Happy New Year from SpamAssassin [LWN.net]

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 4:14 UTC (Sun) by rahvin (guest, #16953)
In reply to: Happy New Year from SpamAssassin by jordanb
Parent article: Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

It could be argued that the only reason Y2K didn't cause a computer metldown is so many people ran around screaming that it was going to cause a meltdown along with all the people who tried to capitalize on those people by selling guns, food, generators and other "end of civilization" products. It's interesting to consider that had there not been so much publicity and the end of the world crowd not gotten involved that the y2k bug would have resulted in serious problems although certainly not the end of the world.

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Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 5:33 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Exactly. Y2K wasn't a problem because billions were spent fixing all of the software systems before it happened. Without those fixes (and many of the bugs that were fixed would have been catastrophic), the software simply wouldn't have worked, and we would have had a huge mess.

Also, if it weren't for all of this investment, the dot-com bubble would have exploded a couple of years earlier. Thanks to all that dot-com spending, we didn't see a tech collapse until spring of 2000.