Free Republic

20 years since Y2K. Never met anyone that built a bomb shelter, but do remember the tension that night as the clocks around the world ticked over. https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/12/y2k-20-years-later-documents-contributors-recall-the-armageddon-that-never-was/

Twenty years ago, we were all pretty sure the world was going to end on January 1, 2000—or, if not the world, then at least civilization. It had something to do with how most computer programs used the last two digits to represent a four-digit year, and when the clock rolled over at the end of 1999, every computer would think it was 1900. When that happened, ATMs would stop working, the electrical grid would shut down, planes would fall out of the skies, and newborn babies would get hundred-year-old birth certificates.

A close up of a YKK zipper. (Photo: Chris 73/ WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)There is not a groin in the world that the city of Kurobe has not touched. It has done so through the auspices of YKK, the world’s largest manufacturer of zippers, producing roughly half the world’s supply—some 7 billion a year. Yet to understand how Kurobe became the zipper capital of the world, one must travel back to the very birth of the zipper, to a time when the zipper wasn’t even the zipper at all. It was in the midst of the Victorian age that mankind suddenly grew disquieted...