We’re about to begin the year 2020, which means a new decade. 1999 was not just the end of a decade: It was the end of a century, AND a millennium. If you were around back then, you should feel fortunate that you got to witness such an event.
Yet if you were around back then, you also probably remember that many people thought the year 2000 would bring about a catastrophic event: Y2K, where all our technology that was programmed with a two-digit year (such as “99” for 1999) would malfunction when it was forced to roll over.
There were runs on canned food, bottled water, and other such items because people thought we might be heading back into a dark age without all the technology we’d grown accustomed to. I remember watching the year 2000 roll in on TV, and as each hour went by and a new time zone moved into the new millennium… absolutely nothing happened.
It seems almost comical, looking back 20 years, that there was such a scare at the end of 1999. Doomsday prophecies were everywhere. Yet we survived. Everything continued as normal, and we’ve even made tremendous strides in technology during the two decades since.
Do you have any memories of the Y2K scare and the dawn of a new millennium? Let me know!
Speaking as a child of the '90s 