theoreticalmal 2y ago
  Must’ve been an important person
- iamflimflam1 2y ago
  The unknown was just how many systems would be impacted. I don’t think there were many people (I’m sure there were some) who were scared simply because of the number. It’s very hard for developers nowadays to comprehend this kind of problem as date handling is now much more sophisticated (though still seems to cause a ridiculous number of bugs). A lot of systems that were developed in the 70s, 80s and even the 90s(!) just assumed that storing the year using 2 digits was more than sufficient. The same attitude as now was pervasive back then - don’t worry, this will be replaced in a couple of years time. It was the realisation that many of these systems were still in use as the year 2000 approached that trigger the effort and education needed for Y2K. The education was needed because many businesses did not even know they might have a problem. The fact that there were no massive disasters is down to the effort that was put in.
  - philistine 2y ago
    I just feel lucky we won't have to deal with the year 10,000 problem.

whilenot-dev 2y ago

I think that's a bit of a weird take... date and time are all about numbers, and there just isn't infinite storage, even non-technical people understand that with ease. I think paranoia comes into play when people throw their hands in the air to soon. We usually encode text into numbers, not numbers into text. Numbers are understood across languages: 12 is more applicable than December and even makes the arbitrariness of things more visible (being off-by-one is usually just a matter of specification). Numbers and computers are among the most reliable and predicable applications of concepts we have, no? All that being said, I'm looking bright into our future[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...

Izkata 2y ago

It wasn't arbitrary. In some older systems, years were stored using only the last two digits with an implied "19" for the first two digits. So 1978 was stored as 78, 1996 as 96, and 1999 as 99... And in that scheme, 2000 didn't exist. When it would roll over to 00, that meant 1900.

gus_massa 2y ago
I agree. Also, some system assumed that 99 was a special code like not-available. [1] And I have a faint memory that some apps assumed that xx<20 means 20xx and xx>20 means 19xx. So the risk of a transition into caos was smoother and weirder. [1] The national ID numbers here in Argentina for foreiners started from 95, then 96, ... My university gave them fake internal ID numbers starting from 99 until they fill all the paperwork to get a real one. The national ID numbers used all the range do they decided to jump to 60, 61, ... (I'm not sure what happened with the 99 duplicates. I expect to see some weird collisions reports.) Anyway, the ID number for newborns reached 59 and then, the ID number for newborns jumped to 70.