The millenium bug

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Why do so many non-tech people think it was a virus?

I still don't get this at all...

Was it the news outlets' bad reporting at the time or what?

I don't remember much from the months coming up to it, too busy doing exams in school...

Last edited by EtotheC on 24 Jun 2009, 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Bad reporting, and an uninformed public that just thinks anything wrong with computers is a virus. I remember people thinking they were safe from the Millennium bug because they used Macs.

My mom used to be a Cobol hacker, so she had plenty of work back in the 90s. Now that they've fixed it, though, she hasn't found much use for her knowledge of such an ancient language.

As presumably one mainframe maintainer to the other, your mum gets props from me.

I've had people ask me to fix their computers after "a virus made it so they can't type numbers" It turned out they hit the NumLock key and didn't realize it (the green light being off should've been a giveaway). Thanks to the media, the public looks at any computer problem as being the result of a virus, and apparently the only possible way to get rid of a virus is to delete ALL of your data including backups.

It's the same way as how they consider hackers to be people who out to intentionally destroy your computer for fun.

Are you 2600?

Macs from that time period were "kick-ass", so I can see why they would think that.

Were? They still are! My 1999 iMac G3 still does everything I would want to do a new Intel box. Well, for memory reasons, I avoid Iceweasel/Firefox, but I could upgrade the RAM if I wanted.

Wasn't the biggest issue with the cobol programs the fact that the original code was not able to handle year zero (effectively), since they had opted for a two digit year (rather than four)? At least that was my understanding at the time.

I knew a little bit of cobol, but at the time I had no intention of being a coder. I've changed my mind a few times over the years, but never stuck with it long enough to be able to pull it off as a job/profession. I know basic, some cobol, some java, some perl, some python, some c++, some visual basic, etc.

Otherwise intelligent people are suddenly rendered useless when dealing with a computer. They have some sort of mental block about the whole thing. The same applies to lots of people who are out of their "comfort zone." I can handle a lot with computers, but I am relatively lost when trying to deal with a car problem, or a problem with an appliance. I have gotten better over the years with the support of my wife, but those are things that do not come natural to me and my first thought is always that I haven't the slightest idea where to begin.

I'm guessing your G3 takes PC133 memory. You can get 256MB chips for about $25 or cheaper online to max the memory out. With 256-512 Ram things like firefox should run fine on old hardware.

Oh and I honestly believe it is bulls*** that the people in the IT industry during the 90's working on the Y2K Bug are not working right now. If these people can work on something that complex of course the can continue doing what they are doing. However in this day of age so many people do computers that corporations will hire employees in a heartbeat because there is so many people in that field.

They used two digits instead of four in order to save space- this was back in the day when hardware resources were so limited that they actually saved a significant amount by doing this. The assumption was that all of this technology would be obsolete and replaced by the time 2000 came around, so the "bug" would be irrelevant. Remember, these people had just seen an astounding technology revolution, and they believed another revolution was imminent which would marginalize all the existing technology.


That would be my mom. It's really funny, she programmed mainframes and yet isn't even competent in doing basic tasks (such as managing her e-mail account) on a Mac.

It's got 320MB now (one 256 stick and one 64). According to Apple, it supports 512, but unofficially this model can handle up to a gig. The 512meg sticks cost something like $26, so I'll probably upgrade it sometime. I'd still use lighter-weight programs just for the speed. LXDE is as heavy as I'd ever go on this machine.

Ironically, the Y2K bug was far more destructive than the original scenario, although on a human scale.

When the IT people realized that they had a problem with 'ancient' code, they began a worldwide search for people who still used COBOL and other languages like that. They found that India had a lot of people who wrote tight code, were dirt cheap, and eager to take their money. Soon other nations were jumping on the bandwagon.

The rest is history.

OS X sucks, and has almost no connection between Mac. If anything, OS X relates more to NeXTSTEP than Mac.

OS 9 was *the* s**t.

OS9 is good for a toy computer, but it lacks a real web browser.

But anyways, I just run Linux on my old Mac. I get modern software with low resource usage.

what about the forthcoming Y2K38?

I'll be dead, so what do I care?...