Y2K: A Retrospective of the End of Time
As 2024 draws to a close, I thought it would only be appropriate to take some time to reflect. I’m sure by this point you’ve realized it, but in case you haven’t allow me to make you feel really old by saying that this marks the 25th anniversary of Y2K. Let’s take a trip back in time and reflect on what happened, where we are now, and what people experienced back then.
What was the year 2000 problem?
Much of this has been covered pretty well in a number of other technical and mainstream news sites over the years, so I will keep my explanation concise. The year 2000 problem, abreviated Y2K, was the coloquial term used to describe a technical issue known as century date change. It was a condition caused by truncating the date in computer software from the mid-to-late 20th century from a four digit year (i.e. 1995) to a two digit year (i.e. 95). While we might read the year as 95 in a particular context and understand that it means, for a computer it could lead to a logic error as the century date rolls over. Will the computer understand that 01/01/00 following 12/31/99 is January 1, 2000? Or will it think it's January 1, 1900? Or will it freak out, thinking it's a null value, and just break everything? That uncertainty, warranted or not, was what caused Y2K to be one of the biggest cultural milestones of my lifetime.
From procrastonation to panic
The origin of the Y2K bug was way back at the dawn of computer programming. Back then, storage and memory were very -- and I mean VERY -- limited. Every bit counted and programmers made every effort to keep their programs lean. This included shortening dates. Originally, they used a single-digit year; so instead of 1968, they just used 8. However, it wasn't long before they switched it up to a two-digit system and everything was fine. They assumed future developers would eventually switch to using four-digit years and organizations would update their systems and software long before the year 2000.
Fast forward to the late 1980s and many institutions were still using the same systems and software practices that had been developed two decades earlier. Two-digit years were still the norm and now people started to take notice. The 1984 book Computers in Crisis: How to Avert the Coming Worldwide Computer Systems Collapse by Jerome and Marilyn Murray -- republished in 1996 as The Year 2000 Computing Crisis: A Millennium Date Conversion Plan -- is perhaps the most notable book on the topic these days, and it is commonly referenced in articles and videos regarding Y2K. The book was filled with technical details about how to go about identifying and fixing the issue.
As we progressed into the '90s, more and more people began to take notice of this looming crisis. From pundits and politicians to pastors and preppers, there were a legion of doomsayers heralding the imminent demise of the developed world. Unfortunately I cannot embed the video, but I would encourage you to check out this video uploaded to Vimeo by Perry Chen with a lot of clips from the time.
Market dominance
It should come as no real surprise that as the Y2K fears simmered, people stepped in to fill a new gap in the market. It wouldn't be long before bookstore shelves had a healthy selection of survival guides, investment strategies to benefit from the bug, religious warnings, cookbooks, and programming guides.
I’ll be honest, this one is my favorite. That dude just looks like an absolute legend…
Y2K survival kits were also available, like this gem from becalm.com. Their "Ultimate Y2K survival kit" which included items such as the "Sunburst" -- a wind-up/solar powered radio flashlight, a "video resource guide with REAL advice from leading experts", a "diagnostic computer program to test your PC", and three soup samples from another company you can buy emergency food from. All of that for only $49.95! -- that's roughly $95 today.
I’ve seen other videos boasting cans of Y2K seeds, though apparently in 2024 Y2K seeds have something to do with the cannabis industry so I couldn’t find the original source to share here.
A 1999 report from the Violence Policy Center also described a sharp rise in firearm sales, and specifically the marketing of “Y2K guns”. The report reads:
Several manufacturers have released special edition Y2K guns, including the Bushmaster Y2K Limited Edition AR-15 assault rifle and the Wilson Combat Millennium Protector .45 pistol. One Wilson Combat ad promises, "The new Millennium Protector will give you security and peace of mind in these uncertain times with its accuracy, total reliability and fast handling.”
And of course, there were Y2K inspired TV specials such as NBC’s Y2K: The Movie which I recently reviewed if you haven’t read that already.
What was it really like?
