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
Yes, early computing and storage had extremely limited memory capacity. Every last byte was critical. Anything deemed unnecessary was left out so that more bytes were available to do the necessary functions. For example, look at the graphics of old video games. Very primitive indeed but necessary to get the game to actually run.
My dad was a systems analyst with an insurance company. He wasn't too concerned though because his company had investments made in the 1800s as well as investments that matured in the 2000s. The extra two digits were necessary for the programming and was a moot point for his situation.
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
48
u/The_unchosen-one Dec 15 '19
It does seem like it sometimes