Malagasy Rain

Would someone please tell me exactly what caused the craziness during late 1999 concerning the new millenium? Was the madness borne by widespread fear and ignorance or was it reasonable to believe that we would revert to primitive times? I have a good mind to believe it was our gullibility (or stupidity).

Godless Dave

Gullibility. Virtually every computer expert I heard said it was all a lot of hype, but the press kept hyping it.

Nickle

"You never know syndrome." Nothing new.

Malagasy Rain

Now why would the press do something like that?

Godless Dave

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Sakpo

The capitalist media works to keep people worried and afraid about all sorts of nonsense, in part because such sensationalistic journalism leads to higher ratings, and thus direct money (from higher advertising rates gained from higher ratings, and nonsense stories rarely reflect poorly on advertisers/the other financial interests of the media conglomerates/owners and shareholders of media conglomerates), and also because it distracts most people from more pressing issues. Most of the output of the corporate press would best be labelled "infotainment." The mainstream media is a great method by which the elites can shape popular sentiment, and filter the issues most people do and do not think about, and often determine that thinking through selective use of information and outright deception.

Toto

Sigh. How soon they forget.

In 1998, there was a reasonable possibility that the so-called Y2K bug would cause a lot of problems for American business and government. In the first wave of computerization, dates were all expressed in YYMMDD format - that is, using only two digits for the year, so Jan 1, 1975 was recorded as 750101. This date format was written into military specifications, and followed in most commercial applications. Everyone knew that this was going to cause a problem on Jan 1, 2000, because the computer programs would automatically assume that 000101 was 100 years before 991231. However, everyone wanted to put off fixing the problem - it wasn't exciting enough.

Godless Dave says that the computer experts he talked to said it was all hype. It should be clear that this was primarily a mainframe problem with older code, not a PC problem. All of that older code was supposed to be replaced with newer systems - but it hadn't been.

By about 1996, it seemed that corporate executives were not taking the Y2K problem seriously enough. The only way to get people's attention is to predict disaster, so a few computer gurus started writing about all of the financial and physical disasters that might happen if businesses did start spending large sums of money fixing the Y2K bug. There were dire predictions of computer crashes, not enough computer programmers to go through all the code, business failures, lawsuits agains the corporate executives who ignored the problem. Congressional hearings were held.

A Christian Reconstructionist investment counsellor named Gary North decided that the Y2K bug was God's way of punishing secular humanist scientists and the capitalists who relied on them. This was in the early stages of the internet, and he set up a web page that predicted disaster, and collected stories about the Y2K problem. (North had previously predicted that a computer virus would bring down the banking system, and that the AIDS virus would bring down the health care system.) Another internet pioneer, who had been laid off from his job working on a mainframe, was convinced that American business was too inefficient too fix the problem, and modern capitalism would collapse.

Anyone who was close to American programming at the time knew that a disaster was a possibility.

These groups acted like an echo chamber, and amplified all the talk of problems. But by 1999, at least some of the computer gurus decided that they had had the desired effect, and corporations had responded and the problem would be manageable if not actually solved, and tried to dampen down the hysteria - but by that time, things had a life of their own. Since no one could be sure what was going to happen, it seened reasonable to lay in some supplies in case the electric utilities had problems, and avoid flying on Dec 31, 1999.

By Jan 1, 2000, every computer programmer in the US was on standby, ready to fix any remaining problems, and disaster was averted, with a pretty wide margin.

Gary North had build himself a compound where he could raise his own food and weather out the urban riots he figured were coming. He disappeared for a while, but is back selling investment advice. Pat Robertson sold a lot of Y2K supplies to his flock (and then claimed that his prayers had prevented the disaster.) A lot of computer programmers made a lot of money.

So it wasn't all hype.

Godless Dave

I think the hype was regarding what kind of "disaster" we could expect. The worst I anticipated was people's bank accounts getting screwed up and things of that nature. IMO the predictions of power plants shutting down and airplanes falling out of the sky were groundless and ridiculous.

ImGod

I work in the power industry and Y2K was a lot of extra work. Everyone was so afraid the power would go out. I briefly worked on a Y2K audit project for a power utility and talk about useless.

Some Y2K consulting company had sold the utility an action plan that we needed to follow that included all support documentation. The funny part was the plant we audited was a 1950s vintage plant that had no computer control. Our job was to contact equipment manufacturers and ask them what their Y2K plan was for their equipment so we could certify it OK. Fifty years is a long time. I have never been laughed at more in my life then during that week.

Try calling a company and requesting their Y2K modifications for a piece of equipment supplied 50 years ago that operates on manual feedback. We very quietly joked that the action plan forgot to get Y2K certification for the light bulbs. Quietly, because they would add anything to the checklist to increase consulting fees.

Oh well, it paid the bills.

Ottman Out

I agree. Actually, the banks in Canada were quite proactive, at least according to the info they released to the public, and were ready well in advance. And nothing bad happened.

Keep in mind that a date in and of itself would not be a problem. The problem would only happen if the software compared dates or did some date arithmetic. For instance, is 01jan2000 before 31dec1999? Well, the software might think so if it stores the dates as 000101 and 991231.

So why were people saying that elevators might stop working at midnight? I've never written software for elevators, but couldn't imagine that there would be many dates in it. The claim was that there was a check that would prevent the elevator from working if it hadn't been maintained in a while. That is a possibility, but surely this check wouldn't be carried out while the elevator was full of people between floors?

Anyway, there was a whole bunch of stuff like that. Another tale was that cash registers would stop working, so no one would be able to buy food. This wasn't very plausible, since one would expect that simply restarting the cash register on Jan. 1 would fix any problems. In any case, if I were the store manager and the cash registers weren't working, I'd figure something out.

There were people who made a lot of money as Y2K consultants and doomsayers. There was probably an informal competition to come up with the longest list of problems, since having a more dramatic story to tell would get you more media attention (which would create more hysteria).