Remember this day back in 1999? The absolute panic people had about things shutting down because of the Y2K bug?

Remember “acid rain”? Or “ozone depletion”? Notice how you don’t hear about them any more? What, you think concerted worldwide effort and smart people with specialized knowledge actually created change? That the fear was real, and we just worked hard enough to address them in time? No, all hoaxes.

My first job out of college was updating COBOL code for Y2K. The company sucked so I didn't hang around long enough to find out if anything happened, though I'm pretty sure there's still code checked out in my name.

There were maybe a million IT ppl who WERE on the edge of their seats--did we miss something?

I remember working for a global bank, month after month creating test environments and running schedules against future dates. I remember finding problems that would have been catastrophic had they been ignored. I remember the sneering cries of "nothing happened, it was a hoax" afterwards.

Oh yeah, and having to talk with folks about how things weren't going to be as bad as expected because of the work done to mitigate it. That being said, my best and most vivid memory of this day in 1999 was soloing in a 172 for the very first time :-)

Wait until you discover the Unix Date Overflow Bug.

We were prepared. The Y2K-Bug was a real thing, and if we didn't take it serious bad things would have happened. Talking about panic in hindsight is a bit like talking about "COVID was not that a threat as predicted", because we took measures.

I did a huge amount of analytical work only to discover that none of our systems were affected by the flip. The next one to look forward to will be January 19, 2038. This is when 32 bit UNIX timestamps overflow. Hopefully, all systems will have changed to 64 bit by then, but we’ll see.

I do. Between my two jobs... community college IT tech and line cook... I'd been working 70-80 hour weeks for a minute.

Sat in a control room for a few hours watching and waiting in case anything failed, after a lot of preparation