What happened in the computerized equipment used all over the world at the stroke of midnight year 2000?

Answer 1

Since most of it had been converted to four-digit years, or it came that way in the first place (the Mac was built with four-digit years from the beginning, and there are probably others), it flipped from 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000 and kept right on going. The equipment that hadn't been changed for whatever reason didn't need to be. Here was the problem: Databases sort on dates, and some of them auto-purge data older than a certain amount...it might have a "dump to tape then discard anything more than a year old" command, to save space on the disk drives. If the computer was running two-digit years, the system would have thought data from 2000 was a hundred years old and start archiving NEW data. You'll like this joke from back then...in 1998, a COBOL programmer (they work on programs for really big computers) decided he was tired of doing Y2K work. He told one of his friends, who sent him to Freezo. At Freezo, they told him that for the low price of only $9995, they could put him in a state of suspended animation for 36 months. When they brought him out of it, all the Y2K work would be done. He signed up immediately and went into suspended animation. When they brought him around, the whole room was full of people who looked just SO happy...the programmer asked the doctor, "why are they so happy?" The doctor told him there had been a mix-up in the records and they...well, they somehow forgot to bring him around in 2002 like he requested. "Okay, so who are these people and why are they so happy?" 'They're people from your old company. See, it's 9998 right now...and we found out you know COBOL."