Did you know our current millennium started with what people had thought would be an apocalypse?
It started with a simple but vastly used in application programming bug ⃰. Back in the 60s, even 1 kilobyte of storage was much expensive. So programmers were always finding ways to write codes as succinctly as possible to save up some storage space. One such way was to write the last two digits of a year instead of the whole year in date formats (12/3/95 instead of 12/3/1995). Everything was rolling on perfectly fine but one day someone poped up question– what would happen in the year 2000? Only having 00 instead of 2000 would leave computers with high chance of misinterpreting 00 for 1900 and that could be a huge problem for areas like banking, airlines, nuclear power plants etc where many operations are conducted based on time. This problem became known as the Y2K, also known as the 'millennium bug'. Solution to the problem was to expand the year digits to four or writing additional code for old programs or installing new codes in old devices. A large workforce was required to make that happen and billions of dollars were spent to fix this Y2K bug. Once the year 2000 arrived, a few technical problems were spotted here and there in different countries without any major occurrences– much contrary to the expectation of people some of whom even had prepared to go underground to escape a potential apocalypse.
If you want to know more on this topic, read this article of National Geographic or watch this video.
⃰ a programming bug is a flaw in the code that stops the program from working properly.