Running a Y2K Test in 2017! | Nostalgia Nerd

I know. I'm crazy right? A Y2K/Millennium bug test, SEVENTEEN years after the event. What crazy occurrences could lay in wait? Maybe an exploding computer? Maybe a dormant TERROR Virus... It's more likely that the selection of computers I test, will pass... ALTHOUGH, perhaps one doesn't. In which case, what do we do? Follow me on this epic story of bugs, century bytes and memory saving code... The very thing which led us to this mess. THE Y2K BUG.
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[@teaes3248]

first!

[@sergiofls7623]

Tea Es noc

[@michaelparker2449]

00110001 00110100 00111000 01110100 01101000 00001010

[@ILike2PlayBass]

nobody fucking cares

[@mergemechanism]

+Michael Parker Smart lad.

[@ajwright5512]

First.

[@zeroDOTjon]

In 1999 I was trying to use Y2K as leverage to get a new computer. The one I had at that point was almost 4 years old. My mom said since my sister and I needed one for school, if Y2K killed our PC, we could get a new one. So I was sure to turn it off before I left to get drunk underage at a party. The next morning, I was very upset that it turned on and had no issues. I had that PC until I started college in 2006.

[@SpeedyMarioPony75]

zeroDOTjon you should have tried to mess around with the files, i guess you had no idea xD

[@googaagoogaa12345678]

should have pulled the HD thats what i did to get a new laptop as my parents are clueless about that and it made getting all my stuff moved easy LOL and quite an upgrade it was too i went from an acer to an ailenware laptop best thing about my stepdad LOTS of money

[@nmotschidontwannagivemyrea8932]

Matthew Neathery: So you intentionally broke something you owned that worked well? You're a spoiled little brat.

[@silverloto6773]

Not broke but intentionally make it stop working, get the alienware and get backup from the HDD (according to what the commenter said) if It was me, after that would put the HDD back in place and get the acer run normal. And maybe sell it for some money (if it was at the peak of netbook popularity, even if the system's were garbage from the very beginning.)

[@420sakura1]

Delete system 32 the solution to every problem. Did 98 have system 32?

[@B1G_Dave]

So you're saying its safe to come out of my bunker?

[@Nostalgianerd]

BIG Dave seeing as you've got Internet connection, I probably wouldn't bother. It's pretty grim out here.

[@Knight_Astolfo]

STAY INSIDE! Actually, can I come in your bunker, too? Mine smells like feet.

[@wyvern4588]

Richard Smith, Better than 0bama's twisted puppet to do 4-8 years of economical sabotage.

[@rich1051414]

You watch too much fox. The economy was improving under obama, and the improving economy now is based on Obama's administration. The economy doesn't change overnight. Trump even said himself that the economy does better under democrats.

[@rich1051414]

I don't know yiddish well enough to know if that was meant literally, or sarcastically xD

[@mcFreaki]

yeah i don't think a lot of people realised at the time that the reason the milennium bug was a whole lot of nothing is because there was such a panic about it. there was much scrabbling to fix the issue before 31/12/99, and make sure the most important stuff was y2k compliant. after all that panic, nothing happened because we had made sure nothing happened. congrats world. you done did something

[@snorman1911]

Yeah at the time I remember thinking how completely incompetent would you have to be to sit around and do nothing to fix your software with such an obvious bug coming up. Also uninformed people were freaking out about embedded devices crashing that had *no* concept of the date at all, like a microwave.

[@Henrik_Holst]

Well the problem with the panic was that is way out of line, media where talking about planes dropping out of the sky and nuclear power plants exploding. Our "Minister of IT" even when on public television and told people that even fixed systems would be brought down by unfixed systems. The panic was not about what would happen if no one fixed things, it was about everything exploding even with fixes.

[@LibraGamesUnlimited]

I was actually more worried that some drunk would slam their car into a utility pole, knock power off some place and people woudl panic thinking it was Y2K and cause a riot or something. :)

[@kimfucku8074]

Ohh I remember very well analyzing tons of COBOL programs and fixing an Assembler date calulcation routine for a large insurance company at that time. Don't miss it!

[@mascot4950]

"It makes me wonder who was up at midnight as the millennium rolled over, checking their PC." Me, for one. I was on the emergency response team in case our software blew up. Luckily, the lengthy R&D project to make the entire system compliant seemed to have caught everything.

