Panic and Technology: Y2K Part II?

TIME Magazine's article on Y2K, published in January 1999

            Even if you aren’t a 90s (or earlier) kid, you most likely have at least a vague understanding of what the words “Y2K” mean. A technological apocalypse? A complete societal collapse? Or just a panic fueled by media hype and government organizations printing out Y2K preparedness checklists warning you to have at least three days of food ready at the turn of the century?

            In short, Y2K was a worry surrounding the wide lack of foresight by some computer programmers in the 90s that only allowed two digits for the year when entering a date. In the 90s, computers were many times slower than they are today, and programmers were focused on conserving as many resources as possible when writing code. To put it into perspective, in 1990, Intel revealed their 16-foot-long just-short-of-eleven-million-dollars Touchstone Delta supercomputer, featuring 528 processors running together for a total of 32 gigaflops (floating point operations per second) of computing power. Today, a single $480 Intel consumer-grade i9-9900k processor can offer about 510 gigaflops of performance and can fit in a computer the size of a few textbooks stacked together. Computers today are orders of magnitude faster than they were two or three decades ago, but back then resources were a serious concern.

Back to the software issue, “97,” when entered as a date, would have clearly meant 1997, but what about “00”? A computer wouldn’t recognize that “00” was supposed to mean 2000 as opposed to 1900, which is where the problem lies. Many people feared that this would cause computer-run systems to glitch out or even completely collapse. Banks, water facilities, and power plants are some examples of areas that could have been seriously affected. The president even had a Y2K Conversion Council to assist in seeing that important computer programs were patched before the turn of the century.

            Leading up to the turn of the century, TIME magazine had a lot of coverage surrounding the preparations people had made. Panic was widespread as people bought tons of food and printed out financial documents for safekeeping in preparation for the worst. US businesses spent about $100 billion on repairs to their computer programs to prevent a catastrophe. TIME magazine itself set up a “war room” with food, supplies, and enough equipment to continue publication of the magazine should electricity and communications networks fail. Kyrie Bates, who worked at a Walmart at the time stated to BBC that “we had customers who thought it was the end of everything. Buying 50 gallons of water and other stuff.” Additionally, 46 states had agreed to insurance companies’ requests to remove y2k-related losses from their liabilities. These fears leading up to Y2K were likely exacerbated by news articles such as TIME’s The End of the World as we Know it? article, published in January 1999, on the dangers of the event.  

            Although overdramatic media coverage likely contributed significantly to the widespread panic in anticipation of Y2K, another contributing factor was likely the lack of knowledge surrounding technology. A weak understanding of the main issue behind Y2K could have contributed significantly to the feeling of an upcoming end-of-the-world scenario. Computers were nowhere near as common in the 90s as they are now, and even today there are a lot of concepts that many of us aren’t quite familiar with. A very common example would be viruses: they aren’t nearly as easy to get as many people believe, but many people still use near-useless “cleaning” apps and multiple virus scanners to make sure their computer remains safe without realizing that preinstalled applications like Windows Defender are more than adequate in almost all situations. General knowledge regarding technology today, however, is much greater than it was in the 90s, and will only continue to improve.

     Now that we’ve gone over the society-wide panic associated with Y2K and its causes, it’s time to go over the fun part: this is all going to happen again. The “year 2038 problem”, as many people are calling it, is a time in which 32-bit systems will quite literally run out of time. On January 19^th, 32-bit systems will have used up the entirety of their 32-bit binary integer used to store time. 32-bit time starts on January 1^st, 1970, and adds one tick every second since then. When it inevitably runs out of space in 2038, system clocks will loop back to December 13^th 1901. Computers are, in the most basic sense, extremely complicated clocks, so when time runs out it will result in chaos. Luckily the problem won’t be as widespread as Y2K: desktops have been running 64-bit processors for a long time now and smartphones made the transition around 2014. The main worry will be older facilities such as power plants or low-level management systems and appliances.  

     It will be interesting to see how much of a reaction there will be in the years leading up to 2038. Will people treat it like an apocalypse-like event again, or will our increased knowledge of technology keep ourselves grounded in the reality that it probably won’t be as big of an issue as some of us think it will be?

Works Cited

Rothman, Lily. “New Year's Eve 15 Years Ago: How We Prepped for Y2K.” Time, Time, 31 Dec.      
     2014, time.com/3645828/y2k-look-back/.

“TALKING POINT | Y2K: Overhyped and Oversold?” BBC News, BBC, 6 Jan. 2000, 
     news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/586938.stm#say.

“1990 | Timeline of Computer History.” Computer History Museum, 
     www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1990/.

“Intel Core i9-9900K : Performance in GFLOPS.” WebOrus, weborus.com/intel-core-i9-9900k-
     performance-gflops/.

Hamilton, Denise. “New Supercomputer at Caltech Ranks as the World's Fastest.” Los Angeles 
     Times, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 1991, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-01-me-2356-
     story.html.

Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. “Y2K Repair Bill: $100 Billion.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 18 
     Nov. 1999, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-11/18/077r-111899-idx.html.