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Reflecting on the years gone by
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Sunny Days




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 12:11 am
Fireworks flashing in my window, so it hits me that hey, its New Years.
I had a sudden vivid flashback to Y2K and the whole scare. I was still pretty young then (I think 4'th grade!) Friday night, sitting around in the kitchen with my brothers waiting for that magical moment when the clock will strike 12...
oh my goodness its 19 years!! how fast did that fly??
What are your memories of those days?
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Surrendered




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 12:19 am
Oh, they were so afraid all the computer systems are gonna crash. Going from 1999-2000, They hired special IT workers and were waiting with bated breath what's going to happen 12:00.
12:00 came and went, nothing happened.
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tf




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 12:43 am
Not only computers. So many things relied on internet. Electricity, phone, gas, traffic lights aand more
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seeker




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 1:46 am
I remember that. I bet anyone who really knew how these things worked wasn't at all worried. I can't imagine everyone was that wrong. It was just gullible sheeple like us who were buying up bottled water for the Y2K apocalypse.

The 2000 glasses with the middle 0s for the eyes were adorable, until it became 2010 and people were still trying to make them work. I'm still seeing 2019 glasses and sure it's cute and all but nothing compared to the 200X versions.
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dankbar




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 2:30 am
I remember it was Fri night & we were by my aunt's house foe shabbos & my then 1 yr old was practicing to walk from couch to coffee table
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Chickpea




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 3:00 am
I remember Chabad Lubavitch gave out *Y2K survival kits*. Each kit contained 2 candles with candle holders, a bottle of grape juice, 2 challah rolls and the appropriate brochos. It brought such a smile to my face. The whole media was trying to scare us, but we had Hashem! I feel like it was yesterday.
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shabbatiscoming




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 3:14 am
I remember the miami boys choir song, y2k about that shabbat/news year.
I was in university.
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zaq




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 1:03 pm
The much-anticipated and feared Y2K meltdown was not something I was concerned about. 9/11/2001 was neither anticipated nor feared and that was a biggie, the repercussions of which we are still feeling to this day.
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amother
Copper


 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 1:29 pm
Its not that Y2k was a big 'nothing' - it was anticipated and prepared for. People actually did fix things.
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amother
Maroon


 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 2:32 pm
My relative worked for years to rewrite the chase bank programs so they dont crash. Yes he was still holding his breath that there was no glitches. They could not try it out till it happened! They prepared for it so yeah nothing happened.
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sirel




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 3:13 pm
well the scare of the world coming to an end was of course crazy, but the fear of all the computer systems crashing was a real issue.

the major companies (governments, international companies) woke up at some point in the mid '90s and realized that all the computer databases and many millions of lines of code all had dates based on 6 digits- 2 each for day, month, year. so that the prefix "19" was automatic. if no changes were made, the years would change from 1999 to 1900.

They spent the next few years changing the year to a four digit system. but there was no way to know if it would really be okay until it happened.
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daagahminayin




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 3:57 pm
zaq wrote:
The much-anticipated and feared Y2K meltdown was not something I was concerned about. 9/11/2001 was neither anticipated nor feared and that was a biggie, the repercussions of which we are still feeling to this day.


Whenever I see a book published in the recent years before that date I think to myself, “Wow, when this was written no the world had no idea what was in store”. It really was a landmark in time, sadly.
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zaq




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 6:44 pm
daagahminayin wrote:
Whenever I see a book published in the recent years before that date I think to myself, “Wow, when this was written no the world had no idea what was in store”. It really was a landmark in time, sadly.
'

9/11 is to my generation what Pearl Harbor Day was to my mother's.
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thunderstorm




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 6:56 pm
It was a month before I got engaged. I remember it was a Shabbos that we were home with my mother. I sat at one end of the dining room table and she sat at the other and I remeber the two of us sitting after the Seuda was over Friday night waiting for the lights to go out...it never happened and we eventually went to bed.
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nicole81