[@Nostalgianerd]

Mascot Without people like you, Y2K could have been the end days. I salute you.

[@tbb033]

""It makes me wonder who was up at midnight as the millennium rolled over," Lots of people, it was new years eve.

[@Nostalgianerd]

tbb033 out of context of course.

[@smilingmiura6515]

Nostalgia Nerd may I ask what the intro music is ?

[@Rockythefishman]

Mascot I was on Yahoo!'s home page 31/12/1999 11:59 one minute later nothing happened! Sad I know

[@marsgal42]

I watched systems roll over at 0000 UTC 1 January 2000, and watched systems roll over at midnight local time. My VCR had several Y2K issues. The most bizarre was setting a recording to start at, say 11PM 31 January 1999, then record past midnight. It tried to come up with a stop time/date, overflowed internal data structures and got totally confused. The only fix was a cold reboot.

[@rawr51919]

Laura Halliday It was like "Wait? What the hell's going on here? I have no damn clue what the bloody time is, & I can't figure out what time/date to use either..."

[@rawr51919]

Laura Halliday Plus it was December not January :P

[@bcubed72]

Well, that was your own damn fault for actually bothering to set the time and date. If you left it to flash "12:00" like everyone else, no problem!

[@Garryck-1]

I had a friend who had 4 VCRs, all in constant use (one for each of the TV channels we got).. To see what would happen, he set the clocks on all four to a few minutes before Y2K rollover. One (the newest) was fine. Two locked up and needed a cold reboot. The last one never worked again. Permanently bricked it.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

That's an answer to a question that I've needed to hear for seventeen years but I never knew that I was searching for until just now.

[@alansolomon113]

My credit card billing software had this problem - it assumed that the expiry date of credit cards was 19xx. So when 2000 arrived, it would have thought that all card it was asked to bill, were expired. Not a big problem, but I did have to edit the software. And the reason why there wasn't an apocalypse, was people like me, getting ready for the problem *before* it hapened.

[@Knight_Astolfo]

I agree; the movement to fix this problem before y2k was our saving grace. But I still don't think there would have been an apocalypse... just a bunch of frantic people trying to spend more money they don't have. And some really weird looking log files. No one has ever explained to me why the clock rolling back like that would cause nuclear missiles to launch on their own and airplanes to fall out of the sky. Anyways, thanks for helping to fix the technical limitations of the past!

[@TymphaRedbreaduwuowo]

maybe there was no problem ever

[@kazikian]

Alan Solomon certainly not in African warlord territory. AK-47 compatible with all year, no problem!

[@Nighterlev]

+Seraphus The whole "nuclear missles to launch on there own" was just to create panic and awareness about it over-all honestly. The Y2K bug wouldn't of caused anything related to "nuclear missles will fire on there own!!" at all. In fact, the US Gov. was very well aware of this bug as far back as the 70's and already had machines which fixed said bug to begin with lol.

[@idlevalley]

My parents continued to fear the bug for almost 10 years after 2000. I can't even remember their reasoning but I was 15 and it sounded dumb to me then. They had so many bottles of water and a gigantic stash of toilet paper.

[@idlevalley]

"Toilet paper is going to be the new currency"

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

I remember someone in my town had bought two generators, crates of Toilet Paper, and who knows how many dollars of canned goods. Then even got 55 barrels of gasoline, water, medicines, etc.. Yeah, only to have to return quite a bit of the stuff later which I doubt they ever managed to do.

[@Capitan_Chaos]

Stepside1986 lol

[@Nighterlev]

+Stepside1986 I would've kepted all the gasoline and just use it lol. He'd be saving a fuck ton of money in the long run just by using the gasoline he bought rather then going to the gas station to get it. All that toilet paper, again, a shit ton of saved money. The canned food is really the only thing I can understand, that stuff can expire in less then a year to 3 years sometimes. Same with the medicine, and anything food related in general.

[@ruler_of_everything]

you're going to have to thank them when the year 3000 prepares

[@lychy645]

Hp still has drivers for a 25 year pc? Now that's dedication

[@Jay-uu5lu]

Lychy or to fuel 3rd world country pc

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

So do IBM, Dell and Intel. I could actually get DOS drivers for my (fairly) modern network chip.

