this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
1104 points (97.6% liked)
memes
14697 readers
5024 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I get that, but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems? Didn't programmers in the 80s want to make sure that their code would last for more than 20 years? And people knew Y2K would be a problem so they had plenty of time to fix the issues right?
You might be shocked at how much of our infrastructure ran on those old systems. But thankfully, yes, the rest of your comment is exactly what happened. Programmers knew what was up, and jumped on the problem early enough to avoid any major issues. However, this didn't stop the media from selling panic for ratings, which became the worst part of the entire Y2K experience. If you've ever seen the 1995 movie 'Strange Days' with Ralph Fiennes (and a great cast overall), it's only a slight exaggeration of what the media was hyping for Y2K.
It had to do with memory and storage limitations on computers back then. It didn't make sense to store two extra digits for the date when that space could be used for other data. It affected pretty much every system made before a certain date. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem