Get Year

2000

At midnight on 1 January 2000, web pages around the world started getting the year wrong. A common piece of JavaScript put “19” in front of a two-digit year, and when the clock ticked over, pages announced the year 19100. Most sites were fixed within days. Pages nobody looked after kept the error.

Get Year was made in 2000, immediately after the event. It's a single page showing the time and date, built on the same faulty code and left running. It has moved between hosts over the years and now lives at getyear.org, where the year reads 19126.

Y2K was meant to be a catastrophe. What actually arrived was a small error on a web page. Get Year keeps that error going and treats it as a place: a year nobody planned for, open to anyone who's never belonged to the official calendar. Elsewhere the bug lingers on pages nobody went back to. Here it's kept on purpose, and it'll keep counting for as long as someone keeps it running.