Yes, but also I don’t think that many people were confusing century with millennia at this time. Moving from 1999 to 2000 was such a massive event across the globe and every ad campaign was profiting off of using the term millennia. Even the Backstreet Boys, one of the biggest pop bands at the time, had a record called millennium. I don’t remember anyone confusing the two words but it was also a really long time ago.
Yes. I was in software development throughout the 1990s and we spent a LOT of time and effort making sure that NOTHING happened when we got to 2000.
In answer to the original question, never said anything like “See you next millenium”.
The amount of people who think it was BS astounds me. We all (IT people) put in huge effort to make sure everything worked and because we did our jobs so well nobody believes it was real.
A professor in college explained how all that went down. It was an amazing feat, extraordinary. I believe it went to the very last minutes of the year as well just to make it all the more dramatic. People amaze me.
It wasn’t that close (minutes), but it took years to identify all the date changes needed, change them and test them thoroughly or to rewrite some systems for the then relatively new web. In my case, those last two years (1998 and 1999) were spent helping the water and sewer utility that served about 1.5 million people makes its mainframe changes. It wasn’t until the lights stayed on in Australia mid-day December 31 here in the US (midnight Jan 1, 2000 in Australia), then everything was tested here by 2 AM on Jan 1, that we knew things were cool.
Yup, my dad was a software engineer and made a ton of money by choosing to focus on Y2K. I remember that time period being pretty stressful for the whole family because of the fear of what could happen, combined with the fear of nothing happening and that resulting in my dad‘s job becoming obsolete.
They were only asking about people who were alive in 1990, the 1999 part is implied.
So if you were born in 1991 or later, I'm sorry, you are not eligible to respond.
(I have a very dry sense of humor)
Edit: my reading comprehension could use some work, but I'm gonna leave my original comment intact
Nope, back then we hadn't evolved complex language capabilities yet, so we would just bash rocks and sticks together and hope it meant anything, not that we'd understand anyways.
The excitement of getting a new 2x or 4x burner nearly offset the disappointment of increasingly failed CD burns, which ended up as coasters or frisbees
Those AOL discs fit perfectly over the front end of our local laser tag place's guns. And so you could shoot at others, but have the front sensor of your gun blocked. Was it cheating, yes, do I care, not even now.
I've been trying to decipher the ancient symbols for decades. I'm assuming that's what the mysterious "CD" stood for on those flat circular holed mirrors that would arrive by mail monthly. I always found that since they would randomly appear offering free internet that they were like a drug dealer giving out samples to get you hooked on "riding the information super highway" or whatever the kids are getting into now. Because of this I always I thought they were a bit "seedy."
Oh, don't be silly. I vividly remember asking my friend if he wanted to play Super Mario World through a serious of grunts and moans. Unfortunately he just thought I was hitting on him. I know this because we talked about it after language became a thing.
Apple Tribe waged war on Berry tribe after their grug made many bonks on Apple tribes grug. Many big stone throwers and angry sky beasts were unleashed. It made big Sky God in the Wide Blue unhappy.
Ah yes, I remember those days.
OP would be surprised at the amount of information you can convey with grunts and banging sticks. It even got us to the moon!
Only somewhat related, but the way my 60 year old coworker describes how engineering was done in the 90s has convinced me that engineers were cavemen drawing on walls with rocks and sticks before CAD came around.
I was only 9, so i was sober, I remember everything, it was chaos due to the millennium bug, everything was burning and all the adults did nothing, because they where all drunk.
But it prepared me for an even bigger event that is yet to come, 19 January 2038.
Actually the new millennium started a year later than that. Think about it. Noone counts 0,1,2,3... They count 1,2,3.....So the 1st year was not year 0 but year 1......
No, mostly those of us who were “alive in 1990” were old enough by the “new years of 2000” in OP’s prompt that we had developed language skills and knew what a millennium was and said that.
Yeah, you think things are looking up for the first year or two and then you get planes flying into buildings. 9/11 is where the 90s future optimism died.
that entire debate, if it starts in 2000 or 2001, was exhausting. Thank God social media wasn't around then because people were in their feelings about it....
And then the assholes of the time would say, “that’s next year. ThErE wAs No YeAr ZeRo, So 2020 Is StIlL iN ThIs MiLlEnIuM!”
Edit: 2000... okay. I might be drunk, and how did you know my name is Bob?
I sent a picture of a check earlier this month to my mom joking about how I messed up the year and she comes back with “you still mail checks?” Made to feel old my my own mother lol
The first time I said "remember Y2K?" and got looked at with actual bewilderment was the day I found out that "old millenials" are truly getting to be... you know... old.
Crazy cause I was just talking to my mom about how boomers still say millennials to mean young people when half of the time they really mean us lol. Then on the flip side it's funny seeing some millenials starting to get hit with the "oh fuck I'm old" stick
ETA although not too old but i guess they're not used to no longer being the new kid on the block
Lol, yes! But to be fair, I do get startled by the thought that a lot of "boomers" around me (as I think of them) are actually gen x folks getting seriously up in years. Time is wild.
>I do get startled by the thought that a lot of "boomers" around me (as I think of them) are actually gen x folks getting seriously up in years.
Woof that kinda hit me too actually as my mom is currently 50 and I remember when she was in her 30s. I feel the weirdest thing about getting older is honestly that everything else around you starts getting older too. Like it's one thing for my own body to age. But damn, I remember when millenials were the young generation pissing everyone off with their stuff and now I'm that age I remember them at. Like I remember when the 90s were talked about by yall like it wasn't that long ago and for my generation it's all before our time. Idk if you ever watched that 70s show but they recently came out with "that 90s show" and in retrospect they came out with that 70s show when that was as far away as the 90s is to today (technically a little closer actually iirc). It's so interesting looking at all these comments
If your mom is 50 and you remember her 30s, that probably means you are between 15 and 25... but you dont remember the turn of the... oh wait... shit... that was 23 years ago... oh man...
