Le 2012-07-20 17:38, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:11:39 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>
>> On 7/12/2012 7:25, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>>> Then Y2K failed to happen (as a catastroph)
>>
>> I've never been able to figure out whether this should be "Then Y2K
>> failed to happen" or "Thus Y2K failed to happen".
>
> Clearly Y2K happened, since it's 2012.
>
> The predicted Y2K computing technology disaster is what failed to
> happen.  Planes failed to fall from the sky, the power grid failed to
> fail, the phones kept working.
>

Mostly because most companies took it seriously enough that they fixed 
the problems that could have happened.

some small businesses did have problems, for example:

My cousin's restaurant's staff realized at 1am on Jan 1st that Visa and 
Mastercard were rejecting all his sales since they were dated 1/1/1900. 
  He had 200 people who had paid $250 apiece, not counting drinks (and 
they were drinking Dom Perignon) for the Y2K bash.  He would have lost 
close to $100,000 that night if it wasn't for the fact that the adjacent 
hotel's manager (whose computers were Y2k-ready) offered to lend him a 
cash register on the fly.

I was working that night baby sitting devices that couldn't care less 
about the date, but had to be at work nonetheless, so I had rented a few 
DVDs to help pass the time.  I ended up working all night on an 
unrelated outage, and slept through most of Jan 1st. As a result, I 
returned my DVDs to the store late, but their computer said that I owed 
them -$18,500 in late fees because I had returned my DVD 99 years and 
364 days before renting them.  Until I closed my account at that video 
store 5 years later, I had a negative balance in their system.

Some larger businesses too had issues:

Planes did not fall from the skies, but some planes didn't leave the 
ground either as all the airlines that were part of Star Alliance and 
were using a LuftHansa-owned system from tracking aircraft maintenance 
had to get special waivers from their countries' respective aviation 
authority because of signed/unsigned integer goofs in the system saying 
that the aircrafts hadn't been inspected in 2147447122 days.

The Japanese nuclear plants were "out of control" for a few hours as 
some of their monitoring systems crashed and had to be rebooted.

NASA also temporarily lost control of a few satellites for the same reasons.

Not counting all the outages, planned and unplanned, during the previous 
year as systems were being upgraded to be Y2K-ready.

> Society failed to fall into a dark age due to technology failures.
>

I don't think anyone seriously expected society to fall into a dark age.



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