Has is been 10 years already?
1999 doesn't seem all that long ago. It does and it doesn't I guess. When I start thinking about things like cell phones and this whole internet thing it's like an eternity passed. On the other hand, when I look at pop culture stuff like movies, music, and TV I can't tell the difference between something produced in 1999 vs. 2009. I can't even gloat "at least all those Y2K alarmists admit they were wrong now" because they've all moved on to 2012. Some things never change.
A week or two ago I upgraded to Windows 7, overall I'm very impressed with it. This of course meant several days of reinstalling applications. I just had to have Visual Studio 6 installed to fuel my Visual Basic 6 addiction. I didn't bother checking but just made the assumption that it wouldn't work as expected on Windows 7. It was extremely simple to setup a virtual machine for all my retro-programming needs plus it's an image I'll be able to easily move to future PCs.
While going through my old CDs I spotted something called "Microsoft Year 2000 Resource Center CD". If my memory isn't too bad I believe this was something given to MSDN subscribers in mid-1999, although anyone could order it for free. It contained a set of utilities to help developers check their applications for Y2K readiness. Let's take a peek at what was on there...
So what's on the CD?
This notice is so important they had to pop it up twice. It tells you to check https://microsoft.com/y2k for the latest updates. It's long gone but here's the last archived version from 1999, just days before the world ended.
OK, so here's the part where I admit that I only wrote this article to see how Lightbox worked. It was surprisingly easy to setup and get working (after changing a few image paths). I don't think anyone will find the rest of this particularly interesting but who knows. Anyway, here's the main menu. It's a low tech application even for the time, it doesn't really need to be fancy though.
Here's an offline version of their Y2K site, for when the internet crashes at the stroke of midnight 1/1/00. For whatever reason you have to scroll for a while in Firefox before the content appears. I doubt compatibility for a browser that didn't yet exist wasn't high on their priority list.
How to order the CD over the phone. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago when you couldn't count on everyone having an internet connection.
The installer for their Y2K analysis program.
It prompts immediately to check for an updated database, I didn't bother trying.
It did a good job of not crashing when it encountered an unknown version of Windows.
Updates for Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, and Microsoft Money.
This last screen contains other random stuff you can install from this CD including IE 5.
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