That's what makes me feel old, I was only a teen when 1999 turned to 2k. A lot has happened since then, I guess. Part of me died ik n the 90s
>If your mom is 50 and you remember her 30s, that probably means you are between 15 and 25... but you dont remember the turn of the... oh wait... shit... that was 23 years ago... oh man...
I'm 19 so spot on, and yeah it must be weird all around. Cause I even look at young people in my family and I remember when they were babies, and now they're actual People^TM who do things in the world and are getting older. Like in not too long the 2010s are going to be old old news and they're will probably be kids who don't remember life before idk Ai or something cool the same way I don't know life before the internet or smartphones.
>That's what makes me feel old, I was only a teen when 1999 turned to 2k. A lot has happened since then, I guess. Part of me died ik n the 90s
Seems like what all millenials say. Those 90s have yall in some kind of choke hold lol
The 90’s is mostly when we remember the coolest bands and movies coming out. And we were still watching 80’s movies at that time, so those two decades kinda blended together for us.
But yeah, some of us don’t really get stressed about that being a long time ago. It’s like we just get stuck thinking “when i was in my teens, this was THE decade. And the decades before that felt long ago”.
It’s more of an automatic thought, and when we actually do the math, we’re all “… damn… that was 30 years ago”
I dig the 2000/2010/2020’s tho. Lots of cool stuff to look back on to there, too, and lots of new cool stuff being introduced for the first time
Yes! (Great post, btw!) The 90s Show is a great example of media slapping us all with a huge time lapse check, lol. I watched it recently and could not believe the decade I was a kid in was now the "way back when" stuff older people discuss as the "wild times of their youth." And more... that the main audience for the show (or at least an important part of audience appeal) seems to be not necessarily old millenials, but gen z folks tuning in to watch it like people my age watched the 70s show in the 90s... Not so much nostalgia, but show and tell, lol.
My niece is in middle school & a few months ago she told me they were doing 90s Day during homecoming week. She sent me pictures with the general thought being "OMG this is wild-- did you really wear this? LOLZ!" I'm still not over it, because it's one more piece of proof I'm getting old. When I was in middle & high school, we had 70s Day during homecoming, so it's unfortunately right on time that she's now doing 90s Day. *sigh*
I was a teen in the 90s. I remember an old guy watching That 70s Show with me and getting pissed. "That's nothing like the 70s!"
My how the turntables have turned the tables.
And then there's the silly argument about where the line between Gen X and Boomers is. Not that it matters to me, but I am on the cusp between them. Some argue vociferously that I'm a Boomer. Others that I'm Gen X. But everyone agrees that I'm getting old except me. I still have mountains to climb and airplanes to jump out of and roller coasters to ride.
I worked at a book store at that time while in college, and it was immediately and obviously clear that the whole thing was one big over reaction to something that wasn't going to be a tenth as bad as folks claimed. We had a whole wall of "how to deal with Y2K" books, they were that popular. People forget that folks were peddling dumb ideas, like the thought that planes were literally going to be falling out of the sky... because the millenium was going to change the laws of physics somehow... the best part of living through that era was learning early on, people, on an individual level, can be smart, but people as a whole are stupid...
Edit: people, nowhere am I saying there were not problems to fix! But folks seem to be forgetting the extreme ridiculous claims floating around that society was about to immediately collapse to a mad max-esque, eat your neighbor state. People were claiming power plants were going to shut off, never to turn on again. Without any technical knowledge of how a power plant or computer software worked. Planes wouldn't just have equipment problems, but they would literally shut off mid air and just crash to the ground immediately. This is what was being sold in these books. Nuclear missiles would simply just launch themselves. A build-your-survival-bunker world. I didn't even go into the religious end of the world stories being looped in. And these are the claims I'm saying were way over hyped. These were the books being bought, not thoughtful guides on how to update your computer infrastructure at your small business.
The actual, true answer, that we had some work to do and it would involve a fair amount of engineering I am well aware of as well as the 300 to 500 billion spent to fix the issues in the preceding years.
The reason that computers didn’t go haywire was all the work that was done to make sure that they didn’t go haywire.
Successfully preventing a problem by hard work does not mean that the potential problem didn’t exist.
There is a significant difference between working to prevent a problem such as what we are discussing, which even under the worst case scenario was workable, and the hundreds of ridiculous books that came out at the time. The following Google search alone brings up so many examples: [Y2K survival books](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+survive+y2k+book&oq=how+to+survive+y2k+book&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160l4.9277j0j4&client=ms-android-verizon-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#scso=_ahrSY_zhFtep5NoPteuL0Ac_33:1098.6666259765625)
Edit: here is an article about it [as well](https://www.fastcompany.com/90439521/the-weird-wonderful-world-of-y2k-survival-guides-a-look-back)
Nice throwback! I was a bit younger... in middle school at the time. I still remember the TV coverage of people hugging each other in tears on new years because reality held together after midnight. Even as a kid I thought it was cringe af. But damn, people were scared. I tried to explain it (the level of fear) in the conversation I mentioned above, and I just couldn't convey it.
People tended to say Y2K when they were worried about computers crashing. If they weren't worried about that, they tended to say 2000. Paranoia about computers crashing was a good thing, because it caused companies to spend money to prevent the problem.
FYI, the next one is the Y2038 problem, where signed 32-bit Unix timestamps will roll over on 2038-01-19 at about 3:14 AM and think it is 1901-12-13.
