Assume that nobody noticed that there was a problem with the two digit year (or how about somebody noticed but nobody did anything about it). How much of a catastrophe do you think it would have caused? The end of civilization as we know it?
It’s bernard, just under new management
A lot of computers dying at once. Wouldn’t have wanted to be in a plane at the bewitching hour from what I hear, and for a few weeks, things would have gotten hairy, but no doubt civilization would have found a way to carry on.
Yer pal,
Satan
Does anyone really think that if a grocery store or a bank or a gas station or an airline lost it’s ability to use it’s computers, that they would not find a way to sell you food, take your deposit, pump gas, or transport people within a few days. Disasters happen all the time and more serious ones just take longer to overcome before things get back to normal.
It would be chaos, then it would be a inconvienience, then it would be solved.
Also, the y2k problem has no effect whatsoever on computers that don’t need to know what year it is.
Theoretically? That the computers controlling the old Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles got really confused and launched all their birds at us. Oh, and incidentally, that little problem still exists. Kiss your backsides goodbye in January, kids----we’re all going to die.
(Evil laughter in background)
What if all the ruskie’s computers misread the date and think they haven’t been invented yet?
Pickman, have you got a cite for that claim? Or were you joking?
Personally, I don’t know if it is as simple as the rest of you are making it out to be. Computers are everywhere! They are behind the controls of a multitude of services. A lot of people believe that internationally many countries are going to be hammered hard by the Y2K bug. It has taken a considerable amount of time and resources to fix the bug with plenty of notice.
Personally, I think it would have been a true catastrophe. Easily a full collapse of our economy and the resulting chaos would have lasted for a very long time. Perhaps not quite the end of civilization as we know it, but it probably (IMV) brought considerable misery to the world.
It’s bernard, just under new management
Lets draw a realistic hypothetical example.
The supermarket has a computer controled inventory, and at regular intervals replacment orders are sent to the main warehouse. Here come Y2K and these invterval time stops getting tripped. No order is placed, and someone is going to notice “Hey! your out of spam!” and they check into it. It will probably take some time before they get a programmer out to fix the problem, and this is compounded by the fact its happening in all the stores.
If you ever been grocery shopping after work, you know how much junk the people buy hundreds of items per cart, hundreds of carts per hour, and now the have to track it all by hand and place the order to the warehouse over the phone.
The supermarket doens’t the staff to keep up, and now they’ve got customer saying “HEY YOUR OUT OF BEER”. The riot ensues shortly after.