The Computer Bug That Almost Ended The World | The Y2k Debacle

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The year 2000 was going to be very special, for a multitude of reasons. We were entering into a new millennium, a new era, a year that only existed in Science-Fiction stories. This was by no means a conventional New Year. It was finally the future, but maybe not the future everyone was anticipating. Millions of people around the world spent their last moments in the 1900s staring at the clock, but not for the reason that you think. Instead of celebrating, they were terrified, because as soon as the clock struck midnight, the world was going to end, and within the blink of an eye, the year 2000 would instead be a future now past.
Word had been going around about this upcoming event for years now. The public even coined a name for this phenomenon: Y2K, and as the late 1990s creeped up and the year 2000 approached, people crowded up stores across the world and lined up to buy food, water, weapons, and supplies to create survival kits, because on this date, according to many credible sources, computers would malfunction, prison gates would open, dams would flood, banks would lose all their money, nuclear missiles would launch by themselves. They did this because they were told the end was year, but why? What exactly caused such a strange worldwide panic like this one, to arise? If the year 2000 was so dangerous, how are we still here?
To fully understand the curious story behind Y2K and how it was able to cause such the level of panic that it did, we first need to discuss what exactly all of it means. To be clear, world ending predictions were by no means a new thing, but no this was something different. Y2K wasn’t just some Armageddon story made up by conspiracy theorists, this was actually something that might have validity to it, and many people at the time took note of this, and prepared for the worst. And that’s exactly what made Y2K such a crazy story. In fact, there were three big things going on in the 20th century, and especially the 90s, that were responsible for the Y2K scare: the exponential growth of technology, the ambiguity and mystique that was present behind the brand new personal computer, and the overwhelming access of information that the world saw at the end of the century. And these factors also tie into the origins of the Y2K story; so what exactly was the story, how did Y2K work? The answer to this question actually goes farther back than you might think. The first known mention of Y2K as a legitimate issue goes back to 1958, discovered by an IBM employee: Bob Bemer, who was also one of the most renowned computer scientists of the 20th century. He proposed his idea during a time where computers were still brand new, a lavish and costly byproduct of World War II, but with time, these machines could become incredibly sophisticated and part of our everyday lives, and he recognized this. In 1958, memory was extremely expensive, and naturally to save money while maximizing efficiency, they removed what they thought was redundant information. And that’s what Y2K was centered on, it all had to do with how numbers were presented on a clock; that’s where the term Y2K comes from, abbreviating “Year 2000.” You see, computers at the time only took the last two digits of a year into account when calculating the date, having the “1-9” at the beginning of each set of digits just used up more memory than was worth. The last two digits were more than fine. It is not like people were looking at these computers to see what year it was anyway, it was used for logging and record keeping, and the last two digits were plenty for that. There were even some computers that only used one digit to represent the year: so instead of 1978 you just had 8. I mean everyone knew it was still the 20th century…but what would happen as we approached the 21st century? Well naturally, the year 2000 would have to be represented as 00, but how would a computer that only stores the last two digits of a year react to that? Would it read as 100, or would it backtrack and read it as 0, and slowly tick back up as the year’s progress? Is the year 2001, or 1901?

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