net.wars

Y2K is back, and this time it's giggling at us.

For the past few years, there's been a growing drumbeat on social media and elsewhere to the effect that Y2K - "the year 2000 bug" - never happened. It was a nothingburger. It was hyped then, and anyone saying now it was a real thing is like, ok boomer.

Be careful what old averted messes you dismiss; they may come back to fuck with you.

Having lived through it, we can tell you the truth: Y2K *was* hyped. It was also a real thing that was wildly underestimated for years before it was taken as seriously as it needed to be. When it finally registered as a genuine and massive problem, millions of person-hours were spent remediating software, replacing or isolating systems that couldn't be fixed, and making contingency and management plans. Lots of things broke, but, because of all that work, nothing significant on a societal scale. Locally, though, anyone using a computer at the time likely has a personal Y2K example. In my own case, an instance of Quicken continued to function but stopped autofilling dates correctly. For years I entered dates manually before finally switching to GnuCash.

The story, parts of which Chris Stokel-Walker recounts at New Scientist, began in 1971, when Bob Bemer published a warning about the "Millennium Bug", having realized years earlier that the common practice of saving memory space by using two digits instead of four to indicate the year was storing up trouble. He was largely ignored, in part, it appeared, because no one really believed the software they were writing would still be in use decades later.

It was the mid-1990s before the industry began to take the problem seriously, and when they did the mainstream coverage broke open. In writing a 1997 Daily Telegraph article, I discovered that mechanical devices had problems, too.

We had both nay-sayers, who called Y2K a boondoggle whose sole purpose was to boost the computer industry's bottom line, and doommongers, who predicted everything from planes falling out of the sky to total societal collapse. As Damian Thompson told me for a 1998 Scientific American piece (paywalled), the Millennium Bug gave apocalyptic types a *mechanism* by which the crash would happen. In the Usenet newsgroup comp.software.year-2000, I found a projected timetable: bank systems would fail early, and by April 1999 the cities would start to burn... When I wrote that society would likely survive because most people wanted it to, some newsgroup members called me irresponsible, and emailed the editor demanding he "fire this dizzy broad". Reconvening ten years later, they apologized.

Also at the extreme end of the panic spectrum was the then-head of Deutsche Bank, Ed Yardeni, who repeatedly predicted that Y2K would cause a worldwide recession; it took him until 2002 to admit his mistake, crediting the industry's hard work.

It was still a real problem, and with some workarounds and a lot of work most of the effects were contained, if not eliminated. Reporters spent New Year's Eve at empty airports, in case there was a crash. Air travel that night, for sure, *was* a nothingburger. In that limited sense, nothing happened.

Some of those fixes, however, were not so much fixes as workarounds. One of these finessed the rollover problem by creating a "window" and telling systems that two-digit years fell between 1920 and 2020, rather than 1900 and 2000. As the characters on How I Met Your Mother might say: "It's a problem for Future Ted and Future Marshall. Let's let those guys handle it."

So, it's 2020, we've hit the upper end of the window, the bug is back, and Future Ted and Future Marshall are complaining about Past Ted and Past Marshall, who should have planned better. But even if they had...the underlying issue is temporary thinking that leads people to still - still, after all these decades - believe that today's software will be long gone 20 years from now and therefore they need only worry about the short term of making it work today.

Instead, the reality is, as we wrote in 2014, that software is forever.

That said, the reality is also that Y2K is forever, because if the software couldn't be rewritten to take a four-digit year field in 1999 it probably can't be today, either. Everyone stresses the need to patch and update software, but a lot - for an increasing value of "a lot" as Internet of Things devices come on the market with no real idea of how long they were be in service - of things can't be updated for one reason or another. Maybe the system can't be allowed to go down; maybe it's a bespoke but crucial system whose maintainers are long gone; maybe the software is just too fragile and poorly documented to change; maybe old versions propagated all over the place and are laboring on in places where they've simply been forgotten. All of that is also a reason why it's not entirely fair for Stokel-Walker to call the old work "a lazy fix". In a fair percentage of cases, creating and moving the window may have been the only option.

But fret ye not. We will get through this. And then we can look forward to 2038, when the clocks run out in Linux. Future Ted and Future Marshall will handle it.

Illustrations: Millennium Bug manifested at a French school (via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.