Twenty-five years ago, the world held its breath as the millennium bug loomed, threatening to plunge computer systems into chaos. This article revisits the widespread fear and frantic preparations surrounding the feared Y2K crisis.
People in Hong Kong queueing to withdraw cash on 30 December 1999 amid fears that banking systems would break down when the clocks rang in the new millennium. On New Year’s Eve 25 years ago, sane people worried that the modern world was about to melt down. The millennium bug seemed to be threatening to crash the world’s computer systems , as technology struggled to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000.
The public, faced with daily predictions of potentially terrible outcomes, braced themselves nervously. Dark jokes prevailed about avoiding being on “a life-support system at midnight on 31 December 1999”. In China, Zhao Be, then the head of the country’s millennium bug coordination efforts, commanded airline executives to be on a flight on 1 January 2000 to demonstrate any problems had been sorted. The same might be said of one of the earliest events to reveal the existence of the bug, which was also known as Y2K. These quirky errors were the result of early computer scientists solving a practical problem. To save space and speed up processing, computer dates were abbreviated. So January 1900 was 01/00 and December 1999 was 12/99. Trailblazing computer scientists had assumed that none of the computers would be in use by 1999. Only, it turned out there were so many legacy systems in operation that catastrophic results appeared a certainty to some. ‘All people could do was hope the nerds would fix it’: the global panic over the millennium bug, 25 years on and headed to a hillside cottage near Forres, Moray, as they feared food shortages, the accidental discharge of nuclear weapons, the breakdown of global capitalism and rioting on the street
MILLENNIUM BUG Y2K COMPUTER SYSTEMS GLOBAL PANIC TECHNOLOGY
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