Some may not remember, but it is the 20 year anniversary of Y2K, the (almost) greatest disaster in modern history…except for nothing happened. The hottest story of 1999 right up to the new year’s first minute was Y2K, unlike the year before, when the hottest story was you could play Prince’s Party like it’s 1999 on repeat (not a bad outcome, late 90’s pop was trash). Y2K was where some nerds realized that all the computer coding wasn’t set to handle the year changing from 1999 to 2000. Companies spent billions and billions, hired every computer programmer under the sun and were screaming from the street corners. Entire companies started up with the sole purpose of chaining programmers to the floor figuratively until they reprogrammed every computer they could find.
Why such a big deal? It was supposed to have the potential to wipe out everyone’s entire financial history as computers had just really replaced paper records. Missiles were in danger of being fired as nuclear failsafes were overcome by the glitch. Preppers bought food and water and even built “Y2K” shelters. Me? I was partying like it was 1999 (the song regained popularity as it was the last time you could party like it was 1999 vs. the first time the year before). When you’re in college and you have seven dollars in your account, you kind of don’t care about being wiped out financially. Plus the internet back then was nothing like today. Ask Jeeves and Netscape were bigger than Google, it took about 27 minutes to download a site, as opposed to the hours it took in 1994, but still awful, and Napster was the king of the internet until lawsuits knocked it into oblivion.
Midnight came and we went online to see the destruction and nothing happened. Nothing. Not one thing. Except that on January 1, 2000, we could no longer party like it was 1999. That was really sad. RIP 1999. Somehow, we had to trudge on in this wasteland, but only history will really see the impact. (Is that someone playing 1999 and saying this song is a millennium ago? Bad joke time and also not really correct as 2001 is the new century and millennium? It’s back baby!)