[@highoctanegames]

1995 was 25 year ago from 2020 so what do mean Windows 98 was 25 years ago in 2017?

[@lychy645]

zzDolphinLegendzz 64 Im from the future

[@YellowToad]

26 years! what

[@AaronHendu]

"...was probably in a ditch somewhere..." ...clicks thumbs up.

[@paulgascoigne5343]

Aaron Henderson I was vomiting down a toilet.. i blame it on the buffet (not the beverages. I only had...some. drinks 😇 )

[@TheLostBear78]

I was working at a Gas station on Y2K, night shift. Listening to Art Bell on the radio calling for DOOM! Fully modern station with computerized pumps and computer registers. Not a single problem. Was a quiet night.

[@juniorsilvabroadcast]

Kevin J i remember that a station running Audicom on Brazil got really fucked. Dead air all day long until they fixed the date problem

[@juniorsilvabroadcast]

They needed to go Manual until the software got a update

[@Slaxbox]

Inaccurate date detected. Initiating self-destruct...

[@Rotsteinblock]

self destruct timing error: -could not read time from bios clock -self destruct CANCELLED

[@gilberttheregular8553]

💥

[@KuraIthys]

hehe. bios screens. Even my 2009 era PC still has a bios screem that is little more than white text on a blue background. I suppose you could say if it isn't broken, why fix it? But it's amusing that fundamentally this 2009 era bios screen is the same as the 486 I had in 1993...

[@hanro50]

KuraIthys The first ever BIOS written was for the original IBM computers and most companies at the time cloned it and most companies before Windows 8 rolled around were still basically using a modified version of that original BIOS and since it was written in a very low level language it takes a considerable amount of code to do even the simplest of tasks Fast forward to the release of Windows 8 and most companies switch over to UEFI which is written in a much simpler and higher level language. These is why Windows 8/8.1/10 boots a bit faster that 7 since Microsoft rewrote the Windows boot loader to allow for uefi support and these is also why motherboard setup menus are more complex now...Another side effect is that your motherboard manufacture can now display their logo on the Windows boot screen if Windows is booted in UEFI mode

[@supercellex4D]

heh, my living room aio still has that sort of ui even tho its uefi

[@ugn669]

Ooh man, I remember back in 99 the company I was working for fell for the hype and hired an "outside specialist company" to test all the hardware. These fools went all around the place sticking "y2k safe" stickers on phones and staplers...

[@MineBro56]

STAPLERS?

[@akeiai]

MineBro56 XD

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Guess who the real fools were. Those who plaster Y2K safe stickers on stuff, or those who pay for it.

[@tinfoil209]

This wasn't a big deal for the average PC user, but businesses with in house programmers it was a big deal. If they were running old late 70's to 80's programs, back then saving two bytes per register was worth it. All the old programmers said "They will just have to fix it before 2000". Well they did, just waited till the last minute of a couple years to do it.

[@johnfrancisdoe1563]

Bradley Winter Also affected a bunch of commercial software. But the idiots thinking it was all about making the CMOS clock tick over confused the issue as much as the fear-mongers. A simple example: A credit card issued in 1998 might have an expiry date of 03/00 . Which means every credit card checking program would need to be tested for that. They would also need to make sure they rejected credit cards with an expiry of 03/99 when the date of attempted use was February 00. Then there was the popular compiler whose date functions would get the time of day wrong if year >= 2000. Oh and don't forget all the forms that had been manually filled in with "expires 9/9/99" to mean "never". List of things to seriously check was huge, and dim-witted bureaucrats added pointless extra such as demanding that programs never display only 2 digit years even when available screen or paper was tight and humans had already been fully tested at previous century turns.

[@DaemonlordX]

One High School I went to had two amusing problems. The Computers used for looking up books were ancient 8008/8086 machines which aside from idiots re-arranging the keys were permanently set to Jan 1 1980 (Probably long dead batteries) and at one time the Computer (486 to early Pentium?) used for borrowing and returning books ms-dos program clocked forward to 2050! This would have been around 1998-2000. I think the only major concern for Y2K was industrial and medical equipment failing which never happened as any vital equipment would have been tested or old machines replaced over time.

