The Computer Bug That Almost Ended The World | The Y2k Debacle - YouTube

The year 2000 was going to be very special, for  a multitude of reasons. We were entering into

a new millennium, a new era, a year that  only existed in Science-Fiction stories.

This was by no means a conventional New Year. It  was finally the future, but maybe not the future

everyone was anticipating. Millions of people  around the world spent their last moments in

the 1900s staring at the clock, but not for the  reason that you think. Instead of celebrating,

they were terrified, because as soon as the clock  struck midnight, the world was going to end,

and within the blink of an eye, the year  2000 would instead be a future now past.

Word had been going around about this upcoming  event for years now. The public even coined a name

for this phenomenon: Y2K, and as the late 1990s  creeped up and the year 2000 approached, people

crowded up stores across the world and lined up to  buy food, water, weapons, and supplies to create

survival kits, because on this date, according  to many credible sources, computers would

malfunction, prison gates would open, dams would  flood, banks would lose all their money, nuclear

missiles would launch by themselves. They did this  because they were told the end was year, but why?

What exactly caused such a strange worldwide  panic like this one, to arise? If the year

and how it was able to cause such the level  of panic that it did, we first need to discuss

what exactly all of it means. To be clear, world  ending predictions were by no means a new thing,

but no this was something different. Y2K  wasn’t just some Armageddon story made up

by conspiracy theorists, this was actually  something that might have validity to it,

and many people at the time took note of this, and  prepared for the worst. And that’s exactly what

made Y2K such a crazy story. In fact, there were  three big things going on in the 20th century, and

especially the 90s, that were responsible for the  Y2K scare: the exponential growth of technology,

the ambiguity and mystique that was present  behind the brand new personal computer, and the

overwhelming access of information that the world  saw at the end of the century. And these factors

also tie into the origins of the Y2K story; so  what exactly was the story, how did Y2K work?

The answer to this question actually goes farther  back than you might think. The first known mention

of Y2K as a legitimate issue goes back to 1958,  discovered by an IBM employee: Bob Bemer, who was

also one of the most renowned computer scientists  of the 20th century. He proposed his idea during

a time where computers were still brand new,  a lavish and costly byproduct of World War II,

but with time, these machines could become  incredibly sophisticated and part of our everyday

lives, and he recognized this. In 1958, memory  was extremely expensive, and naturally to save

money while maximizing efficiency, they removed  what they thought was redundant information.

And that’s what Y2K was centered on, it all  had to do with how numbers were presented

on a clock; that’s where the term Y2K comes from,  abbreviating “Year 2000.” You see, computers at

the time only took the last two digits of a  year into account when calculating the date,

having the “1-9” at the beginning of each set of  digits just used up more memory than was worth.

The last two digits were more than fine. It is not  like people were looking at these computers to see

what year it was anyway, it was used for logging  and record keeping, and the last two digits were

plenty for that. There were even some computers  that only used one digit to represent the year:

so instead of 1978 you just had 8. I mean  everyone knew it was still the 20th century…but

what would happen as we approached the 21st  century? Well naturally, the year 2000 would have

to be represented as 00, but how would a computer  that only stores the last two digits of a year

react to that? Would it read as 100,  or would it backtrack and read it as 0,

and slowly tick back up as the year’s  progress? Is the year 2001, or 1901?

Now at face value, this probably seems  like a mixed bag in terms of severity.

There were those that saw this as just people  overthinking how a computer operates,

“They’re making too much out of  it. It’s not gonna be anything,

just another day. Of course I may be wrong.” while others saw just how serious the

implications of this could be. “I don’t think we have enough time,

because as the year goes on, supplies  are going to be less and less.”

Keep in mind, even at the time, computers don’t  just store dates and times to be organized and

keep records, they also use these dates and  times to make important calculations with data.

The bank is a great example of this. There were  fears that on Y2K, all of the money in the banks

would be gone, and there’s a valid reason to  think this, and it all has to do with computer

error. It’s not like on January 1, the money would  just disappear from all the safes, but instead the

bank servers and computers would calculate the  money’s interest based on the time and date. If

the computers were to clock back to zero, the  interest would likely be all over the place.

That’s what people feared, and that actually was  the case. On January 1 2000, a man in Germany

very briefly had $6 million in his bank account,  with the transaction for the interest on his

account dating to December 30, 1899. The bank was  calculating all the interest that had compounded

since that date. Now that was just one bank that  didn’t update their software on time. Imagine this

on a global scale. People see their new account  balance, they scream a couple of Eurekas, and now

thousands of people are withdrawing huge amounts  of money at the bank. Or maybe you have the

opposite problem: a bank transaction is read as  being dated 1999, and the computer panics because

it thinks it’s 1900, and calculates the interest  backwards. Now people’s accounts are in overdraft,

they panic sell all their assets, they take  out loans, and now the banks are again empty

that way. This is actually very similar to what  happened with the stock market crash in 1929,

but instead it’s with computer bugs. Not only  that, in Japan, nuclear energy plants actually

had several alarms start to go off a couple  minutes after midnight due to this bug. What if

the same were to happen with missiles, and create  false alarms of a potential nuclear attack?

Now you probably see where the problem  lies, and naturally why people panicked,

and banks and nuclear missiles were only part  of it. All these issues created by the bug would

make the everyday necessities and privileges of  society to malfunction or even cease to exist,

which would lead to anarchy and before you know  it, full out civil war. Y2K would be the quick

domino effect for the end of the world. But let’s  go back a bit, and see what our options are,

because luckily Y2K can be stopped, but it’s going  to take a lot of work, and be very expensive.

