Apocalypse never

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

They were doing that all along. No additional "warning" needed.

I am not confident that that is true, to say the least. There were large scale Y2K efforts in the industry in the very late 90s, which should have been long over if they had been doing it all along. Many critical infrastructure systems are very old legacy systems, which are expensive to change - including pulling people out of retirement. I do not trust that an engineer predicting a potential issue would have had as many expensive updates like that funded as did the general alarm raised.

The majority of the advice given to the general public was similar to that given for a potential blizzard - a couple days' food and water in case of power or other infrastructure interruption. It was covered more breathlessly because computers are more exotic than weather, but the actual advice given was usually appropriate.

I did test my personal computer in late 1999 (I forget if it was win95 or 98, in either case it was the latest patch set) by setting the date to a minute before Y2k, and it crashed when the time came, even though the Y2K fixes were distributed by Microsoft in December 1998.

If that could happen, it is not unreasonable to prepare for the possibility that it could have happened to a computer that was doing something important.