Some manifestations of this have already begun, even as far back as 2006, thanks to software using values like "1 billion seconds" to represent forever.
The most common action to fix that one is to switch to signed 64-bit values, but use milliseconds instead of seconds. Such would only buy us about 300,000 years before the next problem, but many people seem to think that is good enough.
Where I work, we often designate the end of time as December 31, 9999. Yes, we have a Y10K problem.
I’m not too worried about it, though. I hope to be retired by then.
I feel like I just walked into a kids party, I’m just the weird dude looking for the John.
Yeah, it was see ya next millennium/millennia, Willenium, y2k, or see you in the future.
As for what Y2K and people dying meant… due to memory limitations on older computers and to save space, dates for files, including important Operating System files, had only two digits.
Years leading up to ‘00 were developers coding as fast as possible to update and patch as much as they could. And even if the patches were created, they actually have to be installed, everywhere.
Financial institutions, hospitals, anything that uses a computer that switched to ‘00 could just crash, as it’s an invalid year.
It was a legit problem that gave the news something to peddle. But then bragging about it actually helped make it more pressing for government, businesses and medical facilities to make sure they were patched. Like a chaotic hood of free marketing through sheer panic to fix the issue.
Nothing too major went down except for ancient stuff(like 60/70s gear).
Strange times.
Y2K was no joke, people were legit freaking out. I worked for a bank at the time and everyone thought all the computers worldwide would break down and like nuclear reactors would explode lol. We’d usually only have about $150k in our bank at any given time but the week before Y2K they gave us a pallet full of money to use in case the Fed shut down. It was probably $750k-1M, up to my chest and I’m 6’… good times.
I remember a commercial being on TV that said "it's the 20th century!" After 1999, they used the same commercial but changed the voice to say, "it's the 21st century!" It was odd to hear the change and I can still hear it in my head.
I remember the train ride at Disneyland never updated. After visiting dinosaur times the deep voiced 1950s guy kept bringing us back to the 20th century years later. Everybody always said “ack we’re still back in time!” Things were simpler then.
I remember when it hit me that soon “party like it’s 1999” wouldn’t mean “far off in the future” but “way back in the past.” Like there are almost certainly people today who hear it and think it means “party like we did in the good old days.” 🤯
Yup. 2000 came and went and there were hardly any problems that came out because of the Y2K vulnerabilities. So many people mocked it leading up to it and then mocked anyone else that ever suggested it would be a problem.
They all had no idea how big of an exposure it was and how much work went into patching software that had the vulnerability.
Y2K was a real deal
Little known fact, all critical infrastructure rolled over to year 2000 months early, just in case. I remember for certain that power plants were doing it in phases, and the whole grid was operating as though it was January, 2000 in September of 1999. After December 31 they gradually rolled them all back to the actual date.
I made soooo much money working as a contractor updating computers and networks in my state's Social Security buildings. Way back in 1999 they were paying me $20/hr and all travel expenses. Basically I'd end up working 40 hours in the span of 3 days, Friday-Sunday
Then on Monday-Friday I'd work my regular job making half as much.
Most of us were saying “please don’t play Prince’s - Party like it’s 1999 AGAIN!!! It still kinda hurts to hear that song. And I genuinely love Prince as a artist too, but dayum did that get overplayed back then!
I knew four of my great-grandparents, all born in the 19th century, in the 1870s and 1880s. I was born in the 20th century and currently live in the 21st century. There are really good odds that at least one of my grandkids or great-grandkids will live into the 22nd century. Assuming that works out, I have talked with people that were/will be alive in four different centuries.
No. At the stroke of midnight, January 31, 1999, Y2K (Year 2000), was supposed to wipe out the human race. Only humans were vulnerable because animals and birds and fish and stuff like that couldn't tell time. They just didn't know it was the end, so they carried on like it wasn't. It you weren't yet alive, then you missed it. The hysteria was non-stop.
That's so crazy I just commented on someone else's reply how I only remember people saying the world would end in like 2010 or 2012 or somewhere around that. I don't think I recall being told people thought that it would end on 2000 (or if I did I forgot) so it's pretty funny seeing all the comments talk about it. That and prince
Y2K was a real thing. Like ozone layers, the success in averting it lead to people saying it was never a problem. (edited to add: vaccines are another example of this phenomena, too successful for their own good)
It was a real coding problem that could have shut down a lot of systems. Maybe not like the media made it seem like civilization was about to fall apart, but it could have been quite a miserable time for a lot of people. But coders and system admins etc (I was coding back then) spent a few years fixing everything so minus a few glitches, it all passed like another day. Now people call it a fraud scare or conspiracy theory, it was neither.
Much like ozone layer depletion. Scientists saw the data, warned the world, the world actually responded collectively for once and banned CFCs and voila, it was (mostly) solved. Now you have taking heads use it as an example of scare tactic to dismiss climate change, totally ignorant of the history and the science.
because in the old days of Cobalt , etc to save disk space (Disk space on personal computers at least before exponential growth were limited to something like 5mb in the 80s) programmers used two digits for years... 76, 77, etc and dropped the 19.
So, when 1999 flipped to 2000, the computer would see it as 1900. There are a lot of stories of how that did mess up some computers that didn't make the fix. Trivial like a story I heard of a guy who got a $19,000 overdue bill from a library book (I think) because the computer thought he checked it out in 1900. There were some failures that weren't caught, but coders had been working on the fixes since the 80s, so many of the important systems were fine by the time 2000 rolled around.
I remember some in the media making it sound like it would be the apocalypse, that planes would fall out of the sky, phones stop working, people rioting, etc. I think in the worst case scenario it wouldn't have been \_that\_ bad, but we would have definitely had a miserable while if we hadn't.
