Millennium Bug Quotes

Remember the Y2K bug? Ahhh, those were the days... I'll never forget that New Year's Eve. My wife and I were in Golden Bay dancing with her parents to Abba songs when suddenly, the rain began to fall. I took it as a sign from Mother Nature that everything was gonna be okay. Sure enough, the clock struck 12, and life went on as normal.

W2K will be a bigger disaster than Y2K.

They [the New World Order] want to reduce the population [to 500 million] and their target date is May 5th of 2000. [.....] The demons who call themselves spirit guides have told them. "You know, you have to reduce the population by May 5th." Because May 5th is Karl Marx's birthday, you know, enter the Age of Aquarius. [.....] I suspect they may use Y2K as an excuse to create some little problems here, we shall have to wait and see.

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".

The Y2K problem is not caused by technical limitations. We simply forgot to think of the problem.

The more irrational of us are worried about the millennium ending - as if a date would really matter.

Eschatological fears are an ancient human concern. The Romans expected the world to end in 634 B.C. owing to a prophecy involving twelve eagles, while the early Christians anticipated the Final Judgment in their own lifetimes. Pope Sylvester II thought A.D. 1000 would be the last year, a view updated for the modern age by the Millennium bug.

How could this Y2K be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?

We get to see it! January 1st, 2000! We get to see... all those fundamentalist preachers having to do their backpedaling when the Armageddon doesn't occur.

When you think of all the things that have happened, since that problem with computers in 2000 and everybody was afraid and they were buying water, imagine what Millennium would do with all the things that are going on in the world right now. It has the capacity to be a movie. But, anyway, I loved doing it. It changed my life because the guy that I was playing was so much more educated and smarter than I was, so I had to live up to it.

The Y2K bug is a genuine technical concern, consuming the energies of many specialists. But the prophecies of doom represent a broader worldview using the bug as a news hook. In this vision, the good society is a stable society, undisrupted by innovation, ambition or outside influences.