Let’s fast forward to Tuesday, January 19th, 2038.
0-3-1-4-0-7 UTC.
The internet is buzzing about a potential computer apocalypse called the Year 2038 bug.
The year 2038 will cause nearly every modern computer to stop working if we don’t prepare
for it.
It’s a tech time bomb that could affect computers and smartphones that year, and may
-- or may not - have disastrous consequences.
Sound familiar?
It’s called the Y2K, or Year 2000 bug.
It’s a problem that some fear could cripple the nation.
Now this is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts.
While computer experts had known about the Y2K bug since the 1960s, it wasn’t until
the 1990s that their fears became increasingly public.
I mean, this is the biggest, dumbest, stupidest, most idiotic blunder in the history of technology.
See that YY right there?
That’s the year in two digits.
1998 reads only as 98 to a computer chip.
Come the year 2000, many computers will assume 00 means the year 1900, back to the future.
Programmers only used two digits for two reasons.
One, they didn’t have a lot of memory space for their programs.
And secondly, they never imagined their software would last as long as it did.
We got specifics today on how ill-prepared America’s computers are for the year 2000.
Today a Senate panel reported that up to 40 percent of the country could be hit by power
failures on New Year’s 2000 because computers get confused.
You wouldn’t want to be in an airplane, you wouldn’t want to be in an elevator,
and you wouldn’t want to be in a hospital.
There is a significant risk, a 40 percent risk, of a global recession.
By 1998, President Bill Clinton moved to quell the fears by creating a Council on Year 2000
Conversion.
He put John Koskinen, a high-level government administrator, in charge.
The cry went up from the hill that the administration was not paying enough attention, there was
not a coordinated effort.
And there needed to be somebody in control.
I only halfway facetiously said, the President gave me an office, an assistant and said,
don’t let the world stop.
We knew finance and telecommunications systems were going to be the ones most at risk.
But also the FAA had a legitimate problem.
IBM sent them a letter that said, these systems won’t work when the transition comes and
there’s no way to fix them.
Social Security had 50 million lines of code.
It’s a mind-boggling number to think about, and that was replicated.
Embedded computer chips in everything from VCRs to power plants were also thought to
be vulnerable.
The life of this baby depends on computer chips, they’re embedded in the machines
that monitor his heart rate and the question is, will they work on January 1st, 2000?
On the nightly news, reporters scrambled to translate the scale of the problem into simple
terms.
Imagine someone told you you had to find and replace every bolt in the Brooklyn Bridge.
That’s daunting but doable.
Now imagine you have to find and replace every bolt in every bridge in America and then the
world, and you only have 21 months to do it.
The easy to understand risk was the system stops.
The more insidious risk was – and that’s what worried people about their bank accounts
– is the system keeps running, it’s just got bad data.
The fix to the code was fairly simple you just had to go through and every place it
said two digits you had to give it instructions to say four.
But poring through reams of old software code to find each and every date reference was
a labor-intensive process.
We simply did not have enough programmers in the United States who could do this.
One of the surprises of the Y2K problem was it gave a boost to outsourcing software work
to India.
We were becoming increasingly interconnected.
So, fixing just part of the problem wasn’t going to help you if everybody else wasn’t
fixing their part of the problem.
So on the one hand you’d like to declare a national emergency to make sure the small,
medium-sized companies, everybody in the supply chain pays attention.
But the minute you do that, you’re going to panic the public.
The millennium bug will affect every business in the UK.
In the spring of ‘99 the British put out a big public warning.
If you rely on any form of technology, this issue affects you.
It was always a concern to me that the panic would spread.
Because once you start warning people and scaring them, it’s a little hard to get
them off the ledge.
By the fall of 1999, Koskinen was promoting a different message.
He was sure that his team would successfully orchestrate a fix for the Y2K bug.
Are you really confident that you are all ready?
We’re confident that the basic infrastructure of the United States is going to function
effectively.
But by the time Koskinen got the message out, the American psyche had already been invaded
by another kind of bug.
The bug in our cultural software – our beliefs about the millennium – were much more serious
than the technical problem.
This is usually a slow time for Hinkley Springs, but not this year.
Their retail business doubled.
And delivery to homes and offices: up thirty percent.
The risk by the last six months of ’99 was there’d be a run on the bank, there’d
be a run on gas, there’d be a run on food.
That was as big a concern for us as anything.
Surf through the Internet these days and you keep coming across a strange new word: TEOTWAWKI.
The word stands for The End of The World As We Know It.
That’s a sound that gets your attention real quick.
By the fall of 1999, news stories reported a spike in gun sales, scammers preying on
a confused public…
He said, yeah I’m calling from Bank Boston, and I need to get decals mailed to you so
you can put them on your credit card, or they won’t work after Y2K.
…and survivalists taking extreme measures in anticipation of the millennium.
Gary North has his own natural gas well.
He says it’s his ticket for survival.
That cheers me up!
And for thousands of Americans, the millennium evoked fears of a coming apocalypse.
I believe Y2K may be God’s instrument to shake this nation, humble this nation, awaken
this nation and from this nation start revival that spreads the face of the earth before
the Rapture of the Church.
American society has a very deep well of belief in the imminent end of the world, and the
three zeroes triggered all of that.
Everybody saw in the Y2K tea leaves whatever it is they wanted to see.
3…
2…
1…
Happy 2000!
The arrival of Y2K did not bring the much anticipated
and feared computer meltdown.
It appears to have been more of a prankster than a real problem.
Things couldn’t be going more smoothly, so smoothly some are even asking if all that
preparing was necessary.
Certainly the flu bug has affected us much more than the Y2K bug, which I think is probably
nonexistent.
You never get credit for the disasters you avert, especially if you’re a programmer
and nobody understands what you’re doing to begin with.
We have sort of a lack of confidence that things can get done.
People did not grasp the magnitude of the effort.
The easier thing to keep in your mind was, all that noise about it and nothing happened,
it must have just been a hoax.
The Senate’s final report on Y2K found that government and industry did successfully avert
a crisis – at an estimated cost of $100 billion dollars.
But was the response excessive?
One research group estimated that government and industry overspent by nearly thirty percent.
My answer to people who said, well they wasted a lot of money, was the number of things that
happened, that went wrong, that fortunately were around the edges, demonstrated that if
you didn’t fix the systems it wouldn’t work automatically.
There were some minor glitches after Y2K, but it turned out not everything needed to
be fixed, including most embedded chips.
Looking back on Y2K today, Koskinen sees enduring value in the systems put into place to prepare
for the worst-case scenario.
When 9/11 hit on that Tuesday, financial markets were able to open the following Monday because
in 1998 and ‘99 they had developed tests and scripts for testing all the interconnections
and all the trade data between all of the major players.
Without that ability to test systems and make sure that the markets and every transaction
could open and close with all of the counterparties, it would have been weeks before the financial
markets would have been able to comfortably open.
We have little Y2Ks happening all the time.
Technologies are always created for one reason but end up being used for an application that
the creator could never imagine.