Sunday, April 30, 2017
Y2K
The 20th century was one in which there was a major technological advance. New technologies were being produced and improved like for example, the IMac computer. Everything seemed to be great for America's economy and technological advances or so American's thought.
It was not until Y2K was discovered that Americans began to fall in a panic of the world coming to an end in the year 2000. So what was Y2K and why did it cause people to believe the world was ending in 2000?
Y2K was a computer failure and was also known as the "millennium bug". It was an error in computers that had to do with changing the year. The computer systems were only programed to change the last two digits of the year. This meant that the first two digits were programed to always stay at 19. To give you an idea of why this was a problem think about it like this, when the year 2000 would come the first two digits would remain at 19 and the last two digits would change to 00 because they were the only two digits programed to change and this would mean the year would be 1900.
This caused people to believe the world would end because there would be technology errors all over the world that would lead to a chaos so huge it would be the end of the world.
Really interesting! Not only did they have fears of the world ending, but many were afraid of unwanted missiles going off because of computer malfunctioning and the possibility of starting wars with other countries.
ReplyDeleteNice post. It's also worth noting that the reason for all of this chaos was that people put a lot of money into online stocks, and people were starting to become very reliant on it. What started as a huge problem just ended up being fixed with a small coding edit.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! It's interesting to learn that people were so panicked by this event and thought the world would end just because of a glitch in computers. It also points out a problem with the programming of new technology.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post! It's surprising to think that people less than 20 years ago were afraid that the date settings on computers could cause the end of the world. However, there was some legitimacy to the idea. Computers were in control of some of the most dangerous weaponry at the time as well as many other security measures. I wonder if the glitch had any effect on any of the computers that did not get updated on time.
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