• TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I remember people I knew stockpiling canned goods and everything. What a weird time.

    And yet still not as weird as people stockpiling toilet paper and boycotting Corona beer in 2020.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      We knew that the problem was already solved, but the media kept leaning into the sensational doomerism. That was the first time in my life that I realized that the media might not be unbiased or truthful.

    • noobnarski@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      Boycotting Corona beer? Here in Germany I have heard that their sales went up when Corona happened.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I’m referring to news items like this one.

        But, while looking for a source on that, I found a couple of articles (Snopes and PolitiFact) that say it’s fake news.

        So, this much 🤏 faith in humanity restored, I guess.

        • noobnarski@feddit.de
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          7 months ago

          Here in Germany, Corona Beer was never that big, so I guess the amount of people who bought it because they had just noticed it for the first time is higher than the amount of people who would have bought it but didnt because of the disease.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        It was probably just Trump supporters. Those guys eat all the gloom and doom stuff up because they actually really hope the world’s going to end, as it’s the only way they’ll ever end up on top.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      On December 31, 1999 I saw a truck loaded up with possessions and “HEADED TO THE HILLS GOOD LUCK EVERYONE” painted on the side.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      December 31st 1999, I was at a house party in Lexington, KY. We had a few radio stations playing for ambiance. Once we realized that at least 2 were playing Prince “Party like it’s 1999,” we tuned as many radios as we could. Turned out that 6 stations ended 1999 with Prince, and started 2000 with “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” by REM.

  • kender242@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    We had a LAN Party!

    486 proxy box using RedHat and ipchains sharing dialup Internet for about 8 of us in parents basement.

    Enjoying looking up websites and seeing odd dates like 19100 show up. Nobody died, outside of Starsiege Tribes CTF.

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    7 months ago

    I remember a friend of mine learned some outdated programming language, and got a lucrative temp job preparing mainframes for Y2K.

    • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.

      At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn’t support 4-digit years… But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn’t process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators’ terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      That “outdated” programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it’s like a cockroach.

      • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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        7 months ago

        Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.

  • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Meanwhile, rebels like me were on a long-distance call just to see if we’d get billed for 100 years.

  • xia@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    How am i JUST NOW realizing that their y2k warning is not y2k-compliant!?

    • radicalautonomy@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Me too, and I came into the comments to mention what had just occurred to me, despite having seen this exact image shared at least a half dozen times before.

  • Ulrich_the_Old@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Dec. 31, 1999 myself and ALL of the employees of the small city that I worked for were all commanded to be onsite by 9:00pm. We spent the night playing cards in the lunchroom. I was being payed double time for playing cribbage. There were plenty of issues on Jan 1 but they were all due to nobody being on shift as they all went home at 7:00am Jan 1, 2000.

  • SeedyOne@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Working in IT at the time, we were fairly sure things would be fine by the time New Years Eve rolled around,. Even going so far as to camp overnight outside at the Rose Parade, a wild time on a normal year and ridiculous in 1999 with Colorado Blvd packed with partyers.

    The moment came and, of course, nothing really happened…except some GENIUS thought it would be a good idea to set off a giant firework at the college next door, scaring the living shit out of a few thousand people. Good times.

  • NABDad@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I had a guy trying to convince everyone that WW3 was going to start because computers on warships wouldn’t know what date it was.

    • sep@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      A lot of software was updated prior to y2k to be able to cope with dates. But the transition was still difficult for some software.

        • sep@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Could not deal with the transition. No issues afterwards. So all machines off the evening before was sop for a lot of companies