In the final days of 1999, everything came to a fever pitch as both excitement and fear mounted. It was a time of both hope for the new millennium, and uncertainty about what would happen if the warnings were right. But in the lead up to Y2K, people’s experiences varied greatly and so I reached out to the community to hear your stories. To my chagrin, many of you were tech workers at the time and actually helped fix the Y2K problem — which is pretty flingin’ awesome, and we thank you for your efforts.
stijn9999 said:
“Well, In 1999 I was working as a junior hardware engineer for DEC Belgium (taken by CPQ and HP later on). That year I performed BIOS updates for hundreds of DEC-servers. Replaced a lot of floppy diskdrives...💾💾💾”
CyberianO said:
“For five years in the middle of the 1990’s, I worked for Taylor Industrial Software and was involved in the initial release of SecurWORX. One day, my manager told me to test for any Y2K bugs.
That was before I had Windows NT, so I was running Chicago, the Beta release of Windows 95. The reason I wasn’t just running DOS was because I needed different drivers loaded for multiple network cards and didn’t want to reboot every time I accessed a different network (e.g., Ethernet, Allen-Bradley’s Data Highway Plus, and Modicon’s network).
All I did was set my machine’s date to sometime in the next century and made sure everything in our software worked. It did, as did everything else on my machine.
When Y2K finally arrived, my wife’s uncle bought us tickets to a banquet to celebrate the turning of the century. I don’t remember even thinking about computers that evening.”
Wilson E. Philips said:
“I remember my mother calling me, terrified that her Crown Victoria would just die. 🤣 I had to explain that her car did not know what day it was. Once I put her at ease on that, she was O.K.
By the time Y2K rolled around, a whole lot of people had worked their butts off to make sure that this was a non-event. I call it a success.
I don't remember now, how many BIOS's I ran from office to office and server to server to get updates. It was well over 100. Lots of software packages were updated as well. When it was all over, everyone at the casino was saying it was all fake and nothing happened. We just said, ‘You're welcome.’"
Shawn Yeager said:
“I was leading a team at one of the then-largest datacenter companies. We were all-hands-on-deck. Hectic. Personally, I stocked/prepped more in the basement than seemed reasonable a few short months later, but hey.”
For me, I was in middle school and didn’t really know what was going on. I remember the hysteria and the news segments. I recall my teachers talking about it toward the end of the year, and I remember seeing warnings to shut down your PC before midnight. However, I was in the middle of playing an early PVP MMO on Sony’s old Sony Station. When the power didn’t go off and my game didn’t crash, I assumed everything was fine.
A few of my fellow nerdlings at the time also chimed in:
John Paul Wohlscheid (of Computer Ads from the Past fame) said:
“My Dad didn't think that much of anything would happen on Y2k, so we didn't do the hoarding that a lot of people did. The one thing I remember about that time was that we went to CompUSA (remember those) to get something. Dad mentioned Y2K to the kid behind the counter, and the kid said that he hoped the Y2K thing was real so he didn't have to go to work.”
Geek on Skates said:
“I was a teenager, not understanding ‘the Y2K bug’ as our local news station was calling it. But it was New Year's Eve, and my friends and I had one thing on our minds: party. We had been given a taste - just a taste - of champagne. And to "good kids" like us we felt like big-shots. We ran down the street, only the Lord and maybe one particularly crazy friend knows why, probably expecting to see what would happen. I was never a fast runner, always faster on skates, but let's just say that was a first and a last for the drinking. We ran to a clearing, a field that was kind of a secret passage connecting two neighborhoods. When we got there, something did happen: fireworks. We stood there, wondering what the new year would bring, and then, one of my brothers did something silly: he had seen a patch of ice that he thought it would be fun to slide around on. He rode down the hill on his chest, like a human sled, and we all had a good laugh. But then we realized something: this field, which was always green and just a big ditch in the summer, had transformed into the perfect place to play hockey. It flooded and froze, thick enough to skate on but only a few inches deep. So when I hear Y2K, I think of New Year's Eve '99, the year we got to play like we were much "cooler" (dumber) than we actually were. Now's that for a nerdy story? Not at all "computer-y", but I had only learned to use a computer 2 years before...”
But what about the normies? You know, the non-technical, non-nerdy people in the world? Well there are plenty of news stories from the time about people hoarding, prepping, building bunkers, and the like, but that wasn’t the case for everyone.
Abby said:
“I remember staying up late playing Mario Party. My dad was in IT so we didn't really think it was a very big deal.”
Aaron said:
“I recall I didn’t think it was going to be the big crazy event they talked about on the news. I remember having to be in the office just in case there were issues.
I just looked at it thinking this more about how computer handled dates. I figured if they were smart enough to make the computers they should be able to resolve it”
Kris said:
“I remember bracing for it. My mother and I were watching tv and around 10 pm she went to bed. I was 16 and sat waiting alone.
