- If you're a millennial or older, you probably remember
the mass panic that descended on the world at
the end of the 20th century.
The simply named, "Y2K problem" threatened
to destroy computing as we knew it.
Newscasters predicted that banks would collapse,
hospitals would fail, planes would fall out of the sky,
and anything connected to a computer,
and really, anything powered by electricity, was expected
to stop working, unless immediate actions were taken
to prevent the dreaded "Millennium Bug".
The problem at the time was fairly straightforward.
Most programs written by that point represented the year
with just the last two digits.
1998 was represented as "98", 1999 as "99", and so on.
The reason for this dates back
to the earliest days of computing,
in the 1960s, when the cost for memory was as high
as one dollar per bit.
Translated to today, a single iPhone's 4GB memory
would cost $32 billion,
or a quarter of a trillion dollars
when adjusted for inflation.
So, anytime programmers could use fewer bits
it was immensely cost saving.
If you could represent the date
and save two dollars every time,
the choice to use just the last two digits was a no-brainer.
But fast forward 40 years, and now it's New Year's Eve
in 1999 and your alarm clock, microwave, train timetable,
and life support machine are all about
to think that the next day is January 1st, 1900.
And this was expected to cause widespread crashes, ranging
from inconvenient to totally devastating.
If a plane takes off on autopilot in 1999, how does it know
to land in the year 2000 if its onboard computer says 1900?
At the time, it was kind of a ridiculous way
to look at computer processing,
but when facing a global worst-case scenario,
people were pretty freaked out that planes would
just start to fall out of the sky.
As a result of the panic, a huge effort to patch
and update computer systems was enacted.
A number of governments passed legislation
to promote and fund the changeover.
In the US, Congress passed the Year 2000 Information
and Readiness Disclosure Act,
and each federal agency had its own Y2K task force.
By the time the clock struck midnight in the year 2000,
it was estimated that between $100 billion
and $300 billion were spent mitigating the problem.
So, what happened?
Well, from the view of popular culture, nothing.
In the two decades since, Y2K is regarded as a joke,
an overblown hysteria with nothing to show for
the money spent and the panic it caused.
That may be what you believe after the collective sigh
of relief on January 1st, 2000.
But you and pop culture historians are wrong.
First of all the view that nothing went wrong as
a result of Y2K is incorrect.
One very sad result was that the UK's National Health Service
made a significant miscalculation
in a test that notified expectant mothers
of their child's risk for Down Syndrome.
The Y2K bug caused the test to calculate
the mother's age incorrectly.
So, tests performed between January and May of 2000 led
to 154 false results.
Four children with Down Syndrome were born
to women who had been told that they were low-risk,
and two terminations were performed
on women who were deemed high-risk.
And that wasn't the only negative effect on January 1st.
In South Korea, nearly 1000 families had their heat go out
in the dead of winter due to the bug,
and it was reported that in Egypt, multiple
dialysis machines stopped working.
But the long-term impact of Y2K wasn't just
the few failures, more importantly,
it was the many successes.
Y2K was arguably the first ever mass audit
of a global computing network
that had been running for decades.
In the process of patching the date bug,
programmers discovered countless other bugs
as they combed through the code serving as a backbone for
the internal and external network that we all use today.
The redundancies put into place were not only necessary,
but turned out to be literally life saving.
For example, the robustness
of New York City's telecommunications and transit
in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks
has been attributed to the amount of work put
into avoiding the Y2K bug.
A number of redundancies and audits that were not
in effect before Y2K have been credited with helping
the recovery efforts from being overwhelmed on 9/11.
The long and short of it is that Y2K is widely considered
an example of over-preparation with nothing to show for it.
But like many efforts to avoid disaster,
the best case scenario is that nobody feels
the effects at all.
Sure, it was unlikely that planes
would literally fall out of the sky,
but had nothing been done at all,
it's not unlikely that major computer systems
would have failed.
The few failures that did occur were easy
to deal with because everything else was working,
but if those failures occurred everywhere,
and all at once, the reaction could
have been exponentially worse,
and much, much harder to fix.
The lasting moral of Y2K shouldn't be
of an overblown panic, but of a successful
and necessary global effort to avoid a known problem.
The lessons we learned are applicable even today,
but with the mocking view of the millennium problem,
we may not be motivated enough to act on them anymore.
(light music)