[@devjock]

24 Meg's of ram on that bad boy, nice!

[@Nostalgianerd]

devjock yeah babay

[@snorman1911]

I lose track of orders of magnitude these days when thinking about my old machines. Like, thinking about my old Amiga that only had 2 gigs of ram... what, no, 2 MEGS? 2 freaking megabytes?

[@KOTYAR0]

Nostalgia Nerd dude, what was that "Shock Shock Horror Horror" song in the middle of the video?

[@DodoGTA]

It's Female of the Species by Space

[@MsLia32]

that should be enough to run anything

[@kamiboy]

The Y2K bug made me an orphan, and the man I am today.

[@olzhas1one755]

Camous oh my god

[@beem3515]

This seems like a hell of a story

[@pelgervampireduck]

doom 2 is from 1994, that thing must be from 1998 or 1999, it even says "for win 9x use blabla", I think somebody put it in the box but it's not supposed to come with the game

[@PistolSwitches]

kainthevampireduck what a smart duck you are.

[@michaelclement1337]

The Y2K bug is still with us. There are old programs running mainly on mainframes that have code along the line of "If YY < 30 then 20YY else 19YY"

[@BlazeFireXERO]

"So, what have we learnt here? Well- We've learnt that my Compaq 486 will screw up when the millenium passes. But that was SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO and It's easily fixed anyway. And what else have we learnt? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing." Thank you for wasting my time in style, NN. Your videos are amazing. Keep it up. :)

[@AmiciCherno]

Blaze Fire I came across this comment as he started to say it xD

[@grantmackinnon1307]

I rated you as one of the best nostalgia nerd. as a fellow nerd i subscribed to your channel when you only had a few like 800-3000. keep up the good work my british nerd friend.

[@refractionpcsx2]

Interesting, I didn't even know they distributed discs! The whole thing was a bit of an anti-climax anyway, nothing really happened, the apocalypse didn't occur lol. On an unrelated note, what speccy game was that music from in the beginning ( 0:11 onwards)? That's a catchy tune! Oh an my OCD triggers every time I see your intro, the raster bars are out of time with the music so they change before the data sound lol. keep up the good work Mr Nerd!

[@TheAkashicTraveller]

It was never a serious issue for consumers. A fair few businesses did have some issues for example rentals being undercharged by a ridiculous amount. It's just that for any system that could have caused a problem they fixed it before anything happened. We didn't notice anything because software engineers worked hard to fix it.

[@refractionpcsx2]

Yeah true, the media blew it so out of proportion though I was kinda looking forward to a massive disaster lol

[@chooky4626]

Not to mention all the worn-out CTRL and F keys...

[@PetrThaGr8]

RefractionPCSX2 so you have ocd? Or do you mean you like things even and orderly. One is a mental illness one is a normal thing

[@refractionpcsx2]

Masonkiksbut it's the normal thing in this case

[@DogsBAwesome]

many a house was bought on the back of the y2k bug earnings.

[@tinglestingles]

Happy days indeed!

[@DoRC]

i was sitting in the computer room at the municipality where i worked just in case anything bad happened. we had a couple minor issues but nothing dire.

[@0oYASASHIIo0]

I love how the Y2K scare was a big thing in the USA but in my country (Poland) I wasn't even aware of it until years later. Pretty much nothing of significance happened once 2000 came. Go figure :)

[@soulagent79]

I remember all the ATMs in my town were shut off on that New Year's Eve, because even the banks were afraid of the bug.

[@benanderson89]

Banks had a legitimate reason though. Mainframes are extremely time sensitive and failing Y2K would've been catastrophic. Given a lot of mainframe software was and still is from the 1970s and 1980s, it never got futureproofed.

[@JohnDoe-qx3zs]

Those clock checking programs were the silly end of the Y2K issue. The huge problems were all sorts of seemingly innocent programs getting confused when doing time or date related calculations. For example, programs built with certain tools from the 1990s would suddenly get time calculations wrong by several hours even though the people making the program had done nothing wrong and might not even use the exact time for anything, all because a time zone calculation inside the tool would suddenly add the time zone twice when it should have done nothing. Or a feature to check for new E-mail would suddenly delete all your e-mails because the server would confuse "never delete" with "delete on 9/9/1999" . Hunting down all these problems while charlatans were constantly assaulting you with crazy requirements such as "you must *show* the century on every date output that will only ever be seen by humans anyway" was quite a problem for everyone in the industry.

