I don’t even know. @cthenarwhal - Tumblr Blog

being sad and horny is a privilege

This post legitimately knocked me out of a doomscroll. Had to put down my phone and everything and stare at a wall.

I really do regret my inaction the most. Every time. All of my future problems are always caused by things I failed to do in the present. And every time, I get so mad at past Me for not even trying because I’m so afraid to fail.

Like. Damn. Didn’t expect pixel art of some planets to hit me so hard.

theemotionmachine

cyberbullyinc

emiliusthegreat

I had previously seen the bottom image with zero context like 5 times before finally finding the context post and that’s why I love tumblr.

flimflix

brought some fruit for the potluck

penelopepseudonym

A dark, foreboding feeling overtakes you. You know this face, even in its absence.

selkiesub

most convincing Tumblr ad I've ever received. almost made me download whatever shitass dating app that is

disturbedlolita

fairycosmos

god i hate knowing i have stuff to do it's like bearing a curse

adventures-in-poor-planning

I hurt my back pretty reasonably at work today and unfortunately I couldn’t stop laughing because my first thought was “workplace injury barbie”

adventures-in-poor-planning

sorta like this

alicenthightcwer

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Shrek Edition *:･ﾟ✧

stripedroseandsketchpads

@mrsloidforger

completed-nihilism-blog

labiodentist-deactivated2015021

what. why? someone pls explain to me pls i wasnt born yet in 1999 why turn computer off before midnight? what happen if u dont?

awhdjksadaluigsjkdfasdk-deactiv

y2k lol everyone was like “the supervirus is gonna take over the world and ruin everything and end the world!!!”

jibini

This is the oldest I’ve ever felt. Right now.

the-ilyasaurus-deactivated20160

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN’T BORN YET IN 1999.

faisdm

Ahh the Millenium bug.

It wasn’t a virus, it was an issue with how some old computers at the time were programmed to deal with dates. Basically some computers with older operating systems didn’t have anything in place to deal with the year reaching 99 and looping around to 00. It was believed that this inability to sync with the correct date would cause issues, and even crash entire systems the moment the date changed.

People flipped out about it, convinced that the date discrepancy between netwoked systems would bring down computers everywhere and shut down the internet and so all systems relying on computers, including plane navigation etc. would go down causing worldwide chaos. It was genuinely believed that people should all switch off computers to avoid this. One or two smart people spoke up and said “um hey, this actually will only effect a few very outdated computers and they’ll just display the wrong date, so it probably won’t be harmful” but were largely ignored because people selling books about the end of the world were talking louder.

In the end, absolutely nothing happened.

ralfmaximus

Oh gosh.

I’ve been a programmer working for various government agencies since the early 1990s and I can say with some confidence:

NOTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE WE WORKED VERY HARD FIXING SHIT THAT MOST DEFINITELY WOULD HAVE BROKEN ON 1-JAN-2000.

One example I personally worked on: vaccination databases.

My contract was with the CDC to coordinate immunization registries — you know, kids’ vaccine histories. What they got, when they got it, and (most importantly) which vaccines they were due to get next and when. These were state-wide registries, containing millions of records each.

Most of these systems were designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and stored the child’s DOB year as only two digits. This means that — had we not fixed it — just about every child in all the databases I worked on would have SUDDENLY AGED OUT OF THE PROGRAM 1-JAN-2000.

In other words: these kids would suddenly be “too old” to receive critical vaccines.

Okay, so that’s not a nuke plant exploding or airplanes dropping from the sky. In fact, nothing obvious would have occurred come Jan 1st.

BUT

Without the software advising doctors when to give vaccinations, an entire generation’s immunity to things like measles, mumps, smallpox (etc) would have been compromised. And nobody would even know there was a problem for months — possibly years — after.

You think the fun & games caused by a few anti-vaxers is bad?

Imagine whole populations going unvaccinated by accident… one case of measles and the death toll might be measured in millions.

This is one example I KNOW to be true, because I was there.

I also know that in the years leading up to 2000 there were ad-hoc discussion groups (particularly alt.risk) of amazed programmers and project managers that uncovered year-2000 traps… and fixed them.

