This is just an odd little story from my life.
Twenty-fiveish
years ago, one of my guilty pleasures was reading the Weekly World News. I didn’t
believe any of the stories, and just laughed at the idea that there were people
out there that probably did believe all that shit. But I felt safe knowing those people would
only be on the fringe of society and they’d never … I don’t know … be elected
to Congress.
Anyway,
sometime in 1998 or 1999, there was an article about Y2K. Now the normal fear was that going from 19-- years
to 20-- years would cause computers to crash.
But this article claimed that things would be far worse and that any
electronic device would explode at midnight.
I
don’t know if shortly before or after I read this article we had a power outage
and I had to reset the time on my VCR.
So I performed an experiment. I
set the time on my VCR to 11:59 PM on December 31, 1999. I then backed away and waited. A minute later the display switched over to
12:00. There was no smoke, or buzzing,
or anything. And when I checked the
date, it was January 1, 2000. I guess I
had a “modern” VCR that replaced the explosive parts with the memory to have a
four digit date.
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