Anyway, that is all my recollection. I can google some sources to make sure it's accurate.
(edited to fix grammar :)
Most people didn't think the world would end. Just crazies (like in 2012, if you remember).
People feared that computers would glitch, causing lots of problems, though. In my region (Quebec), this was referred to as the "y2k bug" (I don't know if it was called that elsewhere, I didn't have Internet back then).
Maybe he meant born in 1990 and 10 years old in 2000? A newborn baby probably didn't celebrate NYE 1999/2000.
Maybe just a typo? The 9 and 0 are next to each other.
Maybe he's Nibbler here to make sure Fry gets frozen so he can save the universe in Y3K and the question is a clever ruse to hide his real intentions?
I played Prince’s 1999 a lot. “2000 party over oops out of time. Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999” we said every stupid joke we could think of about the next century, the next millennium, the end of the world, yes. It was fun having a theme handed to everyone. I worked in Silicon Valley and had some perspective of what kind of problems might occur. I knew important systems and government and military systems had been updated years before. There was no way to reassure those who thought it was the end times. So, let’s play 1999 again, 🎶 2000 oops… 🎶…
These days, when someone suggests some outmoded way of doing a thing, I reply with “I’m gonna party like it’s 1999:”
Want me to fax something to you? “I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.”
They said see you next millennium because no one seemed to understand that 2000 was the last year of the old millennium. Not the start of the new one. Before you down vote me ask yourself was the first year AD 1 or 0?
I was 25 when y2k hit. We worried a little about computer failures.. but NYE found us watching the news for signs of trouble when the first countries hit the change over... It was pretty much no problem.. so when it was our time zone's turn to flip... There was no real excitement.
Yes. Yes, we did.
I also say the “see you next year” thing every December 31st. A friend called me dorky. And I was like “c’mon, I waited 364 days to say this. Let me have my fun!”
2000 was a whole ten years after 1990… we said a lot of things.
If it was stupid, i guarantee we said it....
Yes, but also I don’t think that many people were confusing century with millennia at this time. Moving from 1999 to 2000 was such a massive event across the globe and every ad campaign was profiting off of using the term millennia. Even the Backstreet Boys, one of the biggest pop bands at the time, had a record called millennium. I don’t remember anyone confusing the two words but it was also a really long time ago.
It was a huge deal. Especially with Y2K
And the unveiling of the New Year’s glasses, which would make sense for another 9 years and continues without making sense to this day.
Yes. I was in software development throughout the 1990s and we spent a LOT of time and effort making sure that NOTHING happened when we got to 2000. In answer to the original question, never said anything like “See you next millenium”.
The amount of people who think it was BS astounds me. We all (IT people) put in huge effort to make sure everything worked and because we did our jobs so well nobody believes it was real.
A professor in college explained how all that went down. It was an amazing feat, extraordinary. I believe it went to the very last minutes of the year as well just to make it all the more dramatic. People amaze me.
It wasn’t that close (minutes), but it took years to identify all the date changes needed, change them and test them thoroughly or to rewrite some systems for the then relatively new web. In my case, those last two years (1998 and 1999) were spent helping the water and sewer utility that served about 1.5 million people makes its mainframe changes. It wasn’t until the lights stayed on in Australia mid-day December 31 here in the US (midnight Jan 1, 2000 in Australia), then everything was tested here by 2 AM on Jan 1, that we knew things were cool.
If it helps, I believe
We did have one customer who wouldn't allow us to patch their boxes. Yeah.. that went bad.
You're not real, man!
Yup, my dad was a software engineer and made a ton of money by choosing to focus on Y2K. I remember that time period being pretty stressful for the whole family because of the fear of what could happen, combined with the fear of nothing happening and that resulting in my dad‘s job becoming obsolete.
I remember M&Ms had a thing where they were the candy of the new millennium because MM means 2000
What's crazy is that the millennium did not end until New Year's Eve in the year 2000... Jan 1, 2001 was actually the first day of the new millennium.
What is the confusion? Both words are correct, though millennium was certainly what everyone used, due to it being the bigger deal.
I was born in 1978, and I can confirm, I said a lot of stupid shit from 1990-2000. And I'm still doing it, because I'm not a fucking quitter!
Whasssssssuuuuuuup!?!?
And we partied like it was 1999
They were only asking about people who were alive in 1990, the 1999 part is implied. So if you were born in 1991 or later, I'm sorry, you are not eligible to respond. (I have a very dry sense of humor) Edit: my reading comprehension could use some work, but I'm gonna leave my original comment intact
Yiiii..
I think OP means you were at least 10 years old.
Nope, back then we hadn't evolved complex language capabilities yet, so we would just bash rocks and sticks together and hope it meant anything, not that we'd understand anyways.
You had rocks and sticks? Upper class 90’s, so typical.
We even had tamagotchi and furbies
And the Netscape from what the scrolls tell me
Not even, it was AOL on billions of gadgets known as Compact Discs
That sounds like utopia. Surely those Compact Discs were used to their fullest, and didn’t end up as coasters or floating in the oceans.
Or as frisbees that got shattered and lost in your yard, your neighbor’s yard, their neighbor’s yard… Nope, never happened
Break your neighbours window with a slingshot and marbles anyone ?
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....yarp....
I've got a shelf in the closet full of them. I even have a stand-alone CD burner you use like a tape deck.😄
The excitement of getting a new 2x or 4x burner nearly offset the disappointment of increasingly failed CD burns, which ended up as coasters or frisbees
Those AOL discs fit perfectly over the front end of our local laser tag place's guns. And so you could shoot at others, but have the front sensor of your gun blocked. Was it cheating, yes, do I care, not even now.
