2000
We Survived!
We survived! All the doomsday predictions of total collapse of the banking and other systems all due to a software issue did not come to pass.
Email Entry
January 3, 2000
Well I've survived Y2K,
ha, ha. With all the worry the past year it was kinda a
disappointment that nothing happened. I would say it was a credit
to the programmers throughout the world to have fixed the problem.
Kind of ironic that it was a problem that programmers caused to begin
with.
I spent New Years day watching CNN starting around 8am. CNN had
New Years coverage all day as the New Years progressed around the world.
I found it very interesting to watch the different countries
celebrations starting with Australia and progressing thought each time
zone to Japan, China, Egypt, etc. It was clear by mid afternoon
there wasn't going to be any Y2K problems
In the following weeks some problems were reported:
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In Australia and Japan had bus and train ticket system problems
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In Hong Kong police breathalyzers failed at midnight, fortunately for all the people going home from New Year’s celebrations.
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In Italy courthouse computers showed an upcoming release date for some prisoners as 10 January 1900, while other inmates wrongly showed up as having 100 additional years on their sentences.
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In the United States the US Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, gave the date on its website as 1 Jan 19100
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Also, in the U.S. the campaign website for presidential candidate Al Gore gave the date as 3 January 19100 for a short time.
Did we learn our lesson? We will find out in the year 2038 when many systems using Unix may fail. Older versions of Unix store the time in a signed 32-bit integer which can only represent times between December 13, 1901 at 20:45:52 UTC and January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC. If these systems are not updated and fixed, then dates all across the world that rely on Unix time will wrongfully display the year as 1901 beginning at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038
Updated: 05-03-2024