Y2K parody on Web server inadvertently taken seriously

Posted 1-6-00

CLEVELAND -- After many hours of work to ensure that computer systems at Case Western Reserve University would be Y2K-safe, the Web design team started to think, what would happen if the Web server had a Y2K glitch? Their answer: the home page would suddenly sport sepia-toned pictures of 1900s Cleveland, not to mention a different color scheme and general look. "We all laughed," says Eric Meyer, the site's designer, "and then we realized, 'Hey, this would be pretty easy to do.' So we did it."

Thus, at precisely midnight Eastern Standard Time on New Year's Eve, CWRU's main Web page was replaced with one which claimed to be dated January 1, 1900. A new set of "campus" images, scanned from turn-of-the-century yearbooks provided by University Archives, began to appear, and the site's navigation buttons were converted to a rustic, wooden look.

Almost nothing went unaffected. CWRU's "Most Wired College" award, which Yahoo! Internet Life magazine bestowed in 1999, suddenly claimed to have been awarded in 1899. A brief announcement stated that the "server now believes it is 1900" and that the administrators were "working diligently on the problem."

Although the University's regular page is back in place, the Y2K parody page can still be seen at http://www.case.edu/old_homes/y2k-home.html, and the "CWRU Views" images are at http://www.cwru.edu/pix/y2k/pixdex.html.

Reaction to the joke was quite positive. "We got messages from people all over the world telling us how much they liked it and how hard they laughed," says Meyer. "We even had the widow of an emeritus professor write to say that she was not only amused, but had great fun traveling memory lane, so to speak. It was actually rather touching, and it made the few hours we'd invested in the project more than worth it."

Apparently the parody was so well done that some people misinterpreted it as an actual Y2K glitch, and both Wired and The Washington Post reported it as a real problem.

"That was totally unexpected," says Meyer. "Not for an instant did I think people would take this seriously. We certainly didn't intend to fool anybody-- in fact, we thought we'd gone to some lengths to prevent any misunderstanding."