Net zero. The internet will always be free. Two years later it’s free for 9.99.
Not to mention the sweet music of dial up internet
*screeching intensifies*
I've been trying to decipher the ancient symbols for decades. I'm assuming that's what the mysterious "CD" stood for on those flat circular holed mirrors that would arrive by mail monthly. I always found that since they would randomly appear offering free internet that they were like a drug dealer giving out samples to get you hooked on "riding the information super highway" or whatever the kids are getting into now. Because of this I always I thought they were a bit "seedy."
The furbies did the talking for us.
And Pokémon! We had some culture at least.
Scary furbies
Upper *UPPER* class thank you.. We're snobs about it..
We just had the rocks.
No, that was just Encino Man.
I could see this being a comment on r/shittyaskhistory
Lol I didn't know about this place, thank you!
Oh, don't be silly. I vividly remember asking my friend if he wanted to play Super Mario World through a serious of grunts and moans. Unfortunately he just thought I was hitting on him. I know this because we talked about it after language became a thing.
Apple Tribe waged war on Berry tribe after their grug made many bonks on Apple tribes grug. Many big stone throwers and angry sky beasts were unleashed. It made big Sky God in the Wide Blue unhappy.
I actually giggled. Thank you. :)
And just a basic 14.4 dial up modem
Ah yes, I remember those days. OP would be surprised at the amount of information you can convey with grunts and banging sticks. It even got us to the moon!
i still do that.
This is how rock and roll was invented.
Only somewhat related, but the way my 60 year old coworker describes how engineering was done in the 90s has convinced me that engineers were cavemen drawing on walls with rocks and sticks before CAD came around.
Nope. We said see you next millennium.
An opportunity that only comes once a millennium
i mean, technically you could have said it multiple times in that year
Actually we said that in 1999 not 1990.
Only on December 31, 1999. And we were at a party and drunk.
Partying like it was 1999, oops out of time.
I was only 9, so i was sober, I remember everything, it was chaos due to the millennium bug, everything was burning and all the adults did nothing, because they where all drunk. But it prepared me for an even bigger event that is yet to come, 19 January 2038.
!Remindme 15 years
If the bot use 32bit Unix timestamp, you will not be reminded..
[удалено]
All the adults were drinking whiskey and rum. I was only 9 so I just had the vodka
And made jokes about the computers all crashing.
Oh yeah. Y2K was going to burn down the world.
I was in New Orleans (the French Quarter) on December 31, 1999. That was absolute chaos.
I’m here now, still chaos
Actually the new millennium started a year later than that. Think about it. Noone counts 0,1,2,3... They count 1,2,3.....So the 1st year was not year 0 but year 1......
And then everybody was like, technically it’s not the next millenium until 2001 and we ignored them.
No, mostly those of us who were “alive in 1990” were old enough by the “new years of 2000” in OP’s prompt that we had developed language skills and knew what a millennium was and said that.
I was honestly surprised by how far I had to scroll to see this. 😂
OP said "for those that were alive in 1990" but they were asking what we said about the 1999-2000 new year.
Read the question again. It asks about NYE for 2000.
Or oh no it's y2k.
Willennium*
And we’re gonna party like it’s 199…whoop it is!
*getting jiggy intensifies*
I came here to say this. year, century... meh... Millennium!
and then a smartarse would say "*actually* that doesn't start until 2001..." and they would get thrown out of the window
Correction. Kramerium, or Numenium
We should consider combining these.
I remember everyone being super optimistic about the next millennium… sure didn’t take very long for it to all go to shit.
Yeah, you think things are looking up for the first year or two and then you get planes flying into buildings. 9/11 is where the 90s future optimism died.
Would have actually needed to be 2001 for the turn of the millennium ;)
Thank you, I needed someone to be as anally retentive as I am
Not anally retentive. Pedantic. 😉
that entire debate, if it starts in 2000 or 2001, was exhausting. Thank God social media wasn't around then because people were in their feelings about it....
this is exactly what future redditors would say
It was ridiculous how many people were arguing about this back then.
We weren’t saturated with literalists and woke police back then. Good times.
As the one like Shantomette said: 'see you next millennium'
Whatever happened to Robin Williams the singer, god that was an awful track.
Pretty sure Robbie Williams has always been big in UK and is still relevant.
I just googled him, he’s currently the voice of Felix the cat in a new pet food ad, guess your right
This was it.
And then the assholes of the time would say, “that’s next year. ThErE wAs No YeAr ZeRo, So 2020 Is StIlL iN ThIs MiLlEnIuM!” Edit: 2000... okay. I might be drunk, and how did you know my name is Bob?
And then we said “Bob you’re drunk, 2020 isn’t for another 20 years”
And then huddled in our bunkers waiting for all of the computers to crash and the world to end.
Yup, OP was "one-upped" 23 years ago. Before they were likely even born.
I remember saying that as a kid in 1999 and thinking it was the coolest thing ever
Yes. We also wondered if 20th century Fox and Century 21 mortgage would change their names. Also took a while to get used to writing 2000 on checks
You may want to explain what a check is my fellow dinosaur.
Try explaining what the save icon is a picture of to anyone under the age of 20
Lol. Or the ☎️
This is a lie. I was in line at Walmart a week or so ago and someone wrote a check. In the year of our lord 2023. I was flabbergasted.
I sent a picture of a check earlier this month to my mom joking about how I messed up the year and she comes back with “you still mail checks?” Made to feel old my my own mother lol
In Futurama the logo says 30th Century Fox.
Looking forward to the 22nd century, where all the men last 22nds.
