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As we head into 2015, it's hard to think of any technical skill set less relevant than Y2K - the identification and fixing of computer systems and applications that used two decimal digits rather than four to store the year component of each date. As you may recall, the discovery of the problem (or perhaps, that the deadline to fix it was finally approaching) in the late '90s led to media hysteria and dire warnings about a world full of computers simultaneously losing their bearings, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. An artist has assembled a memorial to the crisis, in the form of a web site presenting photos of dozens of books dealing with Y2K from various perspectives.
This site could be seen as mindless diversion, but also as a digest of reaction likely to repeat itself in a subsequent "crisis", albeit with different media next time (blogging, for one, had yet to be invented).
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @04:06PM
> And the stupidity I'm referring to is that of the chicken lickens who said the sky was going to cave in
You've got it completely wrong. Y2K was a situation in which the 'chicken lickens' actually prompted the necessary response. The very fact that there were only minor problems was the direct result of billions of dollars of effort fixing shit. Sure, not 100% of it was necessary, but expecting that level of precision on a problem of that scale would be myopic.
> In 1994 I took out a 15-year mortgage on a house. Nothing crashed. "09" was 2009 and not less than "94", at least in that bank.
Because you were not the first person to take out a mortgage with a term extending past 2000. That rubicon was passed well over a decade before you walked in the door and was discovered and fixed then because it meant all new business ground to a halt. Find the first guy to apply for such a mortgage at that bank and ask them how much of a hassle it was. 10 to 1, they ended up just going to some other bank that had already fixed the problem.