this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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Yeah, Y2K was really tough man. Just don't know how I made it.
Y2K was a nightmare for us GenX. Months of overtime and late nights with lots of contractors coding 24/7. I hope I never have to go through that again.
I also hope I don't live to see the year 10,000.
Oh, we've got a few hurdles before then. The 32-bit unsigned counter for network time protocol resets in 2036, the GPS 10-bit week counter resets in 2038, and the old Unix signed 32-bit date also resets in 2038.
I'd only ever heard of the Unix epoch one. It's interesting that three separate systems (with three different underlying data types) all overflow so closely together.
Probably have been invented around the same time and tick up at about the same rate.
Apparently the GPS one is a regular thing, every ~19 years.
I remember in '99 the radio DJs loved talking about how there was a chance the world would end on new years, so there was a degree of anxiety, especially to dumb kids like myself
It would have been catastrophic if people didn't put in the work leading up to it.
Which was an absolute shit ton of work.
But we saved the day
I changed jobs in late 99, so I got to go through all the Y2K bullshit in one job, then do it again in the new one.
One dude at my old job had his panties in a bunch because he said all the U.S. Navy ships were vulnerable and he said WW3 was going to start, but he was generally an idiot anyway, so that was par for the course.
In the new job I had to certify that DEC impact printers were Y2K certified. Which way basically me putting stickers on all of them saying they were certified because they weren't smart enough to care what the date was.
My boss at the new job required us to be onsite on January 1st, which was kind of a drag, but that's the way it goes. There was nothing for us to do. He stopped at a deli on the way in and picked up an absolutely fantastic pile of food for us, so it just became a casual brunch and we just kind of hung around eating and chatting until he was satisfied that nothing was going to go wrong.
I'd kill to know what the deli was. I was too young and stupid to save the name.
Even as a teenager I was pretty crystal-clear on the fact that anybody who knew anything about how a computer worked also knew that Y2K was not the cataclysmic society-ending event that the fucking braindead news media were making it out to be at the time.
It wasn't because everybody worked and put in what was required to fix it.
Any company with old code was in danger. Every Bank everything had to work their asses off to get all these changes made and test it. Still some things failed but it could have been much much worse if people didn't panic and put in the time to fix it