Wednesday 6 May 2009

Still, Mustn't Grumble....

Does anyone else remember "The Millenium Bug" which used to worry everyone sick from about 1995 onwards?

Industry would employ teams of inspectors to hunt down this frightening phenomena and even quite intelligent people would be queueing in Comet asking if their Toaster was "Year 2000 Compliant". Pundits and "Experts" bought Villas in Spain on the proceeds of the flood of paid employment they enjoyed in the "Y2K" World.

Of course the "popular" media milked this knee-jerk scaremongering to the hilt and we all thought it was such a joke a few weeks into the new Century when all was warm and cosy again with those nice young "straight kinda guys" Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell at the helm. "Planes falling out of the sky?" - how preposterous!
It was only when I recently came across this reproduction front page from January 1st 2000 that something occured to me.

Yes, that's right. The Millenium Bug has arrived about 8 years after it was supposed to.

11 comments:

Geoff said...

Did anybody use the term "Y2K" who wasn't a tosser?

Dave said...

It's all to do with a monk called Dionysius Exiguus, in the 6th century. He set our calendars - but got it completely wrong (for a start Jesus wasn't born in 0 AD, but probably 7 BC).

So, who knows, maybe this year is the millenium.

KAZ said...

It doesn't say anything about the Internet - so what's the problem eh?

Billy said...

I love the Weekly World News

Rog said...

Geoff: Only the person who was enquiring about a French port "Why Touquet?"

Dave: Jesus born 7 years "before Jesus"? I thought it may be loosely based on Doctor Who.
As for Dionysius Monk, Kaz has got all his early free form albums.

Kaz: Spookily the internet hadn't been invented back then apart from a few Y2K Tossers with Compuserve modems.

Billy: As a young person we used to be sent the Weekly News down every, er, week from Scotland. I think it must have been a different paper.

Dave said...

Ah well, modern scholars don't say BC, we say BCE (Before Common Era), so that's OK. Herod the Great died in 5 (or 4) BCE. As he ordered the death of all children under 2, presumably on some evidence, anywhere between 5 and 7 BCE seems reasonable.

Definitely not 1 week before 1 AD, which is what Dionysius said.

There, you learn something new every day here.

Richard said...

Y2K comes up in the text dictionary on my phone when I start to write "walk".

Rog said...

Dave: "Before the Common Era" was the period prior to the invention of the Bacardi Breezer.

Richard: I suppose it could have been worse.

Betty said...

"Telephones will cease to function"? Sounds like bliss to me. Bring it on, as tossers would say.

Vicus Scurra said...

I wrote to the BBC asking them to help in my checking whether my set was 2000 bug free
http://k.phillips1.users.btopenworld.com/technology.html
They didn't comply or reply.

Rog said...

Betty: No more unsolicited calls from BT trying to upgrade your phone service! It's a bit of social interaction to some people.

Vicus: That was, in a very last Century way, very funny! I would have lolled but the lol hadn't been discovered then.