The story seared into our collective consciousness about the Y2K boner is that the geniuses who conjured up the mayhem of the internet didn’t fucking plan for the whole shebang to last longer than disco. The turn of the millennium came with vague, ominous warnings that… something… would happen because of decades old lazy coding. Something bad. Big bad. But we partied like it was 1999 until it wasn’t, and our robot overlords kept humming along, business as usual. Right?
Well.
Today’s Moment of Science… Y2K.
Everyone over the age of ‘my lower back always hurts’ remembers when bytes of storage were so scarce you had to choose between tits or ass for your “definitely not tits and ass” folder. There are endless options for storing terabytes of your life now, but in the nineties? Your computer got a couple of gigabytes of storage and you were goddamn amazed.
Storage capacity in the decades before microprocessors was orders of magnitude lower, and editing out every possible unnecessary digit of data was understandable. If that meant files and programs didn’t have a century marker attached to them, meh. After the year of our Lord 1931, people wouldn’t easily mistake it for the day or month. So for whom would that effort and precious storage space from adding in those two digits be even remotely helpful?
Computers, it would seem.
Computers are only as smart or as dumb as you tell them to be. Write a program with only two digits for years and a computer will take your word for it. It’s not a miracle machine that instinctively understands how we time our lives based on the movements of the cosmos. It’s a glitchy box of wires that we use to watch videos of strangers fucking.
The “oh goddamn shit fuck we need to unfuck this” effort started as early as the 1950s. Computer scientist Bob Bemer, better known for his later contributions standardizing ASCII, had done some genealogical cataloging for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. An understanding that people were born in a previous century and, hear me out, would be born in a future century likely convinced him that using the full year was worth it long term, extra bytes be damned.
It was 1971 when Bemer first wrote about the potential for impending problems if dates were coded with just two digits for the year. Early on, he was more successful at garnering mockery for alarmism than in impressing upon anyone that this was a pre-inflicted wound. He’d even brought the problem to the attention of the Pentagon and they were like “sir please don’t insult us by suggesting the Pentagon ever has or ever will use intelligence.”
To be fair, it was fucking 1971. This was a full decade before you had a rich kid friend with a computer. At the time, ‘big computer glitch next millennium’ was about as concerning to most people as the eighteen paragraphs before the recipe in a food blog is now.
Then computers happened. To everything.
With warnings of outcomes ranging from annoying to catastrophic, it’s estimated that between $300 and $500 billion was spent worldwide updating systems that hadn’t proactively used four digit years. Various corners of the financial sector were on board early. Bonds were set to mature after the turn of the millennium, and it was a fair guess that investors would be a tad annoyed to get a -100 years of interest due to glitch. From 1987 to 1995, the New York Stock Exchange threw approximately $30 million and a small army of programmers at their preparations for Y2K.
It’s not possible to know exactly what the results of this would have been without the massive and costly effort. For fair comparison, it’s been pointed out that in countries like South Korea, Italy, and Russia, they barely tossed a dime at the issue and didn’t see too many more problems with proprietary software than other countries did.
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any problems.
Even with all the money thrown at the issue, plenty of systems got cheap, temporary patches that worked until they didn’t. With a patch planned to last exactly twenty years in some cases, the problem didn’t go away, it was just delayed until 01/01/20. At which time, cash registers from Polish firm Novitus stopped functioning because fuck you, it’s obviously 1920, that’s why. Cox cable sent out bills dated January of 1920. Parking meters in New York City were refusing credit cards because they couldn’t take cards that were obviously from time travelers.
There were also multiple ‘glitches’ reported at nuclear energy facilities attributed to the Y2K bug, both in testing for Y2K readiness and after the new year. None of these caused any injuries or safety problems, but it certainly makes the preparations feel worth it.
While I’m sure some systems are fixed for good now, there are other time sensitive programming issues on the horizon. I’ll be keeping an eye out for some computers to be just as dumb as their human overlords.
This has been your Moment of Science, assuring you that I’m more than a glitch in the matrix.
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