Twenty-five years ago, the world prepared for New Year’s.
It was an auspicious moment: the start of not just a new calendar year, decade, or even century.
It was the beginning of a new millennium.
Hope fille the air. Would humanity suddenly turn a page, and — looking forward, with fresh eyes — come to a new understanding of our place on this planet, and in the cosmos?
But excitement was tinged with uncertainty. “Y2K” — the fear that when the clock struck midnight on January 1, computers programmed in the 1900s would interpret the year as “00” and malfunction, produce incorrect data, even shut down at nuclear facilities and financial institutions — also loomed heavily.
Employees worldwide worked feverishly to make sure their companies were “Y2K-compliant.” Some Christmas vacations were canceled.
Dependent Care Connections — a provider of workplace services aimed at increasing productivity and reducing absenteeism — was on the case.
Right here in Westport.
From their offices in the Nyala Farm complex (now the headquarters of Bridgewater Associates), they rolled out a program called Y2KARE. It offered counseling, education and referral support to help employees manage personal responsibilities, while helping prepare their workplaces for Y2K.
DCC worked to aid frenetic Y2K employees, from the Nyala Farm office complex in Westport.
Y2KARE included a team of counselors, a network of providers and local resources, discounts and specialized programs.
The goal was to provide extended hours of service; weekend, childcare and eldercare; vacation camps, and services like gift-wrapping, personal shopping, and meal deliveries, for employees toiling on Y2K issues.
DCC CEO Peter Burki said, “People are really on top of and aware of this issue. We’ve had clients sign up right and left. Companies are looking for mechanisms to support the employee at this time of critical need.”
What would happen after the New Year?
“I think we’ll have a very strong indication on January 1 in terms of the magnitude of the problem,” Burki said.
“It could be ‘the mouse that roared,’ or it could be something very impactful.”
Y2K was, of course, a nothingburger.
Computers did not crash. Nuclear facilities did not implode. The world continued to spin on its axis, oblivious of the date or anything we humans were doing.
Today, Y2K is a dim memory. The first quarter of this century is almost over.
On Wednesday, we begin the next quarter of the 2000s.
Now, uncertainty of a different kind fills the air.
What will January 1 — and the rest of 2025 — bring?
Happy New Year!
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We were at the Marriott in San Juan Puerto Rico and flew into Newark and landed about 45 minutes before midnight! We weren’t taking any chances. From 1971 to 2011, I’ve been to Puerto Rico 45 times!
Predictions are easy to make. The 1939 New York World’s Fair featured the “World of Tomorrow” by which they meant the year 2000. One of the predictions was that in 2000 everyone would own their own airplane.
Fortunately, no.
At least in the programming world, Y2K was real. I was an exec at DST in KC, the world’s largest data processor for financial service, mutual fund and insurance companies at the time – also the largest user of Zerox printers after the US govt – and we had to pull seventy year olds out of retirement to fix sub-routines baked into the old Fortran and assembler language kernel code that nobody current knew how to program anymore. They slaved for several months replacing and/or updating the core engines that sat underneath all the ‘modern’ code. The old software would have reset to the year 1900 at 00:00:01 on January 1st, throwing everything out of sync and losing client’s account links. Millions of lines of code were replaced. A lot of big companies that supported huge systems (airlines, financial services, GPS…) were sweating bullets that they may have missed something. But all that effort worked. The public’s response? Y2K was No Big Deal!
I am compelled to point out that the reason it was a “nothing burger” is that IT departments expended immense resources to make it that way.
I was a Director at Yale New Haven Health System, and leading up to Y2K we worked VERY long hours to prevent problems.
But how many times have you been to Puerto Rico?
I was serving in the Air Force during Y2K and at the time I was the Inspector General at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. We ran a number of exercises testing various scenarios using various Y2K generated system failures before the new year. There were many things to consider but fortunately it ended up being a big nothing. The other thing I thought was comical back then was how many companies tried to get on the bandwagon proclaiming their product was “Y2K Compliant”, even on things like boxes of Kleenex.
I was working for Brooks Newspapers and landed the choice assignment of sitting at the Westport News office from 11am-1am staring at the computers. Loaded down with notes on what to do if…and a paper cup of champagne I finally had to admit to the publisher, Kevin Lally, that nothing happened and thanks for a lovely New Year’s Eve.