Grab your radiation suit and head for the hills, David Hayward recalls the turn of the new century
Fifteen years ago today, panic ensued. In a matter of days, so it was claimed, planes would fall out of the sky. The financial industry would collapse, and all money and property would be null and void. There would rioting and the collapse of society as we know it. And this is our personal favourite: the nuclear weaponry of a dozen warmongering nations would suddenly become active and rocket toward their 1980s cold war targets.
Obviously, since we're sitting here on the brink on 2015, none of those doom and gloom prophesies actually happened.
In fact, in the grand history of prophetic no-shows, the year 2000 bug comes joint first with the 2012 predictions.
It's a funny thing, the Y2K bug (or Millennium bug if you prefer). Now we can look back at it while suppressing a little giggle at those who bunkered down in the hills in preparation for the end of the world. But it was thought a simple date change could cause much grief. The Faulty Date Logic dictated that when the stroke of midnight occurred, every computer would revert back to 1900 or 19100 and complete failure would commence.
Its History
The core of the year 2000 bug was purely down to shortening the year, from say 1999 to 99. When 2000 would crop up, the result would be 00 and the since computers (or rather their operators) had always assumed that the prefix would be 19-something, the date would be therefore be known as 1900.
The bug itself would then interpret the date as a true fault to the system and either shut down, which isn't so good for nuclear power plants, or malfunction when a program was called on to check the date/ time syntax. There was also another theory that had some computer system see the date change error as an attack, resulting in the system responding with a defensive shutdown or a retaliation.
To combat the problem, a global update and patching contract was conducted by virtually every organisation and company on the planet. The cost would eventually rise as high as £600 billion, and when the stroke of midnight hit the Eastern coast of Australia, all eyes were firmly glued to see what would happen next.
As well we know, nothing much happened at all. There were a few instances of a malfunction in timekeeping data, but the majority of the doom-mongering was left for another day.
The Good
The fact that we're all alive is pretty good. Personally, we didn't fancy much being the potential survivors of a nuclear war.
Another good point was that a lot of us in the technical arena at the time could command ludicrous hourly rates for staying in the server rooms over midnight, while everyone else partied away.
The fact that we were earning in excess of £500 per hour meant we didn't give a monkeys how drunk the outside world was, as we would soon be able to buy a new car.
The Bad
There were a few issues relating to Y2K. Some credit card transactions failed, a few people were called to court in 1900, and a nuclear power plant in Japan stopped radiation monitoring on the 00:00 batch process.
The other bad, of course, was the enormous cost of the entire affair. Which was quite a lot.
Conclusion
To sum Y2K up perfectly, Ayodele Adewale of Nigera commented, "Y2K makes no difference in Nigeria. We do not normally have light or water, so if we do now, it must be a bonus!"
Did You Know...
• The US Naval Observatory reported a date of 19100.
• Bus ticket machines failed in Australia.
• Lowestoft had a really cool firework display on the beach.
• An Italian telecoms company sent out bills dating back from 1900 to 1999.
• NORAD picked up three missile signatures launched from Russia.
• Apparently, the Commodore 64 was Y2K safe by default.