Tag Archives: Y2K

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Time of My Life, Part 31: Y2K? The ‘worst’ never arrived

We all remember Y2K, right? That was when Earth was supposed to fly off its axis, the sun would rise in the west, hell would freeze over and the world we knew would come to an end.

It didn’t happen. Planet Earth is still spinning around the sun, which continues to rise in the east; hell is still hotter’n hell and the world — with all its troubles — continues to keep on.

I was on duty at the Amarillo Globe-News in Texas when we entered the 21st century, but in the run-up to that big event, I was afraid for the worst. What’s more, so was my boss, G-N Publisher Garet von Netzer.

Happily, the worst never happened. However, von Netzer — a cautious, deeply conservative and hard-driving man — wasn’t about to take any chances. Yes, he hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.

We weren’t the only business in the world to go through that kind of pre-Y2K preparation. Man, it was a hell of a ride.

Our day prior the dawn of The Year 2000 unfolded quite differently than other days. We started producing pages for print before we put the afternoon Globe-Times to bed around noon on Dec. 31, 1999.

Von Netzer feared that computer systems worldwide would lock up, they would vaporize, they wouldn’t know how to log the next day’s arrival. He was concerned about whether they would even recognize “2000” as a year.

So, he decided we would button up the next morning’s Daily News early that evening. There would be no breaking news in the first edition of the Daily News to mark the new century. There would be what we called “time copy,” feature stories with no time element attached to them.

Our sports pages would have no game-day coverage. They, too, would be full of feature material.

The editorial page, which I was in charge of publishing, wasn’t affected quite so dramatically. We had plenty of appropriate commentary that didn’t depend on any time element. Our editorial for the next morning’s newspaper heralded the arrival of the 21st century and gave appropriate recognition to its importance in the history of humankind.

But by golly, we shut it all down early. I cannot recall the precise time, but I believe it was around 8 p.m.

After producing our final pages for the next day, von Netzer ordered all the computers shut down, powered off, unplugged from the wall sockets. Every computer terminal in our business went dark.

What happened when the clock struck midnight was, well, a serious non-event. Electronic calendars logged the correct year. Time didn’t stand still. The sun rose the next morning.

We went to work. Flipped the switches back to the “on” position. We were in business once again, per usual.

The frenetic pace of the previous day proved to be all for naught. Then again, what if the worst had happened?

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Another year down the tubes … Happy New Year!

Those of us who remember the days when we had telephones with coiled cords and TVs that took forever to turn on have learned to live in whole new world.

We recall waiting with bated breath for the 21st century. My dad was one of them. He looked forward to seeing the year 2000. He didn’t make it, but we had many conversations about that momentous event.

Here we are. Another year is passing into history. And we’re another year close to the end of the second decade of the 21st century.

Yes, it’s true that time accelerates the older you get.

So we’re about to enter 2017. Just three more years an we enter the third decade of this once-new era.

And this conjures up a memory of when we got ready for we called “Y2K.” You remember it, yes?

It seems all so quaint now.

As 1999 drew to a close, I was working for the Amarillo Globe-News. We prepped for the big change in a most fascinating way. The newspaper’s publisher took all those fears about the world coming to an end as we entered the 21st century quite seriously. Perhaps too seriously, as it turned out.

On Dec. 31, 1999, he issued a directive that all our electronics systems were to be shut down by some ridiculous time — hours before we were to go to press. He spoke to us about the potential consequences of failing to be prepared for when the clock struck midnight and we entered a new year beginning with the number “2.”

I’d heard the fears: Nuclear missiles would launch; satellites orbiting the planet would crash to Earth; computer systems would catch fire and/or explode; motor vehicles would stop functioning. All of it.

My boss was so concerned he ordered us to shut down our newsgathering and printing operations … which meant that the Jan. 1, 2000 edition of the Amarillo Globe-News had next to zero breaking news in it. We had a lot of feature material, though.

That was then.

We’ve gotten a good bit more sophisticated about these computer issues.

Time and technology have moved us forward.

I’ll spare you my thoughts about the year that’s about to pass into history’s dust bin. It kinda sucked and I’ve spoken my piece already about that.

But oh, my, has time flown by since our knuckles locked up while we waited for Y2K.

One thing doesn’t change for me, though, even with technology advancing as rapidly as it has done. I always await the new year with a sense of optimism, that the new year will be better than the immediate past year.

So it is that we welcome 2017. We’ve got nowhere to go but up, correct?