As a year ends, HBO’s eerily appropriate documentary “Time Bomb Y2K,” Saturday at 10 and streaming on MAX, looks back at the dawn of the 21st century when a potential technological disaster threatened humanity.

“The Y2K computer bug as it was called (even though it wasn’t really a bug),” Marley McDonald explained in a phone interview with her co-director Brian Becker, “was the error coded into our computer programs. Most computers are date sensitive and in the ‘60s at the beginning of computers, they used things called Hollerith cards, which only had 80 digits of information.

“To save space on these cards, they dropped the first two digits of the year date. So 1968 became 68. The fear was that when computers switched over from 99 to 00, the computers would think it was 1900 and that would of course throw all our date dependent systems into disarray.

“The question was, What does happen? If computers just shut down, do nuclear missiles go off? That technical problem then translated into this larger cultural recognition of our dependence on computers. In the ‘90s we were blind to how much our lives depended on these systems.”

“I will add,” Becker, 32, noted, “the man who gave the year 2000 its name Y2K is David Eddy, a computer programmer from Needham, Massachusetts. Y2K was a name that essentially all of the media and most of the public use as shorthand for addressing this year 2000 computer problem.”

Surprisingly, it’s a history being repeated today. “When you Google Y2K, the first images that come up are empty grocery store shelves and people lining around the block at gun stores,” McDonald said. “It looked awfully familiar to what we had been seeing in the news during COVID. And the further we dug, the more we realized that all the same American subcultures that were present in our time were also around in the ‘90s using Y2K as this crisis to espouse their worldview.

“We realized that our entire generation was actually named after this event – the millennials! So we’re probably the perfect people to make this movie.”

As to what they hope people take from “Time Bomb,” “We tried to make a movie that reflects the way that we respond to existential threat, in all different walks of life,” McDonald said.

“Hopefully, people look and realize the ways in which human nature repeats itself in these end-of-the-world apocalyptic stories. You look and ask yourself, How do you respond to crises like this?

“The major theme of our movie is realizing how connected and interdependent we are. I hope that people reflect on that after watching the movie.”

“Time Bomb Y2K” (HBO) airs Saturday on HBO and streams on MAX