It's a bit jarring to think that the turn of the millennium now qualifies as "history," but here we are, explaining the strange Y2K event for those too young to remember it. By 1999, the world was wired to run on computers, but those computers were running on operating systems that weren't designed with the year 2000 in mind, so the dates were assumed to always start the year with 19. Was this a problem? Yes, but not nearly as big a problem as the media made it out to be. Until the "millennium bug" made the news, many people didn't even realize how much of the world's infrastructure depended on computers running smoothly. As the date grew near, programmers worked hard to fix the problem in one system after another, so that when the time came, it turned out to be a big nothingburger. Personally, I don't recall as much panic as this video illustrates, but I was busy with young children. I did take the precaution of turning off my computer before midnight, just in case. I later found out that Macs were never vulnerable to the Y2k problem because they had always rendered the year in four digits.
This video includes a skippable ad from 4:12 to 5:47.
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