Quietly, without fanfare.

In many cases because admitting there was a problem would have resulted in a lawsuit by angry customers. But mostly because it was our job to fix those design flaws before anyone was inconvenienced or hurt.

So, yeah… all that Y2K hysteria was for nothing, because programmers worked their asses off to make sure it was for nothing.

spytap

Bolding mine.

jaybushman

Absolutely true. My Mom worked like crazy all throughout 1998 and 1999 on dozens of systems to avoid Y2K crashes. Nothing major happened because people worked to made sure it didn’t.

Now if we could just harness that concept for some of the other major issues facing us today.

shananaomi

this meme came so far since i saw it this morning. god i love tumblr teaching tumblr about history.

forloveofreason

As a young Sys Admin during Y2K, I can confirm that it was SRS BZNS. I worked for a major pharmaceutical company at the time. They spent millions of dollars on consultant and programmer hours, not to mention their own employees’ time, to fix all their in-house software as well as replace it with new systems. Sys Admins like myself were continually deploying patches, updating firmware, and deploying new systems in the months leading up to Y2K. Once that was done, though, the programmers went home and cashed their checks.

When the FATEFUL HOUR came along, it wasn’t just one hour. For a global company with offices in dozens of countries, it was 24 hours of being alert and on-call. I imagine that other large organizations had similar setups with entire IT departments working in shifts to monitor everything. Everyone was on a hair trigger, too, so the slightest problem caused ALL HANDS ON DECK pages to go out.

Yes, we had pagers.

For hard numbers IDC’s 2006 calculation put the total US cost of remediation, before and after, at $147 billion - that’s in 1999 dollars. That paid for an army of programmers, including calling up retired grandparents from the senior center because COBOL and FORTRAN apps from the ‘60s needed fixing.

Also note that there were some problems, including $13 billion in remediation included in the figure above. Some of these involved nuclear power plants, medical equipment, and “a customer at a New York State video rental store had a bill for $91,250, the cost of renting the movie ‘The General’s Daughter’ for 100 years.”

Y2K was anything but nothing.

tamashiihiroka-deactivated20200

Reblogging because this is a side to the story I had never heard.

phantomonabudget

Yes, but also there are people who weren’t born yet in 1999 and they’re old enough to be on the internet.

australopithecusrex

Everything about this is just….wow.

shoshanah-ben-hohim

My dad, who was a reporter for Business Day at the New York Times, started covering Y2K in the late 1980s.

That’s how early people started figuring out there was going to be a problem and working on a massive effort to fix all their systems, a huge undertaking that brought them right up through January 1, 2000.

And that’s why nothing happened. Although no one knew for sure nothing would happen until it didn’t - they just had to wait and hope.

prismatic-bell

Two things I’d like to add here:

I was discussing this recently at work with a guy who worked in programming in the military. He wasn’t old enough to have been in that job when Y2K hit, but he did get to learn some of the history. Actual quote from him when I said I’d heard they were calling in people thirty years past retirement to fix things: “Oh, yeah. If you weren’t dead they wanted you. And you could just about name your price. Nobody knew how to run those systems anymore.”

If you’ve ever called one of those stupid automated phone lines and it’s asked you to input “two-digit month, two-digit, day, and four-digit year” for anything (birthdate, date of purchase, etc. and so forth), this is why. That wasn’t a thing until probably the early 2010s. It still had to be input as a four-digit year after the year 2000, but it was a reasonable guess that if you were young enough to be talking to the student loans people and you said your year of birth was “87,” you didn’t mean 1887. As we got further into the 21st century, it got to the point where inference wasn’t always 100% certain (yes, you can have a car from 1921), and the jokes we told in the 00s about “oh but were you born in nineteen eighty-eight?” suddenly became “oh wait. Someday there is gonna be a 2088.” That cultural change began so we didn’t have to do it all again in the 2050s or so.

And if you’re wondering if this means I–born in the late 1980s–occasionally, when very tired, still give my birthdate as “7-XX-8X,” yes, it absolutely does.