Thread by @libshipwreck

The fact that people today feel comfortable looking back at Y2K and laughing is because enough people took the problem seriously and fixed it before anything catastrophic could occur.

It was a real problem, fixing it took real work. Even if many just remember it as a joke. 🧵

At the outset let me state that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Y2K (which I’m currently working on turning into a book). I’ve spent years reading tens of thousands of pages of documents on this, and talking to people involved, I’m not just making a quick observation.

Now, to be clear at the outset, there was hyperbolic media coverage and some fringe apocalypticism, but beneath this all was a real technical problem that required a real solution. That the media often focused on the “fringe” is an issue with the media, not Y2K.

The origins of Y2K go back in the history of computing. Memory used to be expensive and anything programmers could do to save space also saved money. So many started truncating dates. Using 6 digits instead of 8 in their code.

The important thing to know is that truncating dates worked! It saved memory so it saved money, and in many places it became standard procedure. Programmers knew all along this would eventually be a problem…but they figured someone else would fix it.

Here a key piece of the story of Y2K is recognizing that people knew it was going to be a problem long before the 90s! Bob Beamer was warning about it in 1971! The NY Times had its first article about it in 1988! The SSA was working on fixing it in the late 80s.

It was a technical problem, one the IT community knew about, and one that they were working on (at least kind of) long before Y2K blew up into the cultural phenomena it became.

Alas, the progress on the repairs was going quite slowly and not enough attention was being paid to it

Fast forward to 1993 and Peter de Jager publishes a piece called “Doomsday 2000” (he didn’t choose the title) in Computerworld. This is generally seen as the “wake up call” article that really got IT to start paying attention.

And in the following couple years (still early 90s), IT is really starting to get to work on this problem.

If you look at the technical literature and technical publications, 93-95 is where you see the first real burst of attention and activity.

This is also the time when you start to see some of the folks in and around IT really going public about the scale of the problem. Sometimes they were using deliberately hyperbolic language in order to get bosses/managers/officials to pay attention.

The issue was that checking/fixing/testing was going to be a big (expensive) task, and speaking in ominous terms was a tactic to help get business leaders and government bureaucrats to really pay attention.

And pay attention they did.

In 1996 Senator Moynihan asked the Congressional Research Service to do a report on Y2K, a report that concluded the problem was very real and which advised more government attention to the problem. And in 96, Moynihan writes to Clinton warning him about Y2K.

1996 is also when the first Congressional hearings about Y2K took place. There were dozens of these hearings over the following years as representatives from all over business and government were called to testify about how they were impacted and how they were preparing.

These hearings were serious and sober conversations in which expert after expert testified to the real work that they were doing and the work they needed to still do. Resources were being spent for fixing this problem and there was a definite sense that the clock was ticking,

Of course, most of the work that was being done was largely unseen by most people. It was happening behind the scenes in IT departments, and there was so much of it that it also drove some off-shoring of IT work. Tons of work for tons of people—most of it unseen,

Now a funny thing happens around 1998. This is the year that a lot of folks in and around IT start saying the problem is under control, but this is also the point where the broader public starts to pay more attention to the issue.

And as the public starts paying more attention the narrative that the media is largely running with becomes one that focuses on religious extremists and militia groups predicting the end of the world. Which is not what IT experts or govt officials were predicting.

In this period lots of IT experts are expressing frustration about how they’ll talk to a journalist for hours, explaining the technical issues, only for that journalist to go around and write an article about people prepping for the apocalypse.

And what makes matters more difficult is that there really is a lot of uncertainty about exactly what is going to happen. There’s still time on the clock, there’s still work being done, and it’s unclear exactly what will happen.

This is made worse in some ways by government reports that hedge on the side of caution. There was a senate special common Y2K, and its extremely thorough reports were filled with careful comments about how it wasn’t clear what would happen.

Nevertheless, by 98/99 most of the technical experts are predicting a situation akin to “a bump in the road” which is a far cry from what is being talked about in much of the media.

This prediction of “bump in the road” is based on figures within the IT community knowing that the work is on track, that the most essential systems have been fixed, and that they were still working on this right up to the end. There was work to do, and they were doing it!

Of course, “bump in the road” isn’t as good for selling magazines or getting people to tune into the news as predicting doomsday. But those predictions of doom were coming (mostly) from outside the IT community.

In 1993 de Jager had warned of “Doomsday 2000” (he didn’t pick the title) but by 1999 he was writing of “Doomsday Avoided” - the warning had been heard, the work had been done, the problem was being handled.

Were there people predicting the end of the world? Yes. Were there grifters selling survivalist gear? Yes. Was the media happy to report on fringe people? Yes.

But the underlying technical issue was a real one that IT people had been working on tirelessly.

The problem is that doomsday peppers and survivalists make for great content and IT workers fixing code at a computer and lengthy government hearings don’t make for great content. So the media tended to run with the doom and gloom.

This pushes many of those doing the IT and government work on this to go into overtime trying to tell everyone not to panic. But they’re saying “don’t panic” not because the issue wasn’t real, but because they were fixing it.

To be clear, this is not to deny that the apocalyptic fringe existed but to emphasize that if you’re interested in the reality of a technical problem you should probably pay attention to what the IT experts (not the fringe) were saying.

And, to say it again, the IT folks were saying: this is a problem, a widespread one, but not an insurmountable one. It is a problem that can be fixed by devoting the people and resources to fixing it.

And…the people and resources were devoted to it, meaning it was fixed.

As 1999 came to an end, there were certainly folks on the fringe predicting doom (and media outlets happy to cover them), but by the end of 1999 most folks in IT and government were feeling confident that there would be no major problems.

And no major problems occurred! Which is a good thing! When people fix stuff and it doesn’t collapse that’s great! When things keep working that’s not a bad thing (unless you actually want society to collapse)!

Granted, things did go wrong, but they were of the “bump in the road” variety not the apocalyptic variety. The Senate Special Committee’s final report has an appendix filled with Y2K related problems that did occur.

Furthermore, many companies felt no real desire to report the Y2K errors they encountered. They usually fixed them fast, and they saw no business advantage in owning up to their problems. Lots of IT folks will tell you they worked somewhere that had Y2K issues.

The irony of Y2K is that it shows that if you fix a problem well enough, many people will later be convinced that there never was a problem in the first place.

Especially if the work that went into fixing it goes unseen by most people.

We can look back at Y2K and laugh today thanks to the work that was done by a legion of IT professionals.

And we remember the hyperbolic news coverage because the media ran with the apocalyptic angle over the “technical problem fixed” angle.

There’s lots more I could say about Y2K (as I noted I wrote my doctoral dissertation on it), but I’ll leave it there.

Here’s a piece I wrote about Y2K for Real Life Magazine…
reallifemag.com/lifes-a-glitch/

And here’s a piece I wrote about Y2K in The Washington Post:

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/1…

Also, I am aware of the new HBO documentary on Y2K. I was interviewed by the filmmakers while they were making it. I have thoughts on the film, and my review of it will be coming out soonish.

Addendum:

Here is my review of the new Y2K documentary “Time Bomb Y2K” if you are interested…

https://twitter.com/libshipwreck/status/1742256960106324441