Remember 1998 and 1999? The impending Y2K disaster was coming close? If all the computer glitches when 1999 turned to 2000 were not fixed, planes were supposed to fall off from the sky?
For those of you who are non-savvy in the so called computer lingo, let me explain the Y2K problem. Assume that data pertaining to dates are stored on the computer in MM-DD-YYYY format. But dates are entered by humans, and presented back by computer UIs (user interfaces) to humans; mostly in MM/DD/YY format. So, if you enter 12/12/98, it meant 12/12/1998 in the pre-Y2K era. And what did 12/12/00 mean? Well, in the last millennium, it could mean 12/12/1900 or 12/12/2000, depending on how the computers were programmed.
Most computers were programmed to append a 19 to the YY in the MM/DD/YY format to make it compatible with the MM/DD/YYYY database storage. So, 1/1/2000 was not taken care of in many programs. To key in 12/12/2000, you had to key in 12/12/00 in MM/YY/DD format, and the computer programs would append the 19 to 00 and store it as 12/12/1900! Similarly, 1/1/2000 or 1/1/00 could be interpreted by computers as 1/1/1900, or a date hundred years back, and this glitch could propagate and lead to all sorts of disasters, including trains stopping on their tracks, and the stock markets crashing!
Well, nothing like that happened on January 1st, 2000. Nasdaq did crash in April 2000, but that had nothing to do with Y2K. It was because the Internet revolution aka (also known as) the dot-com boom aka Web 1.0 was melting down. And today the technology revolution that was the Internet is back in full swing, technologies like JavaScript and AJAX have enabled a new wonderful world of user-interaction, and we call the current state of (Internet and associated technologies) affairs, well, Web 2.0. And someday, we will boldly proclaim that we don't live in the Web 2.0 world any more, and everything now is Web 3.0.
Before the Internet began, we had client-server systems or a GUI (graphical user interface) world, and before that, we had the mainframe green screens on mainframes like IBM and Burroughs / Unisys. So, the genesis of Web 3.0 was in business computing, when humans could interact with computers only through those green screens. We computing (and non-computing) humans have come a long way from the mainframes, through the Y2K fiasco, to the wireless podcasting world of Web 2.0.
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