Back in the 1990s, I wrote a PC primer, primarily because I owned a PC training company. It was a pretty good seller. When the millenium approached, the publisher asked me to write a Y2K book, the so-called Year 2000 Problem. I had no interest in doing it, but I researched it anyway out of curiosity.
The problem was a simple one. Computer programs written years earlier which used dates, such as accounting programs, used two digits for the year instead of four. This screwed up date-arithmetic when the year after 99 was 00. This was to save memory and calculation time. Two digit arithmetic was faster than four digit arithmetic.
It was a relatively simple problem to fix. What caused the problem was that the programs using these dates were old and there were few programmers left that could deal with the outdated programming languages.
What I also discovered was several (many?) ill-informed self-promoting people were fear-mongering. The economy of the world was going to collapse! Airplanes were going to crash! And this was all going to happen on January 1, 2000 when all programs using dates were going to crash. Machines with dates on their computer chips would stop functioning. And so on. When I realized what was happening I decided to write a book which I called The Year 2000 Hoax.
The fear mongering took hold with a world full of panicked technical illiterates who knew nothing about computer functions. Politicians who knew less than the techknow-nothings got caught up in it. The perpetraters of this hoax were in many cases well known in their fields. But they were also computer illiterate and were capitalizing on the notoriety generated by the fear.
The problem took on a life of its own. Big corporations were demanding that any company they were doing business with had to certify what had become known as “Y2K compliance.” I was invited to attend seminars and synposia where I discovered phony organizations had arranged lectures and discussions between morons who were opportunistically taking up the fear mantle.
The major reason the panic persisted was that the programming people who knew what the problem was about refused to plead against the panic. Why? Because, it was providing many months of programming work at high panic prices to repair the problem in a rush. They didn’t want to give up the golden egg provider.
I debated several of these fear mongers on radio and TV and was amazed at how this stupidity took hold. I even promised a TV host that I would be happy to fly on New Year’s Eve if he would provide the plane tickets. He declined.
On Janusry 1, 2000, the world did not come to an end. The fear mongers were nowhere to be found. I was invited to appear at some seminars to explain how I knew it wasn’t going to be a disaster. I was no genius. We computer people all knew.