25 years ago: Were you prepared for Y2K?Class: American history, Grade 11Assignment: Things that happened 25 years agoStudent’s name: Jill Studious
The teacher wanted us to find out and write about something that made news way before we were born, something from 1999. The most interesting thing I found was that lots of people were very worried about what they called Y2K. It stood for Year 2000 … which would happen on the first day of the New Year.
I looked in some old Gazette-Journals to learn about this because I never heard of Y2K before. The paper said, “The Y2K problem arose during the initial building of computer systems, when storing memory in a computer was space-consuming and expensive. Programmers elected to use only two digits to indicate what year it was—i.e., 99 instead of 1999—to save space, without taking into account the problems that might arise at the end of the century …”
It seems that a lot of those dinosaur computers that ran things back then had this flaw and every...