[@BlackJar72]

I remember secretly laughing about all the hype. I had Linux, and knew most of the really important computer were running *nix variations of some kind (Unix, Solaris, etc.) - none of those ever had the bug to begin with. Y2K was not going to turn off all utilities, delete everyone's bank accounts, or shut down our infrastructure - civilization was not going to crash. Some minor inconvenience for the unprepared - so just install the patches on effected systems if you have them, very simple, and skip the inconvenience - so simple. I was polite about it, but found the hype and panic pretty funny.

[@aguchamp7766]

Kinda cool to see the year of my birth as this Doomsday for many. I love looking at Tech around the 90s to early 2000s, and it's always cool to see such a world terror so close yet so distant.

[@rawr51919]

That's probably due to a 64-bit version of Windows... :P 32-bit Win10'll probably run it fine...

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

they got a virtual DOS machine called NTVDM that supports 16 bit software to run.

[@GilliamHimself]

Love that royalty free track you have in the background. Also used by Thunderf00t!

[@ikeyasector]

The only Y2K issue I ever noticed was that certain milk companies here in the states (if not just locally where I live) ended up printing the wrong expiration dates. They got the month and day right but the year was nuts. In Febuarary of 2000 I had milk that claimed that it expired in the 1920's. They ended up correcting it by removing the year completely till a few months later. But other than that, I don't think I noticed anything else regarding Y2K on my end.

[@RMoribayashi]

I used to run a DOS/resident program combo that fixed the Y2K bug but that wasn't its primary function. That was to compensate for how fast or slow the PC was running. It would set the clock with a phone call to the National Bureau of Standards in Colorado every day for a week then analyze the error. After that it adjusted the system clock on boot up as well as applying compensation in real time. Then it only had to make a weekly call to keep it on time. (It was long distance after all).

[@dabombinablemi6188]

What you needed was Windows 10 32bit (16bit executable should run, since they work just fine under Windows 7 32bit).

[@elektrosoundwave]

I remember the time clocks at the grocery store I was working at reset to 1982 when the clock rolled over.

[@PlasmaHH]

Dude, its still 83 years until y2k might become a problem

[@desromic]

Omg, I think I'm the only one who got your joke!

[@KXQ]

nope

[@denis480]

Brilliant.

[@matt2m]

Good on HP I mean sometimes it's fun when you're working on the old computer to realize you're pulling something that no one else has touched and the logistics involved with all those different variations models and migrations over the decades. Thanks for touching it just because you did it justifies Them keeping it

[@kcinplatinumgaming2598]

Lol back then I was assigned to write the software for the company I was working for to check all there computers would pass the Y2K compliance which I think only a few servers crashed but everything is fine other wise... I remember a customer offering me 15 brand new laptops as he panicked that the laptops would break on the date but I said they be fine and they was !! good video !!

[@carlospc866]

In 1999 I was a programmer in a very small software company. I had to check the source code of a production management software. I squashed a couple Y2K bugs, I did my part!

[@elseworlds5]

The memories this brings back ... the fears that when 2000AD dawned, our bank accounts would be wiped and planes would drop out of the sky ... going into a shop and asking some technical guy what the best thing to do with my computer would be on Jan 1, and his knowledgeable reply, “Chuck it out the window” ... the superstitious fears of some folks that when the new millennium started (which wouldn’t be until 2001 in any case) the whole world would suddenly end anyway .... Isn’t nostalgia a wonderful thing? All seems so much simpler now than what we actually DID get in the 21st century, such as 9/11, war, and loads of social media-generated hysterias, none of which had anything to do with the Millennium Bug and makes anything it might have caused seem tame by comparison....

[@kabj06]

A few years ago I took a computer science class and we got into talking about the millennium bug. Apparently the teacher was an IT manager for the college at the time and spent her new year's eve reprogramming the entirety of the college's banner software (the registration program) to not crash and reset everyone's classes.

[@nzwedjat]

what a load of hype all that was! I was in charge of all manner of stuff at the time and went to bed early to be up in time for the rollover and then for whatever reason, over slept and got up at like 0200, what did I find, nothing, nothing failed, nothing crashed! One could argue all the hard work leading up to that fixed all the problems, I'm not convinced!