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 7:00 pm
I was in HS and my best friend stayed the night. We went on what we termed "The Millennium Run" at midnight, through my neighborhood to check that the world hadn't ended. One of us would call out an object, like "streetlights" and the other would yell "check!" as all was fine. We then came back inside and ate ziti with lots of melted mozzarella on it. I still have pictures documenting our grand time.
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amother
Cerise


 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 7:09 pm
DH's company lowered the ball in Times Square for the first time that year. The year before the company that had the contract lowered it 11 seconds late. DH was tense as could be until the ball was lowered. That's my memory of that night.
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rgr




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 01 2019, 8:42 pm
daagahminayin wrote:
Whenever I see a book published in the recent years before that date I think to myself, “Wow, when this was written no the world had no idea what was in store”. It really was a landmark in time, sadly.


Or old movies where they show the skyline of NY.
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imasoftov




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Jan 02 2019, 3:28 am
amother wrote:
Its not that Y2k was a big 'nothing' - it was anticipated and prepared for. People actually did fix things.

Yup. At my job we went over every one of the programs we were responsible for to make sure there would be no issues. We had one program using a customer's database and I was rather annoyed that they waited until the fourth quarter to get around to making the changes but everything else was handled much sooner. And still we had some people spend Shabbat at the office (some of our products are used in medical applications, I'm not the boss's mashgiach but I expect he asked a rabbi, had I been asked to be on call I'd have done likewise) in case the cellular network died, they had a quiet Shabbat.

I also got to see a few of my boss's customers from 20 years before that. We were no longer supporting those customers ourselves, he had sold that part of the business to a former employee but we still help that business out and when some of the old customers (who were still in business and still using the original programs) called to update their systems, many of them had very out of date hardware as well as software, and it was time to get a new computer anyway, so my boss sent me to help with some of those.

ETA: And I didn't even get the t-shirt.


Last edited by imasoftov on Wed, Jan 02 2019, 1:29 pm; edited 1 time in total
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chanchy123




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Jan 02 2019, 6:29 am
I was 19 at the time, I remember, at least in Israel, people looking at the Y2K scare phenomenon as another weird American exaggeration. Normal people knew about the issue of the double digit code and that it was dealt with.
I remember being like 99.99% sure nothing would happen, but curious about that long shot that all technology would shut down. I do remember people talking about traffic lights being shut down. I remember it being Friday night, and looking at the street lights that were still on as the clock struck midnight thinking - well the world didn't come to an end after all.
I was in midrasha in the Rova that year, and my biggest memory is of the crazy amount of Khristian tourists, I even saw my first Mennonite or Amish people in the Old City that year. There were J-esuses walking around the city trying to "save" the world (including one who would walk around wearing sack). That year Shabbat channuka Khristmas and the last days of Ramaddan all came out on the same day and people were afraid of religious riots in Yerushalayim, the midrasha was closed down over that Shabbat in fear of these riots which never came).
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cbsp




 
 
    
 

Post Thu, Jan 03 2019, 1:05 am
Surrendered wrote:
Oh, they were so afraid all the computer systems are gonna crash. Going from 1999-2000, They hired special IT workers and were waiting with bated breath what's going to happen 12:00.
12:00 came and went, nothing happened.



Hmmm, I know correlation does not equal causation, but - and I'm just putting it out here - do you think it's possible that just maybe those special IT workers may have been doing special IT stuff (other than wait with bated breath) and therefore nothing happened?

Banging head

(yes, I was one of those IT people. Not so special, just worked umpteen hours unpaid overtime applying patches and testing to the limited extent of our ability in the years, months, weeks, and days prior to Jan 1, '00. And FWIW, while BH the big systems of the power grid, etc didn't fail [due to efforts of those in the industry], there were countless glitches in less-than-critical-but-still-vital programs that unexpectedly malfunctioned due to the assumption that it was the year 100 - or even 1900)
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