Hong Kong stockpiled meals, Virgin America grounded flights, and the U.S. Federal Reserve printed $50 billion in extra cash, all in preparation for a date change. This was no easy turning of the calendar web page although — it was Y2K and your complete globe was on edge as Jan. 1, 2000 drew close to, anxious the world’s computer systems wouldn’t acknowledge the brand new century and catastrophically glitch. Fears of practice crashes, disappearing financial institution knowledge, energy outages, and even nuclear meltdowns permeated many minds.
The panic was overblown, in fact, and the Earth stored turning on Jan. 1. There was certainly trigger for concern however by the point New Yr’s Eve 1999 approached, risk ranges had been comparatively low, remembers Chris Taylor, Mashable’s senior editor and, a quarter-century in the past, one in every of TIME journal’s journalists on the Y2K beat. Taylor chronicled the code conundrum that started within the mid-Twentieth century when programmers wrote two-digit numbers to point years, largely to save lots of area on the punch playing cards utilized in COBOL, an early laptop programming language.
“It was the middle of the century, and nobody cared much about what would happen at the click of the cosmic odometer,” Taylor wrote in a Jan. 1999 concern of TIME. “But today the world runs on computers, and older machines run on jury-rigged versions of COBOL that may well crash or go senile when they hit a double-zero date.”
The information story of the millennium
In his reporting from 25 years in the past, Taylor tamped down Y2K panic and famous how programmers had been working to improve the code for a few years main as much as the date change. Largely forgotten now’s that there was a minor dry run for Y2K a couple of months previous to the actual factor.
“We didn’t fear the new year so much because there was a big test and that was 9/9/99, a number that often meant ‘end of program’ on many computers; people would just create 9999 codes to file [programs] away,” Taylor says. Sept. 9 (and Sept. 10) went off with out a hitch.
Taylor admits that some within the media took liberties with the perceived risk.
“The White House was already acting, Congress was already acting, [Y2K] was already a known thing but I think we elevated it to a level of mainstream panic,” Taylor says of some journalists on the time. “[On TIME’s Jan. 1999 cover] there’s a picture with a guy with a sandwich board, he kind of looks like Jesus, and he’s holding a cross. And the sandwich board reads, ‘End of the world!?! Apocalypse Now, will computers melt down? Will society? A guide to MILLENNIUM MADNESS.’”
Mashable Prime Tales
TIME’s Jan. 18, 1999 cowl
Credit score: Courtesy TIME
TIME‘s cowl story did suggest restraint, finally. Writer Richard Lacayo admitted “to the extent there is some consensus among sensible experts is that the dire predictions of major social disruptions are way overblown. The most likely problems involve temporary glitches, especially overseas, and billing and invoice systems that can cause some disruptions in business and government.” That passage is 5 pages into the story, although.
Editors seeking to promote magazines weren’t the one ones hyping up the millennium bug. Hollywood obtained into it too in ’99, releasing two catastrophe movies — a TV film and a straight-to-video manufacturing — that had been each known as Y2K.
Diagnosing the panic
The TIME cowl with the doomsday prepper and his sandwich board was becoming, Taylor says, since a lot of the Y2K hysteria was wrapped up in non secular paranoia, with the date ostensibly coming 2,000 years after Jesus’ delivery.
“If you want to have a computer bug that would spread widespread panic, have it coincide with a change from 1999 to 2000 where people were already freaking out about in an apocalyptic sense,” Taylor says. “I was actually in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1999; I was part of the crew dropping confetti on the crowd and I wrote [in my diary], ‘There was a sense that something might happen; that [New Year’s Eve 1999 was] ground zero for nuts.'”
Whereas worries over disruptions and human responses to them had been on the coronary heart of Y2K jitters, there additionally was a creepy realization that know-how had absolutely infiltrated trendy life, Taylor says. “That techno fear,” he says. “The fear that computers would do what the computer did in War Games and launch a nuclear war. Another thing we forget in our miraculous world of tablets and smartphones and things that just work is that they just didn’t work then, so often. And we were right to regard [tech] with suspicion.”
Then and now
Although governments, the banking business, and transportation methods knew in regards to the Y2K risk for many years, they lastly took it significantly within the ’90s. Nonetheless, late because it was, the Herculean preparation was spectacular, Taylor remembers.
“People jumped into action,” he says. “There was a report within the Senate [from the United States Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem]. There was this bipartisan effort to throw cash on the downside to wash it up.”
That urgency is lacking 25 years later, because the AI revolution modifications how we study, work, and talk.
“With Y2K, the problem was easy, we totally understood it. We didn’t put enough digits in the date field when we were programming computers,” Taylor says. “With AI, it seems like we don’t even understand what we’re talking about. No one’s even on the same page. Some of us say AI is the greatest threat to mankind and others point out it’s barely got the complexities of an insect brain. It seems very appropriate for our time that we can’t even agree on the basic structure of reality any more.”
Taylor says “we’re not approaching AI with the same collective action” as with Y2K, however he additionally would not view our trendy considerations in apocalyptic phrases: “The world is always ending, the end is always near.”
