this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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It was actually a bit of a big deal. Luckily it got figured out with enough time to fix it before it really effected anything. They were pulling cobalt programmers out of retirement to fix old systems and auditing anything important for years before 2000.
I know classify anyone who knows how to program cobol as a cobalt programmer. XD.
Autocorrect "helping out"
The panic it caused was the worst part of it, which was largely overblown by the media who kept predicting major crashes that would cause riots.
I was 18 in 1999, there wasn't that much actual panic. At the time people already generally knew the media was overreacting.
There was a pretty awesome shoe commercial a few minutes after midnight. It had a guy jogging down the street, presumably on Jan 1st, while in the background ATMs are spewing cash, planes are falling out of the sky, traffic lights are flashing randomly, and other chaos. Then it had a tag about new years resolutions. That commercial made it all worth it
I was 24. People started panic-purchasing guns and ammunition the minute the whole Y2K story broke. Here's a CBS News segment from 1999 about it. Here's a DOJ paper about it. Background checks shot up 15% from the previous year, with over a million background checks in December 1999 alone.
It turned out to be a huge nothingburger with no riots, no looting, no violence... But there was definitely panic, at least in the sense that a lot of people were prepping for some kind of apocalyptic outcome "just in case". Once the clocks rolled over and people saw that planes weren't falling out of the sky and nukes weren't auto-launching, they realized it was a bunch of over-hyped media nonsense.