My mother had used my trust fund to pay for a condo on the beach. I sat with the tv angled near the sliding glass door and often I would stare out at waves crashing under the moonlight wondering what would change.”
Kristal said:
“I was turning 18 and I didn’t care much. I did think the computers would crash because there was so much talk about it but I don’t recall any of my friends that year being concerned.”
The legacy of Y2K
While the massive societal collapse never came, there were still some issues that popped up. They were mostly small. A New York resident was charged a $91,250 late fee from a local video rental store because of the bug. They later fixed it and he, obviously, didn’t have to pay that.
The convenience store chain 7-Eleven experienced a Y2K-related outage in their credit card processing system on January 1, 2001 due to a problem with the initial fix not accounting for 2000 being a leap-year. Similarly, a Norwegian train system and a Swedish bank also faced these issues in 2001.
Y2K’s impact wasn’t all negative, however. At the Y2K+15 panel discussion in 2014, it was revealed how the planning and security practices that were instituted as a result of Y2K preparations may have actually saved the United States from a total economic collapse in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Part of the planning required banks — who commonly stored their record backups in the basements of their offices— to have a copy of their records stored off site. This policy, according to the panelists, saved the international trade transactions that would have been destroyed at the World Trade Center.
Overall, Y2K has in many ways faded into obscurity. The hype surrounding the turn of the millennium and the century date change fiasco is little more than a meme to most people these days. However, that doesn’t mean we cannot see ways in which Y2K continues to impact our world today. For example, a new movie about Y2K just dropped this past November. It is a comedy-horror along the lines of Scary Movie and looks very stupid, but we got a Y2K movie a quarter of a century later.
If you go onto YouTube and search Y2K, you’re now more likely to find Gen-Z fashion videos than you are to find information on what we’ve talked about here, because the name Y2K has been adopted. The name that once was synonymous with a computer bug is now the name of a visual aesthetic style in line with Fruitger Aero, McBling, and Webcore.
But it isn’t just the look of Y2K that persists; the troubled code occasionally rears its ugly head and takes some system offline for a little while. One of the most notable examples from the last few years was the incident that led the video game WWE 2K20 to crash when trying to load certain game modes. This came as a result of some underlying code having its roots in Y2K-era software that had been deemed “compliant” through a process called windowing. Basically, they set a particular window of time to cause the system to assume the prefix of year to be 20 instead of 19. Many programs were windowed up until January 1, 2020 which just kicked the problem down the road because honestly, why would we still be using old code in production in the 2020s? In any event, when we crossed the threshold that year, 2K’s software experienced the Y2K20 bug (some refer to it as Y2020) wherein the systems thought it was January 1, 1920.
Similarly, Classic Mac OS fans may remember an issue with the Date & Time Control Panel on OS 8 and older. While the system isn’t vulnerable to a calendar fault until 2040, that control panel couldn’t set a date past December 31, 2019 and an enterprising community member had to create a program to fix it.
While ultimately Y2K was a whole lot of nothing, I think it is safe to say that is will always be a bit of a cultural milestone for all of us older Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers. In some ways, its memory has been eclipsed by the events of 9/11 and their subsequent fallout as well as the insane explosion in technological advancements of the 2000s. However, Y2K should always be remembered. Let it serve as a reminder to everyone to plan ahead, and don’t make assumptions that future generations will handle things the way you would.
EDITORIAL NOTE: There was SO much more about Y2K that I wanted to share, but it just couldn’t all fit here. I didn’t even have time to get into guys like Peter de Jager or Gary North. Their stories and contributions to the Y2K experience are extremely fascinating and should definitely not be forgotten. So if you are interested be sure to check out these links:
Y2K: An Autobiography — a multi-part podcast series from Peter de Jager on his experience with Y2K.
Year2000.com — a 1999 archive of the website managed by Peter de Jager. It has a ton of resources including an archive of articles, books, news, etc. Included in the archive is a copy of de Jager’s Doomsday 2000, an article originally published in Computer World that helped bring the issue to the public’s consciousness.
Scary Gary and Y2K — an academic article by Thomas D. Ice from Liberty University offering a theological break down of Gary North’s apocalyptic Y2K predictions.
There are many other resources that I should probably include here, but those are the only ones that come to mind at the moment. I hope you have enjoyed this retrospective, and I hope that you have a safe and happy new year!
