[burritos]

Or was it an overblown paranoia?

[jasonraymondson]

no, no I always believed the year 2000 was coming. I was rightly justified to believe it would come to pass

[jato]

did you think that Y2K was a threat?

No.

[Specop_007]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jasonraymondson', 'n')o, no I always believed the year 2000 was coming. I was rightly justified to believe it would come to pass

[Carlhole]

It never grabbed me as a real threat. I would read the occasional article about it wondering if I were missing something.

[dinopello]

It was a huge threat, especially to the banking system. That is why my company and others received billions of dollars in contracts to fix the problems and verify the fixes through simulations starting a decade or more before the turnover.

Threats, (aka risks) occur all the time. It's when you don't do anything about them that they become a real problem.

[sittinguy]

NO
I was in the Keys partying my ass off. There sure was alot of dumbasses that spent ALOT of money to prepare for nothing. There was some prep on the tech side that was needed but we knew it was coming and exactly what time it was coming.

[JPL]

There was a simple 'fallback-fix' for Y2K anyhow, which was that we all wound our clocks back 10 years (shrug).

Not sure that would work for PO though...

JP

[MacG]

Y2K? Pure hysteria. The text below was written in Nov -98 (and reprinted in Nov -99) in NT Insider. I used it as inofficial response when people asked about "Y2K".

[web]http://files.meetup.com/189080/Peter%20Pontificates%20Nov%2098.pdf[/web]

[EnergyUnlimited]

No.
I was certain that technology will solve it.

[Geko45]

I actually did believe that it would be a problem and took appropriate measures, but I never thought it was going to be TEOTWAWKI. I saw it as a possible one or two week disruption of services before things got straightened out. I planned for it like you would plan for a hurricane. I topped off my gas tank, went to the store and got two weeks of food and water and made sure I had plenty of cash on hand. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

[jasonraymondson]

[quote="MacG"]Y2K? Pure hysteria. The text below was written in Nov -09 (and reprinted in Nov -99) in NT Insider. I used it as inofficial response when people asked about "Y2K".

that was fucking great..!

[PrairieMule]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Geko45', 'I') actually did believe that it would be a problem and took appropriate measures, but I never thought it was going to be TEOTWAWKI. I saw it as a possible one or two week disruption of services before things got straightened out. I planned for it like you would plan for a hurricane. I topped off my gas tank, went to the store and got two weeks of food and water and made sure I had plenty of cash on hand. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

[cynthia]

It was a problem, many dollars were thrown at it to postpone or repair the problem.
I bought extra food, jugs of water and planned to hunker down for a few weeks. I was disappointed.
Many I talked to about Y2K now throw it in my face when I mention Peak Oil.
And still I live the simple life, growing food, butchering chickens and enjoying what is in front of me. And I have a candle supply like no other.
cynthia

[eastbay]

Y2K was important to me. The concern reached the upper management of my old agency. I earned extra overtime working in the city that night. It was a very quiet shift.

[Chaparral]

Not really. I didn't have much skin in the game at the time and a number of friends and acquaintences had nicely paying work fixing the problem.

[MD]

I remember attending a y2k meeting where the speaker ranted on about "clocks" in every chip and how TEOTWAWKI was on our doorstep.

I carefully and gently tried to explain to him that the bulk of these "clocks" were just oscillators that didn't track any dates or times.

His eyes glazed over and responded "I've been in this too long to listen to that nonsense" and he went back to discussing his 3000 gallon LP tank and 1000 lbs of grain storage. I just shook my head and left.

I even knew some skilled software people that bought into the "clock" thing. The hardware guys (like me), mostly just gave up trying to explain.

Yeah, it was a major serious problem that was blown way out of proportion by a lot of people.

Try not to draw parallels between y2k and peak oil.

With y2k there was a clear time line and available fix.

No fix has emerged for peak oil as of yet and none of the proposed solutions look viable.

It's difficult to blow the scope of this problem out of proportion.
It is very possible to blow the timing out of proportion (the sky is falling!).

But the ultimate scope of the problem is frightening beyond belief. It's truly hard to overstate the problem.

[topcat]

Still have some food in sealed plastic buckets left-over from Y2K! Not to mention an over-priced genset.

At least I/we feel more comfortable when extreme weather hits as we are now somewhat prepared for a short-term disruption of services.