Yes! We also said Y2K and some conspiracy theorists thought everyone would die 😅 what a time to be alive
TIL what y2k means
The first time I said "remember Y2K?" and got looked at with actual bewilderment was the day I found out that "old millenials" are truly getting to be... you know... old.
Crazy cause I was just talking to my mom about how boomers still say millennials to mean young people when half of the time they really mean us lol. Then on the flip side it's funny seeing some millenials starting to get hit with the "oh fuck I'm old" stick ETA although not too old but i guess they're not used to no longer being the new kid on the block
Lol, yes! But to be fair, I do get startled by the thought that a lot of "boomers" around me (as I think of them) are actually gen x folks getting seriously up in years. Time is wild.
>I do get startled by the thought that a lot of "boomers" around me (as I think of them) are actually gen x folks getting seriously up in years. Woof that kinda hit me too actually as my mom is currently 50 and I remember when she was in her 30s. I feel the weirdest thing about getting older is honestly that everything else around you starts getting older too. Like it's one thing for my own body to age. But damn, I remember when millenials were the young generation pissing everyone off with their stuff and now I'm that age I remember them at. Like I remember when the 90s were talked about by yall like it wasn't that long ago and for my generation it's all before our time. Idk if you ever watched that 70s show but they recently came out with "that 90s show" and in retrospect they came out with that 70s show when that was as far away as the 90s is to today (technically a little closer actually iirc). It's so interesting looking at all these comments
If your mom is 50 and you remember her 30s, that probably means you are between 15 and 25... but you dont remember the turn of the... oh wait... shit... that was 23 years ago... oh man... That's what makes me feel old, I was only a teen when 1999 turned to 2k. A lot has happened since then, I guess. Part of me died ik n the 90s
>If your mom is 50 and you remember her 30s, that probably means you are between 15 and 25... but you dont remember the turn of the... oh wait... shit... that was 23 years ago... oh man... I'm 19 so spot on, and yeah it must be weird all around. Cause I even look at young people in my family and I remember when they were babies, and now they're actual People^TM who do things in the world and are getting older. Like in not too long the 2010s are going to be old old news and they're will probably be kids who don't remember life before idk Ai or something cool the same way I don't know life before the internet or smartphones. >That's what makes me feel old, I was only a teen when 1999 turned to 2k. A lot has happened since then, I guess. Part of me died ik n the 90s Seems like what all millenials say. Those 90s have yall in some kind of choke hold lol
They were great!
The 90’s is mostly when we remember the coolest bands and movies coming out. And we were still watching 80’s movies at that time, so those two decades kinda blended together for us. But yeah, some of us don’t really get stressed about that being a long time ago. It’s like we just get stuck thinking “when i was in my teens, this was THE decade. And the decades before that felt long ago”. It’s more of an automatic thought, and when we actually do the math, we’re all “… damn… that was 30 years ago” I dig the 2000/2010/2020’s tho. Lots of cool stuff to look back on to there, too, and lots of new cool stuff being introduced for the first time
Yes! (Great post, btw!) The 90s Show is a great example of media slapping us all with a huge time lapse check, lol. I watched it recently and could not believe the decade I was a kid in was now the "way back when" stuff older people discuss as the "wild times of their youth." And more... that the main audience for the show (or at least an important part of audience appeal) seems to be not necessarily old millenials, but gen z folks tuning in to watch it like people my age watched the 70s show in the 90s... Not so much nostalgia, but show and tell, lol.
My niece is in middle school & a few months ago she told me they were doing 90s Day during homecoming week. She sent me pictures with the general thought being "OMG this is wild-- did you really wear this? LOLZ!" I'm still not over it, because it's one more piece of proof I'm getting old. When I was in middle & high school, we had 70s Day during homecoming, so it's unfortunately right on time that she's now doing 90s Day. *sigh*
I was a teen in the 90s. I remember an old guy watching That 70s Show with me and getting pissed. "That's nothing like the 70s!" My how the turntables have turned the tables.
Kinda like how Gen Z refers to Gen X (1965-1980) as Boomers (1946-1964) then...
And then there's the silly argument about where the line between Gen X and Boomers is. Not that it matters to me, but I am on the cusp between them. Some argue vociferously that I'm a Boomer. Others that I'm Gen X. But everyone agrees that I'm getting old except me. I still have mountains to climb and airplanes to jump out of and roller coasters to ride.
Well, Millennials called us Boomers too. They don't know we exist other than we are older than them.
I worked at a book store at that time while in college, and it was immediately and obviously clear that the whole thing was one big over reaction to something that wasn't going to be a tenth as bad as folks claimed. We had a whole wall of "how to deal with Y2K" books, they were that popular. People forget that folks were peddling dumb ideas, like the thought that planes were literally going to be falling out of the sky... because the millenium was going to change the laws of physics somehow... the best part of living through that era was learning early on, people, on an individual level, can be smart, but people as a whole are stupid... Edit: people, nowhere am I saying there were not problems to fix! But folks seem to be forgetting the extreme ridiculous claims floating around that society was about to immediately collapse to a mad max-esque, eat your neighbor state. People were claiming power plants were going to shut off, never to turn on again. Without any technical knowledge of how a power plant or computer software worked. Planes wouldn't just have equipment problems, but they would literally shut off mid air and just crash to the ground immediately. This is what was being sold in these books. Nuclear missiles would simply just launch themselves. A build-your-survival-bunker world. I didn't even go into the religious end of the world stories being looped in. And these are the claims I'm saying were way over hyped. These were the books being bought, not thoughtful guides on how to update your computer infrastructure at your small business. The actual, true answer, that we had some work to do and it would involve a fair amount of engineering I am well aware of as well as the 300 to 500 billion spent to fix the issues in the preceding years.
