Where do I begin?
As a programmer, we are often asked opinions about the Y2K bug. In short, we are more concerned about the bugs in people’s minds than on their computers.
But this is not the answer to this question. People want to know whether the “Y2K is true – forecasts, and next January, defect, it is true, and suddenly change their lifestyles. Even people who are just passing, to follow the news that they can be serious. This is just what to do in their Y2K his life is a big decision, and they want reliable information.
There is no lack of information reliability. Y2K stories are everywhere, and the entire industry, Y2K experts showed that the different scenarios for 2000 AD. They all start from the same place where it is known that the penalty two decimal numbers, observed a 99 question is how it’s done in the real world?
First of all, she pictures the breakdown in a variety of devices – computers for automatic control systems and built and the elements of great importance for action in all kinds of materials. They imagine that these losses could be to promote and consolidate leads to many problems. Imagine the range of results, is a perfect way for the destruction of civilization as we know, almost non-existent problems.
Ummm…. it’s 2008 dude, and that doesn’t make a lot of cents…
As the Captain says on Safe As Milk, Go back 10 years ago . . .
HIT BY THE MILLENNIUM BUG
PESSIMISTS BRACE FOR A COMPUTER-DRIVEN CATACLYSM
Chicago Tribune
December 14, 1998
Author: David Mendell, Tribune Staff Writer. Freelance writer Pat Harper contributed to this report.
Estimated printed pages: 4
Guinda and Philip McKoon realize their friends and neighbors are beginning to view them through cautious eyes, but the Kenosha couple believe it is the unprepared and unenlightened who will perish.
The McKoons have stocked up on dehydrated foods, canned goods, and gardening and hunting items. The have sold their suburban house and are searching urgently for a secluded homestead in the rural southern U.S.
“Some people think we’re nuts and should be in an insane asylum,” Guinda McKoon said in a serious tone. “But it’s going to be much more than people think. Much more.”
The McKoons were among an estimated 2,000 worrisome souls who gathered over the weekend at a huge Christian worship center in Tinley Park to prepare for what they believe will be a computer-driven apocalypse: the arrival of the Millennium Bug.
If businesses and governments striving to fix the computer problem represent how established society is handling Y2K mania, these 2,000 people symbolize the other extreme. In an almost cultlike fashion, they talk about Y2K in terms of a religious calamity that coincides with the arrival of the year 2000.
“It’s like a storm coming,” warned Stan Szopa, who is hooking up a homemade generator at his Tinley Park home.
At the leading edge of the storm, though, is a bevy of entrepreneurs who are building a cottage industry around the Millennium Bug. Dealers in everything from wood-burning stoves to gold coins have made a career traveling the country to set up shop at gatherings such as the one in Tinley Park, and about a dozen were on hand in the southwest suburb Saturday and Sunday.
Their customers are preparing to live in a world without technology, modern conveniences or even power, a dangerous place where the unprepared could lash out at those like the McKoons who have made contingency plans. The McKoons said they have spent about $1,000 on survival provisions so far.
“Y2K” is the moniker given to the problem created because computers, software programs and many electronically controlled devices are not programmed to accommodate the year 2000. Some read dates using only two digits and will record 00 as 1900.
Pessimists believe the computer meltdown will cause a domino effect of doom: Electrical power grids will fail, 911 emergency services will shut down, stock markets will crash, governments worldwide will collapse, food production will cease, and anarchy will ensue.
But others forecast only minor glitches when midnight arrives on Dec. 31, 1999.
Part two
Last weekend’s event, at the Midwest Christian Center, 18500 92nd Ave., drew a traveling roadshow of companies peddling wares to help secure the lives of the fearful. Skeptics might label these individuals as purveyors of panic, but this audience was all ears.
“The grown-ups are not going to fix this problem,” lectured Tony Keyes, a radio show host and author of “The Year 2000 Computer Crisis: An Investor’s Survival Guide.”
Keyes and others advised people to sell stocks and invest in government bonds, stockpile food and household goods, find an alternative source of water and electricity, secure another form of currency and build an emergency-preparedness library. Keyes suggests you buy his book.
Thus, in the corridors of the worship center were sales booths hawking propane heating devices, steel drums for fossil fuel storage, boxes of non-perishable foods, water filtration systems and manuals on self-sufficiency.
“We’re not fanatics; we’re not preaching the end of the world,” maintained Kathleen Bess of Orland Park-based Ark Enterprises, which sells a line of Y2K goods that includes stoves for $900, generators for $5,000, water drums for $29.99 and packages of dried-food products for up to $500.
Bess boasted her business is demand-driven and is one of the few Y2K firms that can ship products to customers within two weeks.
“We’re just trying to help people prepare for what might come,” she said.
Underlying the gloomy message is Christian prophecy.
Rev. Robb Thompson, pastor of Midwest Christian, has been preaching the gospel of a Y2K apocalypse for about a year. His writings interpret the Bible to define the new millennium as the time when God “will revive us, and then raise us up with Him.”
Though Pastor Robb, as he is known to his flock, did not attend the summit, the church’s current glossy bimonthly newsletter, distributed to all attendees, features Y2K on its cover.
From the pulpit of his marble-floored, purple-hued worship center, guarded by a team of security personnel, Thompson has dubbed the holidays “The Season of Preparation.”
Inside the newsletter, eight audiocassettes to aid with the Y2K crisis are advertised for $29.95, marked down from $40. They also can be bought in Midwest Christian’s gift shop.
“Only 382 shopping days until Y2K,” the church newsletter observes.
Not all who attended the summit were devoted followers of the more extreme Y2K philosophy.
Isaac Trigleth, an electrician on Chicago’s South Side, takes a more pragmatic posture on the prospect of computer annihilation.
“I’m no doomsday advocate,” Trigleth said. “You can find people who are afraid and you can always enhance that fear with scare tactics. So many of these people really don’t know what they’re afraid of. If it isn’t this, it’s people on welfare or another Great Depression.”
PHOTO: Jolean Semensow of 21st Century Products talks with Dan Walski of Homewood during a Y2K conference at Midwest Christian Center in Tinley Park. Fearing the worst, some people are buying survival goods to prepare for 2000.
PHOTO: Guinda and Philip McKoon listen to a speaker at the Y2K conference. The McKoons have sold their Kenosha home and are searching for a secluded one in the country. The Y2K problem is “going to be much more than people think,” she says.
PHOTO: Joanna McDowell, 8, eats corn chowder from Ark Enterprises, which sells dehydrated food, generators and other items. At the Y2K conference, a representative of the Orland Park company said, “We’re just trying to help people prepare for what might come.
Wow it’s really fun imagining up those PHOTOs, guess the picture data never survived y2K? I reckon I should be ready for y3K.
Y-2-D-K?
I had a molar, lived in a hole
It was a molar, and it lived in the hole
A measure of something chemical
The ungold tooth ecumenical
I hope that means what I want my tooth out
Out, tooth, tooth out
tooth free, Skidoo
Begone oh creamy filling no longer filling
crumbling ’round poisoned undead nerve
I’ll dynamite you ol’ black stump
Suck cess, suck seed
Suffrin’ succotash
The pliers nurse
Snip off his spectacles
One Tooth Free
Skidone
Skigone
Oh Y 2DK?
OY2dk?
0yIIDK