What was the y2k scare?

Question

yea i was young when that happened so i kinda missed the entire story. i "know" what its about but does anyone have some good incite, or an article

Answer 1

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EVERYONE THOUGHT ALL THE COMPUTERS WOULD CRASH - THEY THOUGHT THAT AFTER 1999, THE COMPUTERS WOULD NOT KNOW WHAT THE DATE WAS AND THAT ALL THE INFORMATION IN THE COMPUTERS WOULD BE LOST FOREVER. PEOPLE WERE WORRIED ABOUT THEIR INVESTMENTS, MONEY, JOBS, HOUSES - ANY LOANS - GOOD CREDIT, ETC. WE WERE GOING TO GO BACK TO CAVEMAN TIMES - NO HEAT, RUNNING WATER, ETC. PANIC - IT WAS KINDA FUNNY HOW SOME THOUGHT WHEN YOU LOOK BACK ON IT.

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its an ok answer

Answer 2

it was a simple oops in logic with programming.

Everyone thought 2000 would mess up their computers. It was more panic than anything else.

google is your best friend

Answer 3

Nope cause nothing happened. All that worry & hype for nothing.

Answer 4

it was all about computers dates re-setting to 1900 like a rollover instead of 2000 and it would shut them down or something it was ridiculous i dont understand how that would shut them down but it was supposed to ruin a whole bunch of stuff all computer were to malfunction and many people were to die, and i dont believe it happened lol

Answer 5

i dont know Y2k.i know Y2J

Answer 6

It was because there is alot of data out there stored in computers and often times, the years are stored as "99" instead of "1999". So when "00" comes around, the database will get messed up because it will appear to be earlier than "99" when it's not. They was fear that things would wig out over that. Silly eh?

I was on Y2K duty on New Years Eve. I had a beeper clipped to my party gown. I would have no idea what I would have done had it beeped on me!

Answer 7

it was about the presumption that computers at the end of 1999 at new years the computers wouldn't recognize the change in 2000 and would crash, it scared people into buying out a whole bunch of safety and emergency equipment like it a hurricane or some terrible natural disaster was coming.

Answer 8

everyone thought the year 2000 was going to bring chaos to the electronic world since computers were only able to count to the year 1999 when they were made. Of course we are talking about older systems that were built between the 1950's and up. What a bunch of baloney.....guess they were all wrong.

Answer 9

The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug or the Y2K Bug) was the result of a practice in early computer program design that caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000. It caused widespread concern that critical industries (such as electricity or finance) and government functions would cease operating at the stroke of midnight between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000 and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". This fear was fueled by the attendant press coverage and other media speculation, as well as corporate and government reports. People recognized that long-working systems could break down when the 97, 98, 99 ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Companies and organizations world-wide checked and upgraded their computer systems. Therefore, while no significant computer failures occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000, preparation for the Y2K bug had a significant effect on the computer industry. Debate continues on whether the absence of computer failures was the result of the preparation undertaken or whether the significance of the problem had been overstated.
When January 1, 2000, arrived, there were problems generally regarded as minor. Problems did not always have to occur precisely at midnight. Some programs were not active at that moment and would only show up when they were invoked. Not all problems recorded were directly linked to Y2K programming in a causality; minor technological glitches occur on a regular basis.

Reported problems include:

In Ishikawa, Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight, but officials said there was no risk to the public.[7]
In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.[7]
In Japan, at two minutes past midnight, Osaka Media Port, a telecommunications carrier, found errors in the date management part of the company's network. The problem was fixed by 2:43 a.m. and no services were disrupted.[8]
In Japan, NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT DoCoMo), Japan's largest cellular operator, reported on January 1, 2000, that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up.[8]
In Australia, bus-ticket-validation machines in two states failed to operate.[9]
In the United States, 150 slot machines at race tracks in Delaware stopped working.[9]
In the United States, the U.S. Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, had a Y2K glitch on its Web site. Due to a programming problem, the site reported that the date was Jan. 1, "19100."[10]
In the United States, fare collection turnstiles at PATH Stations throughout New York City & New Jersey failed to operate.
In France, the national weather forecasting service, Meteo France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday's weather forecast as "01/01/19100".[9] The White House effort was conducted in coordination with the then-independent agency FEMA, which was well staffed and thoroughly prepared in the event it was needed. The US Government promoted Y2K Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to share readiness between industries, without threat of antitrust violations or liability based on information shared.
The US Government followed a three part approach to the problem: (1) Outreach and Advocacy (2) Monitoring and Assessment and (3) Contingency Planning and Regulation.[11]

A feature of US Government outreach was Y2K websites including Y2K.GOV. Presently, many US Government agencies have taken down their Y2K websites. Some of these documents may be available through National Archives and Records Administration[12] or The Wayback Machine.