[@rondlh20]

Good to know the power didn't go down...

[@PapiDoesIt]

Ron DLH I went into the basement and shut off the main breaker a few seconds after midnight. My mom had stocked up on essentials because she was certain it was going to be chaos at midnight.

[@DrMicahLuv]

For those of you who are around for this. It seems very silly but a lot of people were very scared of what it would do to financial economic and Manufacturing sectors. We have a similar problem coming up called Y2K 38 for any 32-bit systems. The 32-bit systems will not be able to encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

[@SanityVideo]

I remember the news reporting how brave people were for celebrating despite all the horrible stuff that was about to happen. It's kind of impressive how terrified people were about this.

[@JonMichaelDeShazer]

Loved the clip of "Female of the Species" by Space in there at around 4:05.

[@theblackwidower]

I was under the impression that Y2K was more of an issue for machines made in the 70s that were still running in the 90s because they still worked so why upgrade. To learn that a 90s DOS machine would have problems at the turn is quite surprising.

[@AChannelFrom2006]

I was surprised that the 95 PC had the Y2K error. I remember back in the day I was so meh about it and thought it was just a silly thing that only affected some cobol programs. Learn something new (old) every day.

[@diicctater]

I got my first real job at an international industrial company by way of the Y2k stuff. I was responsible for contacting, interviewing and evaluating all the suppliers for "all the things". Among other things, the elevators would have the wrong dates on rollover but would keep on elevating things just as any day. Mostly it was a lot of date labeling machines which would print the wrong dates if they were on on roll-over or not work OK if switched back on after.

[@tinglestingles]

I was engaged in 1999, by a large aerospace company in the UK (yes, that one) and out of a few thousand PCs that our team tested, only two failed the Y2K utility. Weeks of walking around the site with a Y2K floppy disk and an asset sheet. Easy money, good times.

[@over00lordunknown12]

3:49 Thunderfoot, is that you?... XD

[@madmax2069]

lmao @ that sketch of Doc Brown when that little toy caught the garage on fire.

[@PolizeiPaul]

I got some advice too, I once was bored and decided to leap years into the future by setting my PC to the year 2099 (as high as it goes) Didn't go well, Most programs ceased and internet lost ALL connections, So I changed it back to the current year..All fixed.

I remember being "in charge" of making sure that our Win98 Pentium III computer passed the Y2K test. It was off during the rollover & since the system was new in the late 90's we had no problems.

[@over00lordunknown12]

5:41 That's like my school, just a text-only simple bios! (Except it is a white background, black text, and no yellow outlines)

[@hexusG4Z]

I was at just starting a computing course in 1999 and my dad ran a vehicle recovery business. the police and RAC wanted him to test for Y2k so of course I was enlisted. I wrote my own program in pascal and tested the 3 or 4 98 PC's and then the old DOS MOT computer. I did it in a similar manner to this one except you ran it from DOS. Everything passed fine, ahhhh 1999... goood times!

[@HistoryVM]

Most of the computers that I've tried to "test" for the Y2K bug ended up with a different result. All of them resulted in a date of January 1, 19100. Which actually makes sense. In a way. But at least it's less destructive than a rollover back to 04/01/1980. =P

[@paulstandaert5709]

I remember doing a Y2k test on my machines back then, and even the BIOS reverted back to 1980, and not 1900 like everyone said it would. Besides, anything that wasn't Y2k compliant was simply too old to run anything important.

[@DrRChandra]

I was one of two people tasked with making sure the NT4 domain where I worked kept humming along at midnight, 01-Jan-2000. Not much testing to do, went home by half past IIRC. BTW...the millennium didn't happen until one year after that (no year zero and all).

[@Mikey129]

6:14 Rise of The Triad... very nice!

[@KuraIthys]

Reminds me my mother was responsible for fixing a huge number of spreadsheets for the hydro-electric commission in Tasmania. I doubt any of that work was safety critical, but I can imagine people would have gotten some seriously weird electricity bills if she hadn't fixed all those documents...

[@intel386DX]

5:40 Cool! Windows 3.x GUI :)))) I remember AMI SETUPs from 1994-1999 have slimier text-graphic GUIs :)

[@Ichinin]

During the transition from 1999 to 2000, i remember that me and a friend were Y2K checking Starcraft with multiplayer and lots of alcohol.

