Was the Y2K scare real and where did you get your information from?

y2k was the fear that pervaded myopic humans that when the year clicked over from 1999 to 2000

everything would crash because the computers would not be able to handle it.

but of course nothing at all happened in the end .......

and by the way it was supposed to herald in the 21st century, but most have got wrong as the 21st century only starts at the and of 2000, ie when the clocks tick over to 01 01 2001.

but whatever that is what most think, wrongly.

assuming there was no year 0.

I was a computer programmer in the 80's. At that time in programming, the year was only a 2 digit field. This was mainly the COBOL Language. The fear was when programs went from 99 year to 00 year, the programs would crash.

This was caught in 93-95 and companies and governments started to fix the programs, changing the programs from 2 year fields to 4 year fields. They made it. We went to 1/1/2000 and nothing happened. Only because everyone spent a lot of time working on the problem.

Okay, here's what happened. ( I don't have a source, this is what I've gathered from the things that I've read about it.) Originally, computers could only go through 0-99 (as years) and when the year 2000 came along, computers' year dates would switch back to 00 and cause problems for dates (like birthdays and such, and FFFF up social security and such that rely on people's ages. For example if someone were born in 1967, and the computer's calendar read 00 (thus 1900) they would be read as 00-67, and they would be, according to the computer, -33 years old.

Anyways, They did manage to update computer's Operating systems so that the dates read in 4 digits (0000-9999).