There were a lot more companies that were impacted than just the insurance and financial ones.  Anyone who took the short cut of not storing the full year for their applications had to make modifications of some sort.

And yet leaded gas is what we are talking about here, and it was a primary factor in lead exposure - not all children chew on windowsills. And banning lead in gas was a byproduct of smog reduction, not primarily to save the children. <shrug>

That main reason being that we found a highly effective, cheap enough pollution control device for gasoline engines that simply did not work in the presence of lead. Do you really think “the children” had much to do with it? Getting lead out of the environment was a bonus, not the prime objective. Smog reduction was…

And yet Europe had leaded gas rather longer than we did (2000 vs. 1986 in most countries), and generally is rather a lot less stupid. Which of course greatly depends on your definition of stupid. I think the American gun fetish is stupid, and most Europeans would agree with me. Most Americans do not. <shrug>

Oh boy does that get missed. I spent pretty much all of 1999 going from site to site all over the country doing Xenix to SCO Unix upgrades for the point of sale and inventory control system that my employer sold, because Xenix could not handle Y2K. And that was with the majority of sites already having upgraded from…

but we still use petroleum because of the ridiculous influence of

It is cheaper if the government is propping up the price. :-)

Can confirm. As a PC tech in 1999, I spent most of the year either replacing outdated terminals or updating software on computers. The industry didn’t “move past it,” they handled it.

See, that was my understanding also. Y2k, like the ozone layer, only took the massive coordinated efforts of millions of people to overcome. Remember acid rain? That too.

I worked for a bank over Y2k. My understanding was that “Y2k,” while slighly overblown, only took a several million hours of collective overtime to fix. 

Its absolutely a testiment to the hard work of so many that Y2K can even be looked at by laymen as something other than the monumental Herculean effort that it was.

I actually laughed out loud when I read that. The amount of real work that went into making sure Y2K wasn’t a massive disruption was monumental.

Exactly. I’ve been working in software since 1996. Y2K was definitely not nothing. I was in the ATM business at the time and we had an engineering team and project manager 100% focused on Y2K readiness/compliance for 2 years prior to the rollover.

Making fuel out of corn is hideously expensive. It’s why you don’t see corn farms run solely on ethanol. The main reason for it is corn subsidies to pay NCGA members to plant corn suitable for fuel subsidies. Whatever benefits there are on the environment, tax money is what makes it profitable.

Um using ethanol for gas is absolutely not cheaper than oil, especially out of corn or anywhere else that doesnt have a crapload of sugarcane excess to make it from.

I’ve talked to some of the people who did massive Y2K compliance retrofittings for a chemical plant near where I live. They said between 1995 when the issue was first brought up and October 1998 when they had their deadline, it was a constant daily race. Reflashing BIOS chips, converting systems from 8-bit to 32-bit,…

It kind of reminds me of Y2K, where everyone was panicked about this technical issue, but manufacturing had already moved past it by the time the situation came to a head.

I’m sure we all have some errors in judgment that we’d like to revisit. I distinctly (and shamefully) recall decrying environmental alarmists and telling them to simply plant more trees just after the turn of the century. I’ve since become more informed, changed course a just bit, and started a company aimed at…

I’ll add my two cents:

Jamie, you are truly a gifted writer. I also appreciate how you admit to faults of judgement [not entirely of your own making] in the past and how with time, clarity and information you intend to leave the lasting impression of correcting history to better the world (at the cost of corporate Christmas cards). Bravo!…