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PITFALLS OF TECHNOLOGY

Whatever Happened to Y2K?

Why did the dreaded Millennium Bug slip into the memory hole of history?

Matthew Clapham
Pitfall
Published in
5 min readJan 4, 2025

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A distorted close-up of computer hardware, lit in eerie violet and resembling a lidless eye
What do you see? (Photo by Ali Mammadli on Unsplash)

Technology evolves at such a pace as to suck the air from our lungs and make our eyeballs bleed. Or ‘devolves’, some might say. Concepts, devices and the terms that define and describe them can slip into obsolescence almost before they gain a foothold in our consciousness.

MP3 players sit superfluous and neglected on the scrapheap of invention, alongside fax machines. Rummage just a little lower and your inquisitive fingers might unearth the wheel of a spinning jenny, the beads of an abacus.

Novelty is the fickle mother of innovation, constantly discarding its own brood.

But there are, as AI has recently reminded us, certain technological events that achieve ubiquitous recognition, become the news story itself. And those of us who are old and memorious enough to cast our minds back a quarter of a century to 1999 will inevitably recall the Y2K phenomenon as one such milestone.

The inability of global computer systems programmed with just two digits designating each year to distinguish between (19)00 and (20)00 at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1999. Planes would fall from the sky as air traffic control…

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Pitfall
Pitfall

Published in Pitfall

Filling In The Gaps — For Writing That Doesn’t Fit

Matthew Clapham
Matthew Clapham

Written by Matthew Clapham

Professional translator by day. Writer of silly and serious stuff by night. Also by day, when I get fed up of tedious translations. Founder of Iberospherical.

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