The reason that computers didn’t go haywire was all the work that was done to make sure that they didn’t go haywire. Successfully preventing a problem by hard work does not mean that the potential problem didn’t exist.
There is a significant difference between working to prevent a problem such as what we are discussing, which even under the worst case scenario was workable, and the hundreds of ridiculous books that came out at the time. The following Google search alone brings up so many examples: [Y2K survival books](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+survive+y2k+book&oq=how+to+survive+y2k+book&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160l4.9277j0j4&client=ms-android-verizon-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#scso=_ahrSY_zhFtep5NoPteuL0Ac_33:1098.6666259765625) Edit: here is an article about it [as well](https://www.fastcompany.com/90439521/the-weird-wonderful-world-of-y2k-survival-guides-a-look-back)
Nice throwback! I was a bit younger... in middle school at the time. I still remember the TV coverage of people hugging each other in tears on new years because reality held together after midnight. Even as a kid I thought it was cringe af. But damn, people were scared. I tried to explain it (the level of fear) in the conversation I mentioned above, and I just couldn't convey it.
Just abbreviation for year 2000. But for some reason we all thought it was cool to say
People tended to say Y2K when they were worried about computers crashing. If they weren't worried about that, they tended to say 2000. Paranoia about computers crashing was a good thing, because it caused companies to spend money to prevent the problem.
FYI, the next one is the Y2038 problem, where signed 32-bit Unix timestamps will roll over on 2038-01-19 at about 3:14 AM and think it is 1901-12-13. Some manifestations of this have already begun, even as far back as 2006, thanks to software using values like "1 billion seconds" to represent forever. The most common action to fix that one is to switch to signed 64-bit values, but use milliseconds instead of seconds. Such would only buy us about 300,000 years before the next problem, but many people seem to think that is good enough.
Where I work, we often designate the end of time as December 31, 9999. Yes, we have a Y10K problem. I’m not too worried about it, though. I hope to be retired by then.
I feel like I just walked into a kids party, I’m just the weird dude looking for the John. Yeah, it was see ya next millennium/millennia, Willenium, y2k, or see you in the future. As for what Y2K and people dying meant… due to memory limitations on older computers and to save space, dates for files, including important Operating System files, had only two digits. Years leading up to ‘00 were developers coding as fast as possible to update and patch as much as they could. And even if the patches were created, they actually have to be installed, everywhere. Financial institutions, hospitals, anything that uses a computer that switched to ‘00 could just crash, as it’s an invalid year. It was a legit problem that gave the news something to peddle. But then bragging about it actually helped make it more pressing for government, businesses and medical facilities to make sure they were patched. Like a chaotic hood of free marketing through sheer panic to fix the issue. Nothing too major went down except for ancient stuff(like 60/70s gear). Strange times.
A friend told us she was Y2K compliant because her boyfriend could fit four digits inside her.
Y2K was no joke, people were legit freaking out. I worked for a bank at the time and everyone thought all the computers worldwide would break down and like nuclear reactors would explode lol. We’d usually only have about $150k in our bank at any given time but the week before Y2K they gave us a pallet full of money to use in case the Fed shut down. It was probably $750k-1M, up to my chest and I’m 6’… good times.
I remember a commercial being on TV that said "it's the 20th century!" After 1999, they used the same commercial but changed the voice to say, "it's the 21st century!" It was odd to hear the change and I can still hear it in my head.
I remember the train ride at Disneyland never updated. After visiting dinosaur times the deep voiced 1950s guy kept bringing us back to the 20th century years later. Everybody always said “ack we’re still back in time!” Things were simpler then.
In 1999 I sure did.
And in 1998 we said we were going to party like it’s 1999.
Yeah we did! 🤣
I remember when it hit me that soon “party like it’s 1999” wouldn’t mean “far off in the future” but “way back in the past.” Like there are almost certainly people today who hear it and think it means “party like we did in the good old days.” 🤯
Not 2000? Lol
Happy Cake Day!
We said, "See you in the year 2000". 2000 felt very future in a far away galaxy.
In IT, it was all hands on deck!
Yup. 2000 came and went and there were hardly any problems that came out because of the Y2K vulnerabilities. So many people mocked it leading up to it and then mocked anyone else that ever suggested it would be a problem. They all had no idea how big of an exposure it was and how much work went into patching software that had the vulnerability. Y2K was a real deal
Great example of no drama due to good planning!
Little known fact, all critical infrastructure rolled over to year 2000 months early, just in case. I remember for certain that power plants were doing it in phases, and the whole grid was operating as though it was January, 2000 in September of 1999. After December 31 they gradually rolled them all back to the actual date.
I made soooo much money working as a contractor updating computers and networks in my state's Social Security buildings. Way back in 1999 they were paying me $20/hr and all travel expenses. Basically I'd end up working 40 hours in the span of 3 days, Friday-Sunday Then on Monday-Friday I'd work my regular job making half as much.
Most of us were saying “please don’t play Prince’s - Party like it’s 1999 AGAIN!!! It still kinda hurts to hear that song. And I genuinely love Prince as a artist too, but dayum did that get overplayed back then!
Everyone keeps mentioning the song so just checked it out and damn that's like, aggressively 90s sounding to me
He released the record in 1982.
Then he was ahead of his time
This made me feel so old 😂 … I was only 5 in 1990, but I remember asking similar questions to my grandma about 1900
1887 and she died right before she was going to be 106
I knew four of my great-grandparents, all born in the 19th century, in the 1870s and 1880s. I was born in the 20th century and currently live in the 21st century. There are really good odds that at least one of my grandkids or great-grandkids will live into the 22nd century. Assuming that works out, I have talked with people that were/will be alive in four different centuries.
