1999 throwback - the Millennium Bug

[Pawnless Endgame]

I'm having a nostalgia for 1999 at the moment as it's now 25 years ago. It was early internet and our 1st PCs for many of us with chat rooms, ICQ/AIM, Netscape, mp3.com, Hampsterdance, early web forums, coverage of the '99 eclipse, Age of Empires II and so on. It was before the internet got sanitised by so-called social media and the big corporations.

Somewhere amongst this in the tech world was the imminent Millennium Bug. Does anyone remember the build up to it, how it got dealt with, and any setbacks? The main thing I can remember is that some forum software rolled over from 1999 to 19100, meaning that 19 was hard-coded and only the 99 year part was a variable. This got patched pretty quickly.

I found an old gov.uk site from archive.org with an interesting read about the "dangers" of the Millennium Bug.

What Everyone Should Know About The Millennium Bug : UK Government : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A public information leaflet produced by the UK government to inform and advise citizens about the Millennium Bug.

archive.org

There are numerous download links on there that still work on the archive site (surprisingly!) e.g. text only, JPG, PDF, ZIP etc. Here's a link to the PDF (32MB) for a bit of light Christmas reading I found it interesting that the language used was a bit different in 1999 to how a gov.uk web site would be worded now. It seemed less formal and less threatening back then.

https://archive.org/download/WhatEveryoneShouldKnowAboutTheMillenniumBug/What_Everyone_Should_Know_About_The_Millennium_Bug.pdf

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

I remember the panic about the millennium bug but it was obvious it would be fixed because it had to be and I don't recall seeing any issues.

This may be of interest:

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Interesting, as I didn't know about Y2038, and also that the article says there isn't a universal solution for this. I still use Office '97 on one of my computers, and so far, Excel has been calculating dates correctly. As Excel '97 is now so old, it will presumably succumb to the Y2038 problem. We better get updating!

Winamp! Nostalgia

Loving the videos in the replies in this thread, but thought I'd point out the Winamp video because I still use Winamp. Daily! For the uninitiated, you had Windows Media Player, but for the rest of us in 1999, it was Winamp vs Sonique. I still have a load of MP3s, MIDIs, WAVs plus some obscure files such as OGG, SGT and APE files which still all play fine on Winamp.

At the time we were promised planes falling out of the sky, nuclear weapons launching by themselves, atomic reactor going critical. In the end it was a bit of a damp Squibb. Very disappointing.

With all the AI scaremongering in the press over the past 18 months or so, planes dropping out and nukes going off could still happen any day now. The Technological Singularity. Skynet!

Pity, it came a year before the millennium.

Technically you're right because there wasn't a year 0. So the 1st Millennium was AD1-1000, 2nd was AD1001-2000, then the 3rd began in AD2001. The Proles (including me) simply thought that 2000 was a prettier number and so we got played into this by the press.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

The millennium bug and the hole in the ozone layer was going to wipe out humanity.

"How dare you!"

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

I still play AoE2 fairly regularly.

I thought I'd put AoE2 in my OP because it was my first online game. MSN Gaming Zone! But also all-night LANs in student digs with 6 of us fellow housemates. We would start at 9PM, pausing the game at 5AM for a bit of sleep, with 5 out of the 6 civilisations still standing

My main memory of that new years eve is getting horribly drunk, but I don't think the millennium bug affected it.

NYE was a bit disappointing for me as my local mate went out with a group of mates on the whim in the next town. He texted me after midnight saying he was smashed. Yeah cheers for inviting me out, while I was stuck at my parents with a load of their teacher friends! I remember NYD sunrise being really nice though so that was a positive.

This thread makes me realise a lot of people on here are older than me..

I would have been 15 years old, I was aware of it as I grew up with the pc age and knew what they were talking about.

Did it scare me ? No I was at a family party

I'm only a bit older than you (I was uni age), but looks like we started here in the same year and you have way more posts Like you said though, it was a good time to be alive as it was the PC and 90s internet age.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

There's an old saying in business, usually said by IT illiterates "Why do we bother spending so much on IT when everything works".

I heard similar in IT, except it's 2 sayings:

"Everything is working fine. Why are we paying you this much?"
"Nothing is working properly. Why are we paying you this much?"

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.