The year 2000 problem, also known as Y2K, was something that many were fearful of. It was the fear that because many computers were not programmed for the year 2000, it would cause issues with them. Some people were so afraid of this that they had prepped for an apocalypse. After all, the world essentially ran on computers by 2000 - so if computers had issues, we would too.
To address this, many companies addressed -- and fixed -- this issue, before the year 2000 even arrived. Thus, relatively few computer failures occurred by the time the new year began.
Had we not fixed the issue early, would an apocalyptic event really have occurred?
Certainly there would have been more computer issues, however it's unlikely that they would have been on the scale that many predicted. We have no way of knowing for sure, but the chance of the most important computers having issues was fairly slim. This is because although the change in millennium would have confused some devices, it generally would not lead to them completely shutting down.
What are your thoughts on Y2K? Leave a comment below.
I believe if Y2K did occur, mayhem within governments and business would occur. I do not believe riots or looting would happen on the streets. The government would be able to solve the issue fairly quick. I do believe the stock market would have closed and potentially some missiles could bug out and launch. In the end things would pan out with little destruction. The blame would most likely be put on technology companies since they'd be easy target.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I do agree with you that if Y2K did actually come to fruition there would a lot of political and financial chaos for a certain period of time, I don't think that the government would necessarily be able to "solve the issue fairly quick." As the experts claimed in the documentary we were watching, coders and program creators were working as hard as they could during the months prior to 2000 to fix most of the Y2K bugs and were still not able to necessarily fix everything (since some programs end up going ignored, it's difficult to analyze billions of lines of code in a short period of time, etc). Therefore, if this bug actually did end up creating mayhem throughout the country, it would probably end up leaving financial, social, and technology impacts that would last for years to come based on the difficult nature of having to look through so much code to fix it.
DeleteWell a common misconception is that the dates would go haywire. The date would simply reset to 00, which would mean 1900. Now dates are stored with four bits, so the next computer date crisis will be Y10k. However, by the year 10,000 we will probably change our time recording system to something different.
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