Remembering Y2K ... where were you?

What were you doing ten years ago? Chances are good that if you were an IT pro back then that you were hard at work battling the dreaded Y2K bug.

I'm not going to waste pixels and inconvenience electrons by giving you the background to the whole Y2K thing. If there are any youngsters out there who want the background on this, I suggest you read this excellent Wikipedia article.

I remember the hype. I remember the survival kits and ration packs that were on sale. I remember updating BIOSes and checking and patching countless pieces of hardware and software. Then there was the testing. Lots of testing. It was a busy time.

And then I remember the rollover, when thanks to all out efforts the power stayed on, planes didn't fall out of the sky and the McDonald's "99 Billion Served" didn't roll back to zero.

It's odd to think back to how genuinely spooked people were by the idea of their hardware suddenly stopped working. The reason, I think, was that we'd allowed technology to infiltrate so many aspects of our lives without giving it much thought. We'd walked into a tech trap and Y2K threatened to throw us back into the stone age.

Note: I'm not going to get into how technology has infiltrated out lives so much more since 2000, and how we're more vulnerable than ever to it being taken away from us. Don't have nightmares!

Ahhh, good times!

Feel free to share your Y2K thoughts and memories here.