I'm thinking writing something but I don't know if the premise is correct or not. I already read up Y2K but I really can't figure the exact scale of what could have happened in January 1, 2000. Can you list the hypothetical damages done and how long will it take for a recovering the systems back online along with the haywire devices around the world?
All I can say is that you might find out when we hit 2038 and the integer keeping track of the number of seconds since 1970 finally overflows.
The first I hear about it I thought its effect is replacing Y with K ......... get it Y "TO" K in all documents, files etc.
Depends on the program, range from mundane things such as the billboard display dates wrongly, or funnily (19100 instead of 2000). To some serious things as: Hospital may overwrite old record (because the year rolled back to 1900), mislabel new records, or just delete the new record due to strange year input. Groceries food expiration database can be broken, may mislabel everything as "expired". All credit card transaction will have some problems due to date mismatch (maybe stopped entirely). Stock exchange may not record the stocks you buy, or record wrong price due to date mismatch. Depending on how large the system is and how you overwork the programmers, may take 1 week to several months. That's why the government pushed every company to fix their programs at 1999.
There was internet, but the world wasn't that connected at that time, so the impact wouldn't really be too severe. Definitely not at the level of SARS, bird flu or Covid-19. Affected things were largely computers, afterall. There was a lot of preparation done to prevent problems, to be fair. If something similar were to happen today, the impact would be more severe. Even cars have general purpose CPUs embedded in them these days. Not to mention all those handphones. And the various economic related stuff like forex, stock and commodities markets. Hospitals, too, have been heavily computerized since then, with many pieces of critical gear relying on specialized code running inside CPUs. It's one of the reasons they couldn't just make cheap ventilators for covid patients. It's supposed to be nearly on the level of fly by wire systems of modern jet fighters.
This. The world was still in the baby stages of computer integration at that time so it really won't affect much, more on the lines of massive inconveniences rather than doomsday scenarios. I mean, the internet was jokingly called the World Wide Wait then so what is the worse that could happen? We wait longer? lol. As for the future? It would depend on if the problem had a lot of advance warning to let people find alternate solutions or if it came at us cold.
It was, though? I mean the Internet was certainly running globally at that time. Yeah, I found out during the reading. Like wow! Talk about a crisis that I didn't know existed or should have happen. What about nuclear sites, power plants, and public airlines? If 2038 does happen, how are these affected globally? Which countries would be the most affected if 2000 did happen, though? Please do tell, because I'm not well informed on history as you can see.
None actually. We were still using things like DOS and phosphorous screens then and all computations were at the basic level, so basic that you could more or less swap them out with relays. So even if all the computers went down, all it would cause then was massive inconveniences and nothing to the point of society failure. I remember when Pentium first came out, it had a "few" bugs, so the joke was that Pentium stood for Produces Errorous Numbers Through Incorrect/Incomplete Understanding of Mathematics. So you can guess how heavily people relied on computers then. Not. On the other hand, you are writing a story, you say? Stories are not to be based too much in "facts", they are the art of "what if", so if you want Y2K to crash even the ISS, go right ahead. Or even set off all the nuclear reactors in the world and start off a new version of Joe Denver's Freeway Warriors or Mad Max, go right on ahead.
There goes Crisis Event Countdown 1999 --- poof --- erased from existence. Time to look for new backstories to write.
A similar bug to Y2K happens at the year 2038. {"document.title" : "Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia", "document.URL" : "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem"}.
You could also see the extent of this from its effects on people's lives. They were all very scared. A whole generation thinking that it's the apocalypse.
At that time, the internet was where you looked for convenient but not necessarily reliable information. Curious about what the Mona Lisa looked like? Look it up on one of the search engines, wait 5 minutes for the result to come back. Java programmer? Look up Sun's javadoc. As for the Y2038 problem, wikipedia has a decent intro. Its nature shows a strong similarity to the Y2K problem, just a much larger scale. I mean, for Y2K, we had lots of electronics but there usually ran customized integrated circuits. Most of them have no use for dates and time and don't have enough room or power to implement such unneeded functions. But these days, we've embedded general purpose CPUs into everything because they're actually cheaper than the old custom i/c chips. These modern processors run stripped down OSes based on UNIX or Linux, and the OS executes the custom software for stuff like your car's ABS system. If you're worried about whether these things will suddenly stop working, you can try setting your Android phone's date to 2038. Some reports say phones stop working but others claim otherwise, so test it for yourself. The powerplants, nuclear or otherwise, that were built in the 60s to 80s should be fine. Their core stuff should be purely mechanical or still using dedicated circuits to control things. Any computers are probably just for paperwork. More modern powerplants, though... That said, the way most modern consumer goods are designed and built with planned obsolescence in mind should not allow the problem to blow up too badly. Why worry about 2038 when your handphone and most of the consumer goods in your life have to be replaced every 2 to 5 years? How many things in your life (other than your body) will not be changed a few dozen times by the time 2038 rolls over? By that time, the people writing the underlying OSes should have fixed the problem.
Just saying but even stuff like mysql has not got their shit together regarding 2038. https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=12654 <-- Submitted 18th August 2005 btw.
What is happening in the boardrooms right now: "2038 bug? That's 18 years away. Tell me again when we hit 2 years and counting." 18 years is a long time away, I doubt they see the urgency to fix it. You could have a kid now and he'll be going to college before this becomes a problem.
Not really. It was something the media hyped up. As pointed out before, computers and the internet was not that prevalent then. For most of us, Y2K was more a curiosity and media stupidity that causes our bosses to get paranoid and make us do paper duplicates of all documentation rather than apocalpses. People were a lot more mechanical inclined in those days rather than electronically inclined. Hell,our data media had a limit of 1.44 MEGA bytes. (1x 5.25 inch "Hard" floppy disk). How big a program can you stuff in 1.44 Mb?
One of my teachers was from that generation. I think it's one of the letter generations I'm not sure. But he was saying that because of the Y2K, Americans started stacking food and making hideout shelters preparing for Armageddon. And also because of that, that generation missed the opportunity to get jobs because of the lengthened lifespan from the previous generation and the accelerated growth of the next generation. What I'm saying is, the reactions in different countries are different and it's pretty cool to make a take on that too. Not just technology-wise. Found it, They're called the millennials.
I get it, it is not the biggest deal right now. It is just that you would expected something used so fucking much to have had this fixed in 15 years. And the problems would begin way before 2038 - assuming they dont deal with it which I highly doubt.