Each federal agency had its own Y2K task force which worked with its private sector counter parts. The FCC had the FCC Year 2000 Task Force.[13][14]

Most industries had contingency plans that relied upon the Internet for backup communications. However, as no federal agency had clear authority with regard to the Internet at this time (it had passed from the US Department of Defense to the US National Science Foundation and then to the US Department of Commerce), no agency was assessing the readiness of the Internet itself. Therefore on July 30, 1999 the White House held the White House Internet Y2K Roundtable

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

Answer 10

When micro chips came out, they were never designed to handle a roll over of numbers. Since these microchips were in everything from clock radios to coffee makers to computers. People were worried that on Jan 1, 2000. When the internal clocks flipped on the chips it would not understand what to do and just short circuit or make the date Jan 1, 1900.

But computers were smarter than we gave them credit for, for they really only speak in 1's and 0's, its all it knows. And to go from 1999 to 2000, its just adding 1. A computer chip is nothing more than a calculator.

Most of the scare was drummed up by computer geeks to sell fake software, books, and such. Plus many computer companies got on the scare band wagon to push newer models and make people buy their products.

Source(s):

computer geek since the commodore 64 (1982)

Answer 11

A lot of people thought that when Dec 31, 1999 rolled around to jan 1, 2000, a lot of computers would not recognize 2000, but would rollback to 1900. This would create chaos with banking, hospitals, airlines, security, broadfcasting and everything else.
it turns out most computers were programmed to accept the year 2000, so guess what happened??? nothing!

Source(s):

http://www.bankersonline.com/articles/bh…

Answer 12

A lot of software programs do date checks....hospital admissions software does a lot of date checking for example.

Back in the day, people used to refer to date in a MMDDYY format...so April 8, 1961 is 040861. Everybody knew that "61" meant "1961" not "1861"...which is why it was OK to refer to "61" instead of spelling it all out at "1961".

That was OK in the 70's and 80's...but in the early 90's people started to realize that there were going to still be people alive from 1909...and new people born 2009...so you couldn't just say "09" you needed to say "1909" and "2009".

So Y2K meant starting in the year 2000, all software dates would need to converted from MMDDYY format to MMDDYYYY.

Basically, the fear was that year "00" would be thought of as "1900" versus "2000".

Answer 13

Type in Y2K into your search engine and you will come up with some sights that were around then, and are still out there now.
There was a theory that because computers were using a two digit code for the year e.g. 1984 would be just 84, then they would reset at midnight on 1/1/2000 to 1900, and everything that was computer based, or had a computer chip in, would fail - water purification plants, power generators, airplanes' navigational gear, banks, insurance company's and whole governments would fall.
All that was required was to reprogram the computers to a four digit code for the year, but could it be done in time to avert disaster? Simply put - yes.
But some people panicked, they stockpiled emergency goods in case the power, water, phones and governments failed, they chose not to fly, and to stay close to home to avoid disasters.
TEOTWAWKI -The End of The World As We Know It didn't happen - at least not yet.

Answer 14

In the beginning of computer era, many information systems stored dates as two-digit numbers - e.g. 12/22/99. That practice continued to a large extent throughout 1980s and 1990s.

As year 2000 (Y2K) approached, everybody rushed to fix their systems to work properly for post-2000 dates.

To better grasp the problem, imagine that if was born in 1969 and some system, for example medical software - would calculate my age in 2000, if the only information it had about my year of birth was '69'. It could produce results like -69, for example, which might have created a lot of problems in real life for me and for others. And if somebody was born in 1900, for example, would he or she be considered one year old or 101 years old in 2001 ?

Any kinds of computer programs using 2-digit dates could potentially create problems like that in the year 2000 and later.

In practice, everybody was aware of the problem, and businesses around the world were spending ridiculous amount of money to make sure that their computer software and hardware would not have any problems in 2000. I personally know people who made a lot of bucks on this.

At the end, it wasn't such a big deal after all, because everybody was over-prepared.

There is another similar problem coming - The Year 2038 Problem.

Hope it helps ;)