• @TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    6628 days ago

    I remember people I knew stockpiling canned goods and everything. What a weird time.

    And yet still not as weird as people stockpiling toilet paper and boycotting Corona beer in 2020.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      28 days ago

      We knew that the problem was already solved, but the media kept leaning into the sensational doomerism. That was the first time in my life that I realized that the media might not be unbiased or truthful.

    • meseek #2982
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      828 days ago

      My bank said that like 20% of their clients emptied their accounts lol

    • @rozodru@lemmy.ca
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      426 days ago

      went over to my friends house on new years eve around like 6 or 7pm. His step dad was in the living room cleaning all this guns. He was absolutely convinced that as soon as midnight struck society would crumble and mass looting/killing would begin. he also stocked up on can goods, TP, beer, etc. I was like 16 at the time and he offered me one of his guns to take home to “protect your family”. I kindly refused.

    • @noobnarski@feddit.de
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      326 days ago

      Boycotting Corona beer? Here in Germany I have heard that their sales went up when Corona happened.

      • Echo Dot
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        126 days ago

        It was probably just Trump supporters. Those guys eat all the gloom and doom stuff up because they actually really hope the world’s going to end, as it’s the only way they’ll ever end up on top.

      • @TootSweet@lemmy.world
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        126 days ago

        I’m referring to news items like this one.

        But, while looking for a source on that, I found a couple of articles (Snopes and PolitiFact) that say it’s fake news.

        So, this much 🤏 faith in humanity restored, I guess.

        • @noobnarski@feddit.de
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          226 days ago

          Here in Germany, Corona Beer was never that big, so I guess the amount of people who bought it because they had just noticed it for the first time is higher than the amount of people who would have bought it but didnt because of the disease.

    • @AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      December 31st 1999, I was at a house party in Lexington, KY. We had a few radio stations playing for ambiance. Once we realized that at least 2 were playing Prince “Party like it’s 1999,” we tuned as many radios as we could. Turned out that 6 stations ended 1999 with Prince, and started 2000 with “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” by REM.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod
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      226 days ago

      On December 31, 1999 I saw a truck loaded up with possessions and “HEADED TO THE HILLS GOOD LUCK EVERYONE” painted on the side.

  • ɐɥO
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    5628 days ago

    Got that one on pretty much all of my computers

  • @kender242@lemmy.world
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    3328 days ago

    We had a LAN Party!

    486 proxy box using RedHat and ipchains sharing dialup Internet for about 8 of us in parents basement.

    Enjoying looking up websites and seeing odd dates like 19100 show up. Nobody died, outside of Starsiege Tribes CTF.

  • magnetosphere
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    2928 days ago

    I remember a friend of mine learned some outdated programming language, and got a lucrative temp job preparing mainframes for Y2K.

    • @Thrashy@lemmy.world
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      3528 days ago

      Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.

      At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn’t support 4-digit years… But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn’t process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators’ terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.

    • AggressivelyPassive
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      1928 days ago

      That “outdated” programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it’s like a cockroach.

      • magnetosphere
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        528 days ago

        Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.

  • @Ulrich_the_Old@lemmy.ca
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    1627 days ago

    Dec. 31, 1999 myself and ALL of the employees of the small city that I worked for were all commanded to be onsite by 9:00pm. We spent the night playing cards in the lunchroom. I was being payed double time for playing cribbage. There were plenty of issues on Jan 1 but they were all due to nobody being on shift as they all went home at 7:00am Jan 1, 2000.

    • @radicalautonomy@lemmy.world
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      227 days ago

      Me too, and I came into the comments to mention what had just occurred to me, despite having seen this exact image shared at least a half dozen times before.

  • SeedyOne
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    1528 days ago

    Working in IT at the time, we were fairly sure things would be fine by the time New Years Eve rolled around,. Even going so far as to camp overnight outside at the Rose Parade, a wild time on a normal year and ridiculous in 1999 with Colorado Blvd packed with partyers.

    The moment came and, of course, nothing really happened…except some GENIUS thought it would be a good idea to set off a giant firework at the college next door, scaring the living shit out of a few thousand people. Good times.

  • @NABDad@lemmy.world
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    1128 days ago

    I had a guy trying to convince everyone that WW3 was going to start because computers on warships wouldn’t know what date it was.

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      1228 days ago

      “Hey, what’s today’s date, Bill?”

      “What do you mean you don’t know? We’d better bomb somebody!”

    • Flax
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      628 days ago

      Probably scared it would crash on y2k

    • @sep@lemmy.world
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      428 days ago

      A lot of software was updated prior to y2k to be able to cope with dates. But the transition was still difficult for some software.

        • @sep@lemmy.world
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          227 days ago

          Could not deal with the transition. No issues afterwards. So all machines off the evening before was sop for a lot of companies