This is exactly what people in the late 90s  were thinking. They had to act fast, and in

many respects, they did. There’s a scene from  “Office Space” that actually describes Y2K and

the debug effort perfectly, a film that’s actually  from that era and came out before the year 2000,

an adult comedy unintentionally serves as a  valuable primary source for studying Y2K.

“I sit in a cubicle, and I update  bank software for the 2000 switch.

To save space they use two digits for the date  instead of four, so like 98 instead of 1998. Uh,

so I go through these thousands of lines of  code and uh…it doesn’t really matter.”

But keep in mind just how last minute all of this  was. Back in 1958 people mostly disregarded the

warning proposed by Bemer. Both due to distance  in time and constantly changing technology.

2000 was still 42 years away, we had some time to  worry about it. But as humanity continued putting

it off and procrastinating on fixing the problem,  the date continued to come closer and Y2K was

presenting itself as more of a bigger threat every  day. But people in 1958 assumed that 40 years from

now, the old computers would have been upgraded  by then to acknowledge and fix that problem,

except in many cases, that was not true. Lots  of companies who didn’t feel the need to put

all this effort and money into upgrading their  machines just stuck with the old technology.

As you can clearly see, there’s a bit of a  contradiction here. People believed that in

the future all of the computers and their software  would be updated to fix these problems by then,

but at the same time, a lot of these companies had  no reason to upgrade because the thirty-year-old

machines still worked. People just didn’t know  what to do with all this technology that was

continuously advancing at an unprecedented  rate, and this was apparent with the general

public’s perception of Y2K as well. People  constantly had to adapt to new things and ideas,

to the point where change became almost  routine. Oh, a devastating computer bug

is about to end the world? Might as well prepare  for the worst. It is very easy to underestimate

just how much technology changed during the 20th  century. We went from the horse and buggy to the

Hubble Space Telescope in one lifetime. Jeanne  Calment, who met Vincent Van Gogh when she was

a teenager and was almost in her 40s when the  Titanic sank, lived long enough to use Netscape

Navigator and see Jerry Maguire in theaters.  Technology changes a lot in one hundred years,

and that can be intimidating. The personal computer being used by the masses

was still a new concept, meaning that a lot of  these people didn’t really understand it, or

really care to understand it. The general public  wasn’t putting effort into learning about the

technical details behind the Y2K bug. They were  just living their normal lives, watching the TV

and reading the paper and reading on the internet  what the media was telling them, and that was

the key component which really brought the Y2K  panic to its extreme. Consequently, in the 90s,

you had the rise of fake news. This is not to say  that Y2K was some fabricated and convoluted hoax,

because it wasn’t, but it was embellished.  Consider the amount of money countries spent

on updating software to be Y2K-Proof. The  United States spent so much more money on

Y2K remediation, whereas Italy spent very little,  and both countries experienced roughly the same

level of Y2K problems. But this doesn’t take into  account what Italy spent on government departments

and business testing, which could have been in the  billions. So, yes Y2K was serious and could have

caused some significant problems if not catered  to, but end of the world serious? Probably not.

But this didn’t stop the news from telling people  that airplanes were going to fall out of the sky

and that a worldwide famine would occur. “8! Airlines and trains may come to a hault.”

The 90s were essentially a transitioning  point between having to believe everything

you hear on the news because its all you have, and  anyone being able to write the news. In the 60s,

when televison was still new, you mainly had  people like Walter Cronkite just sitting, in front

of the camera stating the news, stating the facts,  and you had newspapers. The only information you

could really get was from corporate companies who  specialized in research and accuracy. In the 90s,

you had the internet, more news, more information.  You can thank the personal computer for this.

An explosion of easily accessible information and  more people being able to share their opinions

through blogs, online journals, etc. With the  internet, everyone had equal representation,

including the reputable and maybe some of the  more…unconventional. People could post whatever

they want, and gain popularity from it, even  if they were lying. This was the case with Y2K,

you now had a ton of misleading tabloids and news  coverage about how the apocalypse was on its way,

preying on generations of people who were still  used to the old ways of retrieving information.

It was the perfect recipe for disaster. “3! 2! 1! Happy 2000!”

And to many people’s surprise, on January  1 obviously nothing dangerous happened,

and people, shortly after, began to take  note of the sensationalism that had just

occurred. Christian Author Col Stringer put it  eloquently that many preachers who took advantage

of people’s feelings during the Y2K scare never  “apologized for their scare-mongering tactics.”

The same could be applied to the media.

The United States would end up spending  roughly $100 billion on the Y2K Repair Bill,

designed to combat any glitches related to  the 2000 switch. Regardless of how severe

things could have been, Y2K was not fake, it  was avoided. But because computer glitches

are often so unpredictable and can yield  different results depending on the setup,

there is theoretically no way of knowing just how  much damage Y2K could have caused. Whether or not

the United States would have been okay without  the Y2K Repair Bill will always be speculation,

but despite all the fear-mongering Y2K created,  there was some good that came out of it.

It essentially forced thousands of computers  to upgrade to the latest and greatest software,

something that likely wouldn’t have happened for a  long time had a glitch like it not present itself.

It not only prepared people to be more  critical of the things they are told,

but it also taught them to consistently adapt  to an ever-changing world. So, thank you Y2K,

for finally taking us to the  future that we always wanted.

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