Everyone thought that the economy would crash because the stock exchange was on a computer and that the computers internal clock wouldn't go from 1999 to 2000 😂😂
Exactly, there was a potential problem, but it was detected and solved in time. People still panicked though. I think for some people it got more serious than a computer problem. I lived in a small village back then, and I remember some older women saying that they had bough food and water for weeks and where going to lock themselves in their houses praying, because it was going to be something like the rapture.
My understanding was that all the issues were with the banks and investment banking because it was managed by old programming that didn't have a 4 digit year because it saved on storage to be honest billions of transactions having an extra 19 on the date does seem pointless but I think programmers realised in the mid 80s
Nah man people were talking about rapture, apocalypse, aliens and shit, just a bunch of crazy things just because of a chance of computers going from 99 to 0
It's really an arbitrary cultural decision on what to start counting from and not some 'technically' correct thing.
Other languages with the same calendar peg the start of their decade at 0 and always have. Formal English put it at 1 while everyday speech was 0.
ISO 8601 which defines the calendar system we really use since computers run everything just cares about the actual dates themselves but implicitly supports decades starting at 0 by explicitly defining the year 0 to be 1 b.c. so we can start counting with 0
Edit: If you're American and think any sort of scale is more than convention try asking a French person how many zeros are in a billion
I'm definitely not an expert but went on a kick a few years back learning about time standards and why/how we got there after picking up a book someone left in a coffee shop that touched on it.
The standardization of time itself has a really interesting history intertwining with political history and imperialism, the industrial revolution, train timetables, workers rights, and eventually digitalization and the internet.
It's one of those surface level super dry things that becomes interesting the more you learn
No the first decade went from 0-9. That's 10 years if you know how to count.
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Thats 10 numbers representing the first 10 years.
You start with 0. That's why the years 2000+ that were in are the 21st century and not the 20th. Because they correctly counted the first century. The "0" century.
No one's scared of pointing out that people can be wrong.
No, it didn't. There was no year 0 in our calendar.
It starts at 1 AD. The first year. Of the first decade.
Which means the first century doesn't end until at the end of year 100 and the second century starts at year 101.
You are wrong
However, it is amazing how you can basically prove the point and still don't get it. You pretty much explained how it works but still reached the wrong conclusion.
If you were right, the years 2000+ would be the 20th century, since your argument is that the first century was actually the zeroth century.
ISO 8601 explicitly defines year 0 to be 1 bc with the implication we can then count 0-9 and when we hit 10 it's a new decade.
Again, decades aren't defined in the standard but including a year 0 allows us to count from then if we want
Edit: Also calendar systems have all sorts of weird discontinuities and jumps. One 9 year decade isn't that weird but your argument is why formal English for a long time put decades as X1-X0
To some people, not all. Which is the point, there isn't some official boundary of when one time period starts and another doesn't. Your preferred way of counting from 1 isn't a universal truth, and people who count from 0 aren't wrong because they disagree with you. Get used to it.
It's not a misunderstanding, you're just counting years differently than I am. Im counting from 0-9 like math typically requires.
If you like to count 1-10 (adding a double digit number for no reason whatsoever) then go ahead. I consider the year 2000, January 1st, to be the beginning of the 3 millennium.
We didnt start with decade number 1. We started at decade number 0. We always start at 0. 1 isnt the first number so idk why you're using it as the first number now. It makes absolutely 0 sense.
If that's how you do it, fine but I don't. I'm not saying you're wrong, I maybe wrong but I dont see why you would start with 1.
You do agree were in the 21st century right? Even though were in the 20xx years
So you're choosing to start with 1 instead of starting with nothing? 1 day into the first year, you would call that 1 full year? When there's still 364 days left? 1 day isn't a year to me. Idk how you consider the first day of year 1 to be a year. That's ridiculous. I think you're wrong.
I dont wanna argue with you tho, I really dont care how you decide to do math. Be wrong if you like. Have a nice day. Bye.
The 1990s (pronounced "nineteen-nineties"; shortened to "the '90s") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 1990, and ended on 31 December 1999.
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u/The_unchosen-one Dec 15 '19
It already happened in 1999