It’s been a quarter of a century since the Millennium. Where were you at 11:59pm on Friday, December 31, 1999? Here’s a toast to Y2K.
The year was 1999 and they were trying to convince us the world was going to end. Airplanes were going to fall out of the sky. Banking with a particular bank meant your account might be depleted. Our computers would no longer work unless we turned them off before we rang in the new year.
The news even went as far as warning us that there could be prison escapes and even wild dog packs roaming free. For some, it was mass panic to the point of clearing out grocery store shelves, stockpiling non-perishables and toilet paper.
The world was going to end due to the Y2K bug – a bug in some computer software that would glitch when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. For anything storing a year value with two digits instead of four digits, the assumption was the software would roll all the way back to the year 1900 instead of continuing forward to the year 2000. Which wasn’t really a bug. More of a data storage issue as memory was hard to come by back then.
Not really the end of the world when you stop and think about it. However, the understanding of how systems really worked was only understood by a small portion of the population. It’s no wonder, we would have believed anything. Enough to cause people to buy up all of the toilet paper.
Where were you the night of Y2K? I was in high school during the Millennium and that NYE I was driving around with one of my girlfriends, trying to get to a party with some boys we liked. Close to midnight we needed to fill up her pickup truck so stopped at a gas station across the street from our high school. So there we were, at the stroke of midnight, at a gas station pumping gas. Fortunately for us, two things. 1) Prince’s 1999 was playing on the radio; and 2) when the clock struck twelve, nothing happened. The power never turned off. The gas pump proceeded to pump gasoline. No planes fell out of the sky. The inmates seemed to have stayed put in prison. And there were no signs of wild packs of dogs on the loose. I think we survived Y2K!
ICYMI, there is also a movie that released just in time to reminisce about this crazy moment in our history a quarter of a century ago. The movie Y2K was directed by Kyle Mooney and produced by Jonah Hill, with appearances by Alicia Silverstone and Fred Durst. Very 90s and 2000. I did happen to miss this somehow but might just have to check it out!
I hope by now, everyone can look back and laugh at the hysteria we were put through 25 years ago. And I hope we can learn that nothing thus far has been worth buying up all the toilet paper. Cheers to 2025!