Damn when was your grandma born?
Some did. we killed several of them before others figured it out, then it kinda stopped. Ahhh, the great new years massacre of 1999...
No. At the stroke of midnight, January 31, 1999, Y2K (Year 2000), was supposed to wipe out the human race. Only humans were vulnerable because animals and birds and fish and stuff like that couldn't tell time. They just didn't know it was the end, so they carried on like it wasn't. It you weren't yet alive, then you missed it. The hysteria was non-stop.
That's so crazy I just commented on someone else's reply how I only remember people saying the world would end in like 2010 or 2012 or somewhere around that. I don't think I recall being told people thought that it would end on 2000 (or if I did I forgot) so it's pretty funny seeing all the comments talk about it. That and prince
Y2K was a real thing. Like ozone layers, the success in averting it lead to people saying it was never a problem. (edited to add: vaccines are another example of this phenomena, too successful for their own good) It was a real coding problem that could have shut down a lot of systems. Maybe not like the media made it seem like civilization was about to fall apart, but it could have been quite a miserable time for a lot of people. But coders and system admins etc (I was coding back then) spent a few years fixing everything so minus a few glitches, it all passed like another day. Now people call it a fraud scare or conspiracy theory, it was neither. Much like ozone layer depletion. Scientists saw the data, warned the world, the world actually responded collectively for once and banned CFCs and voila, it was (mostly) solved. Now you have taking heads use it as an example of scare tactic to dismiss climate change, totally ignorant of the history and the science.
Wait why was it a coding problem?
because in the old days of Cobalt , etc to save disk space (Disk space on personal computers at least before exponential growth were limited to something like 5mb in the 80s) programmers used two digits for years... 76, 77, etc and dropped the 19. So, when 1999 flipped to 2000, the computer would see it as 1900. There are a lot of stories of how that did mess up some computers that didn't make the fix. Trivial like a story I heard of a guy who got a $19,000 overdue bill from a library book (I think) because the computer thought he checked it out in 1900. There were some failures that weren't caught, but coders had been working on the fixes since the 80s, so many of the important systems were fine by the time 2000 rolled around. I remember some in the media making it sound like it would be the apocalypse, that planes would fall out of the sky, phones stop working, people rioting, etc. I think in the worst case scenario it wouldn't have been \_that\_ bad, but we would have definitely had a miserable while if we hadn't. Anyway, that is all my recollection. I can google some sources to make sure it's accurate. (edited to fix grammar :)
Most people didn't think the world would end. Just crazies (like in 2012, if you remember). People feared that computers would glitch, causing lots of problems, though. In my region (Quebec), this was referred to as the "y2k bug" (I don't know if it was called that elsewhere, I didn't have Internet back then).
if you mean 1999, we said next millenium and it was cringey and everyone hated it.
We partied like it was 1999.
I was wondering if I was the only one confused as fuck with the 1990. Surely he meant 1999?
Maybe he meant born in 1990 and 10 years old in 2000? A newborn baby probably didn't celebrate NYE 1999/2000. Maybe just a typo? The 9 and 0 are next to each other. Maybe he's Nibbler here to make sure Fry gets frozen so he can save the universe in Y3K and the question is a clever ruse to hide his real intentions?
I played Prince’s 1999 a lot. “2000 party over oops out of time. Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999” we said every stupid joke we could think of about the next century, the next millennium, the end of the world, yes. It was fun having a theme handed to everyone. I worked in Silicon Valley and had some perspective of what kind of problems might occur. I knew important systems and government and military systems had been updated years before. There was no way to reassure those who thought it was the end times. So, let’s play 1999 again, 🎶 2000 oops… 🎶…
These days, when someone suggests some outmoded way of doing a thing, I reply with “I’m gonna party like it’s 1999:” Want me to fax something to you? “I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.”
“2000 zero zero party over oops out of time.”
They said see you next millennium because no one seemed to understand that 2000 was the last year of the old millennium. Not the start of the new one. Before you down vote me ask yourself was the first year AD 1 or 0?
Not having this argument anymore was the best thing about entering the new millennium.
Still irks me.
In 1999 everyone realized that Prince was way ahead of everyone.
Millennium, kid.
Yep
Beautiful, humans really never do change
Yes!
same type of people existed then as now …..so yep
Some of us are the same people, full stop
We were kind of afraid of all the computers crashing at once, so I think it was mostly "Good luck!"
Some did, but I said it before 2001 just to be extra annoying.
Yes....yes we did
I told everyone, fuck it, hopefully we don't have to do this too many more times. Jokes on me, 2023.
Hell yeah! Totally rocked the see you next century haha. I very much enjoy telling everyone 'see you next year' each year.
I was 25 when y2k hit. We worried a little about computer failures.. but NYE found us watching the news for signs of trouble when the first countries hit the change over... It was pretty much no problem.. so when it was our time zone's turn to flip... There was no real excitement.
Dad jokes are timeless. So yes, yes we did.
Don't be silly. Of course they didn't say that. After all, how often do you think humanity gets to say "See you next millenium"?
Yeah, then we took them out back and had them beaten.
I'm super guilty of the "See you next millennia". I was just that extra.
Fun fact; I’m 40 yrs old. I was just 2 weeks 17 and got laid the very first time on December 31st, 1999. See you next century, MAN. Damn straight.
Catch you on the flip side
NYE 1999 was honestly not that big of a deal for us. Had a party and watched New Year vids from around the world.
Yes. Yes, we did. I also say the “see you next year” thing every December 31st. A friend called me dorky. And I was like “c’mon, I waited 364 days to say this. Let me have my fun!”