[@michaelparker2449]

After all the millennium bug scare stories I was worried your PC was going to command your toaster to give you a good grilling.

[@theharbingerofconflation]

January 19, 2038 will be a bigger issue.

[@mcarnas3197]

For 32-bit pc's ha i have a 64-bit pc

[@DrMicahLuv]

It's not just about PCS it's about all 32-bit systems cars cell phones Etc. Hopefully we will think ahead instead of Y2K and wait till the last 2 years to try and solve the problem. We have 20 years to get things to 64-bit and then it will be another Millennia before we have an issue LOL

[@YuukoEnjoyer]

How so?

[@TomLuTon]

@@YuukoEnjoyer en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[@purparyumi-raimyura-2]

Only for 32 bit unix systems

[@backofficeshow]

interestingly enough does make me wonder how our retro hardware, I.e. Atari ST etc handle this 🤔

[@SeaJay_Oceans]

Fond memories of all the people tasked with working their way to test and Y2K update THOUSANDS of corporate or schools PCs... All before the 1999 midnight deadline...

[@ChrissehCat]

I was babysitting my little cousin. It feels like yesterday and yet she's all grown up and married and I'm in my 30s now. Honestly, I wasn't too worried if I recall, maybe a little but not really. I stayed up late watched the traditional American new years eve special with the ball drop. Some people claimed the power flickered, but I didn't notice it.

[@stephenhunter70]

In my instance the Bois was fine, the operating systems was fine but MS office failed miserably, with the particular MS office version I had you couldn't configure a four digit year.

[@_JayRamsey_]

Reading the comments, I just realised that I remember where I was New Year's Eve '99, but not any other New Year's Evenings (save 2018, because I don't have Alzheimer's...yet). '99 was definitely one of the more boring "celebrations", too.

[@CholoCPC]

Whew! and here i though the pc and the universe around it, would snap into a infinite loop like a badly raytraced mandelbrot rendering.

[@FooneTuring]

I've got a 5150, and while out of the box it doesn't have a clock (so it can't really have a y2k bug), it has an AST SixPack Plus installed which does add a clock, and it's got a y2k bug in it! But it's thankfully only in the "get the startup time" function, which displays the current date. It'll always say MM/DD/99, but then DOS gets the right time.

[@meegstomtom]

My mother was a VP at the local bank at the time and I remember waiting with Dad at midnight while Mom was at work to ensure there where no issues. And there wasn't.

[@theandnewman]

To think of how much money was spent by companies to make sure their systems would survive Y2K, and how little they actually had to worry about in most cases. Some clever people got rich and some companies had to write down their profits. The real nightmare is 2038 for companies still relying on old systems

[@TheCyndicate.]

One of the companies I programmed for, made these kits, including the kits to fix any computer to make it y2k compliant. It was such a funny situation.

[@Fattus99]

We did learn something, something I knew back when I was 16! The Y2K "virus" was the biggest load of bull muck going and we as humans should be ashamed of ourselves :'-(

[@ccandrew111]

"This PC is 100% millennium complaint" never has such a great accolade been witnessed

[@DanafoxyVixen]

Its odd about that Compac failing.. back at the time of Y2K I had a 286 16mhz that I had built from various parts as my 2nd machine. It handled Y2K just fine and rolled over, I wish I knew what BIOS it used.. the thing that killed it in the end was a leaking CMOS battery.. I miss it ;.;

[@DrumWild]

Y2K kept me busy working to update/reprogram copiers, fax machines, and NexTel phones.

[@3800S1]

I remember checking on a pc on that night to see if anything would happen which I thought wouldn't as I had already manually tested the bios time by changing it to post 2000 beforehand. In fact every PC from the 90s I manually changed the time seemed to support time up to either 2050 or 2099

[@qbertguy]

I remember new years eve 1999 clearly. I was 13 that year. Sitting on the computer while watching Dick Clark and the ball drop on TV then waiting to see if anything happened. (It didnt). Everyone thought the world was going to change. We had stocked a couple months supply of food and water just in case. Wish I saved that PC, a Micron Millenia with a Pentium MMX and a Sound Blaster AWE32.

[@Kee-Lo]

Haha did anyone remember that old ad where the boss had no face? The Millennium bug was the biggest con ever.

