I was thinking about New Year's Eve 1999 last night. I spent the whole night at Walmart's World HQs awaiting the

[sinkingfeeling]

terrible predicted crash of all computers. As the year rolled over, everything was supposed to stop and all progress was to end. The night passed quietly.
Little did I know that things and progress would stop and chaos would overtake the land, but a quarter of a century later.

[BadgerKid]

1. 2038 is concerning for old computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

I’d worry especially about medical, transportation, and communication devices.

Some FAA systems are a half-century old, as aging tech suffers from lack of replacement parts and support service

The report also highlighted several unnamed systems critical to safety and operations that are 20 to 30 years old, with some up to 50 years old. Timetables for reinvestment in the systems won’t occur until 2030 at the earliest, if at all.

https://fortune.com/2025/02/01/faa-tech-system-american-airlines-air-traffic-control-under-staffed/

[da svenster]

2. i was on call that night (good to see a midrange/mainframe programmer)

we were pretty sure we had changed what needed to be changed. stuff developed in house since the early 90s were already y2k compliant but we has a property management system written on a system 36 that we were worried about.

y2k was a huge non-issue. not because it wasn't a problem but because a lot of developers kicked ass and fixed the problem. the world didn't see things collapse because folks like you and me spent several years working our backsides off to make sure it didn't happen.

[hunter]

3. The place I was working started testing Y2K upgrades in the early nineties.

It was a tremendous effort which is why Y2K rolled around without a glitch.

We need to be doing the same with Trump, explicitly planning and explaining how we will make our nation a better place once Trump and the Republican party are deposed.