Y2K, WTF

As we cruised ever closer to the year 2000, there was a growing sense of anticipation everywhere. Something was about to happen.

A new millennium was a big deal! The last thousand years saw almost unimaginable change, with the Earth’s population exploding from 300 million to over 7 billion. At the start of the last millennium, the fastest way to spread ideas was to painstakingly copy everything down by hand.

By the middle of this thousand-year stretch, we were able to produce a thousand times as many words per year. By the dawn of the 21st century, we had almost left the printing press in the dust, disseminating information at the speed of light and all around the globe.

And, the speed of change itself was speeding up. More change happened in a few decades of the 20th century than in previous entire centuries, and this trend only increased as 1999 drew to a close.

In the midst of all this excitement, there was also a great deal of concern over a more technical matter. Older computer s…