[@destrierofdark_]

Try it on a 32 bit Windows 10.

[@BilisNegra]

It's nice they made this compatible with Windows 3.1, which is in turn the reason it's a 16-bit program which windows 95 and 98, even being 32 bit operating systems , can handle too (unlike NT kernel Windows versions, which is why it won't run in Windows 10 here in the video). It's nice, I said, because at this point of PC history thing were moving very fast, in fact too fast for peoples' wallet, and obsolescence ran at a wild pace, and at the turn of the century a typical win 3.1 machine was essentially junk you could repurpose for a single task, but not use as your daily driver anymore (well, you could try, but the experience was painful). Today, a 2011 or 2012 machine, provided it was decently speced when you bought it, can be perfectly fine for you if you're not a hardcore gamer nor want to edit 4K footage and the like.

[@ΑΡΗΣΚΟΡΝΑΡΑΚΗΣ]

Nah... My computer has to see hardware upgrade since 2006, and still is usable and can do mild multitasking. Of course I forgot for any good gaming experience, the Pentium D, and the 2GB RAM said so.

[@jamescameron149]

That wallpaper takes me back...

[@awesomeferret]

Thunderfoot outtro music at 4:20! 😊

[@rigsly6606]

Does anyone know what the soundtrack is called?

[@theravens52]

Riding - by Silent Partner

[@TheDutyPaid]

At work back in 1999 I was part of a team that had to go around testing anything that was powered, incase it had the bug.

[@lupine25]

My friends and I were playing GTA 2 on a Windows 98 PC right at the Y2K roll over... Seriously, one of my friends was like "Oh, happy new year 3 minutes late!" so we completely missed the year 2000's first 3 minutes. But neither GTA 2, Windows 98 or their PC crashed during the rollover so we figured society must have not fallen apart (except for those still on Windows 3.1! Gaa! Broken file manager....)

[@KK4CNM]

I checked mine, I was rocking a pentium 100 at the time which I had had for several years by that time. After watching fireworks I came and checked the machine, it said that it was Dec/31/1999 12:xx(something, I don't remember) AM. It just kept on counting. I rebooted the machine, once it came back up the clock showed Jan 1st 2000 at 12:xxAM. A weird but anticlimactic bug.

[@AmberAmbwee]

I was too young for this. But I remember we cut up news paper to make confetti to throw when the “world was going to end”. Rofl.

[@oldaccount6348]

"crappy dos like interface" stares hard at my GA-H55M-UD2H bios...

[@imark7777777]

Compaq had to clean room develop a bios to avoid copyright infringement of IBM so yes we got a really nice bios for the time. a Compaq was one of the first computers my family got.

[@clemstevenson]

But watch out for John Titor, who claimed that the sky will fall in, in 2038 when a 32-bit time counter rums out of elapsed seconds since January 1, 1970. There is no law against techno-trolls, but someone needed to reverse the polarity on his neutron flow.

[@0011peace]

All they had to do is roll back the year to 1972. The calendar resets 28 years except in year divisible by 4 and not 400. Since 2000 is divisible by both 4 and 400 all years from 1901 to 2099 follow this pattern. Years before 1900 will use 28 year cycle until 1899 and years after 2100 will use the cycle until 2199. 2400 is the next long cycle

[@marcobonera838]

2:05 irony, you need to enable compatibility to check your compatibility.

[@Sparkette]

Can you post some more footage of that Compaq setup tool? And it also has diagnostics, right? (E:\DIAG I think?) I remember that program from a long time ago but I don't have a Compaq computer of the right model anymore to play around with it myself.

[@HoldFastFilms]

I was at work and being annoyed by everyone freaking out. Of course nothing happened.

[@okaro6595]

The original PC did not have any CMOS clock. One had to enter the date and time when one powered it up. The clock that ran when the PC was powered down came with AT. There were third party cards that had the cock for PC compatibles also.One might wonder how the PC did not have one but one has to remember that what it had was advanced for its time. Many computers had no concept of current time or date.

[@AiOinc1]

I was unaware that the 5150 had an onboard RTC. I could've sworn you needed an add-in board for that!

[@AiOinc1]

The program probably doesn't run in Windows 10 because you're probably using 64 bit windows - try on an x86 version instead and it'll probably work.