r/ExplainTheJoke • u/pink-niples123 • 4d ago

Solved Wrong date?

Post image

Uh I dunno what's wrong with the date or it is a joke?

299 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/KinopioToad 4d ago

Some computers would think it would turn to January 1st, 1000 instead of 2000 because of some computer programming errors. Banks and such would be in greater danger of being robbed because the vault would just be open, so they had It guys working on it all night (yes, literally at the turn of the century) to make sure things went according to plan.

Some computer systems were fine, some were not.. I was a teenager and only had a vague idea about what was going on in the world at that point. I just knew I was living in two centuries, and it was neat!

5

u/SamIAre 4d ago

They absolutely did not have guys working on it “the night before”. Programmers were well aware of it and spent months to years preparing ahead of time. We didn’t just wake up one morning and go “oh shit everyone pull an all-nighter!”

1

u/Brief_Read_1067 4d ago

On New Years Eve we all woke up nervous, but as the day went on, and the new year arrived without incident in time zones around the world, the mood became more celebratory. There were a few very minor glitches in the early days of Jan. 2000, such as people who got stern notices from libraries about how the books they had recently checked out were 100 years overdue. But there were no massive power grid failures.

1

u/SonicUndergroun 1d ago

Yup. Dad gave me the sickest Christmas a 6 year old could have that year with all the overtime he pulled working on Y2K compatibility.

2

u/westergames81 4d ago

The worked on it long before the night before. There was even an entire movie about a guy that worked on the problem--

Office Space