Millennium Daily Mail dated Saturday January 1st 2000
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There were many an hour wasted round the coffee machines of the nation discussing whether or not the new millennium started on 1st January 2000 or 2001. Who cares – there goes another £10000 worth of fireworks, oooh, aaah.
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The Y2K Bug or Year 2000 Bug was the big media-driven scare of 1999. They predicted that at the stroke of midnight when the century changed from 19 to 20 computers controlling everything from your trusty video recorder to in-flight jumbo jets would crash. The problem went back to the early days of commercial programming when computer memory and storage space was at a premium. To save space most date fields in records were given just 2 bytes instead of 4 – i.e. yy instead off ccyy – i.e just the year without the century – i.e. 99 instead of 1999.
The news media decided that this meant that at the vital moment the computers would think it was 1900, and because the Wright Brothers hadn’t flown yet, all the planes would just drop from the sky.
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Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin became the first President of the Russian Federation (which replaced the old communist USSR) in 1991 and tried to convert the Russian state into a ‘free-market’ economy. The result was widespread corruption and inflation, not to mention personal unpopularity. He finally resigned and his Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took over.
Yeltsin was an eccentric figure who enjoyed a drink of five – a sort of political Oliver Reed.
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Born when Rutherford B. Hayes was US President, Queen Victoria was on the English throne and Gladstone was Prime Minister, she was already 23 years old when the Wright Brothers pioneered powered flight. She lived through two World Wars, the proliferation of the motor car, the Stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression, the start of both radio and TV broadcasting, the rise and fall of Communism, the Cold War, the assassination of John F Kennedy, the coming and/or going of 24 Presidents and saw the first man walk on the Moon. Now that's what you call a life.
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Ex-Beatle George Harrison was stabbed in the chest by and intruder in the early hours of Thursday 30th December. The attacker, Mike Abram, was found to be insane and committed to a secure hospital but was released in 2002!
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As it says, predictions are pointless and a Happy New Year to one and all.
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