As the clocks ticked down to midnight on December 31st, 1999, as each final second of the last millennium slipped away, people all over the world collectively held their breath. If all the hype was to be believed, if the Y2K threats were real, their New Years merrymaking - the fireworks, the champagne, the confetti - might all come crashing down amidst terror and chaos, the apocalypse. Would the power go out? Would planes fall out of the sky? Would there be some giant explosion? What was going to happen? There was only one way to find out. [count down audio]. And then… nothing. Nothing happened. In the decades since, Y2K or the “Millennium Bug” has been dismissed as nothing more than a hoax, media hype gone way too far. But did you know, the threat was more real than many of us realize? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I remember New Year's Eve 1999. I was 11, but I remember it all so clearly. I remember where I was, what I did, who was with me. I remember running out into the street at the stroke of midnight, screaming and hollering and blowing into noisemakers with my friends, no jackets on, freezing cold, exhilarated, giddy. One of those moments where you just feel so alive. The adrenaline leading up to that moment, the anticipation, all exploding in one instant. And then, that was it. The moment passed and we walked back inside, smiling and shaking our heads. Nothing had happened. But did we ever really even think something was going to happen? Or was it just fun to hype ourselves up, a welcome escape from the dull monotony of normal life. I decided on that day, January 1st 2000, that Y2K was never real. Just a hoax, just some sick joke the world had played on itself. And then I left it behind, like the last millennium itself, and moved on. 

 

When I realized this episode would go live on New Years Eve, I knew I wanted to do something New Years themed. Y2K seemed a fitting topic. I thought I’d expose this old hoax, this scam, that worked us all up into a frenzy back in 1999 - where the idea came from, why it caught on, that sort of thing. It’s certainly an interesting phenomenon, not unlike the Maya calendar debacle that unfolded 12 years later. There’s something innately interesting about a doomsday prophecy whether real or imagined. But then I started to do some research. It’s the first I’ve ever looked into it, if I’m being honest. Like I said, I left the whole notion of Y2K behind on that cold street back in those first few moments of 2000, left it behind and moved on. But once I started to actually look into it for this episode, I realized my angle was all wrong. I’m not exposing a hoax because Y2K was never a hoax. It was a surprisingly very real threat. One defused by countless hours of work - as many as 400 man years of work per large company according to IBM - and as much as $600 billion dollars according to Gartner research firm, which today is equivalent to just over $1 trillion dollars.  

 

Many of the sources I found proclaimed that Y2K was only thought of as a hoax in the aftermath of the frenzy because an army of computer programmers and IT guys worked feverishly to correct the issue for years before it became an issue. It’s easy to look at an event that never took place and say “oh I guess they just made all that up,” when really you just didn’t see all the time and effort that went into preventing said event from taking place. According to a Time Magazine article called “20 Years Later the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously” by Francine Uenuma quote “The innumerable programmers who devoted months and years to implementing fixes received scant recognition. (One programmer recalls the reward for a five-year project at his company: lunch and a pen.) It was a tedious, unglamorous effort, hardly the stuff of heroic narratives — nor conducive to an outpouring of public gratitude.” end quote.

 

That article also mentioned one name in particular that kept coming up over and over again - Peter de Jager. He’s mentioned in the Time Magazine article, he’s in a Washington Post article I read, he’s in a Forbes article, the New York Times, Computerworld magazine. Google Y2K and you will pretty quickly stumble upon the name Peter de Jager. And there’s a good reason for that. Peter wrote a groundbreaking article for Computerworld in 1993 called “Doomsday 2000” in which he raised the alarm about the impending Y2K disaster. It was a call to action, a warning to the world to fix the computer issues before time ran out. He’s been called the Paul Revere of Y2K. So I reached out to him, not really expecting a response. And, you guys, here he is… 

 

[Peter de Jager interview]

 

I was giddy excited to speak with Peter because he is THE Y2K guy and I just had so many questions for him. But before we get into that, let’s start with the basics like what Y2K even was cause if you’re much younger than me, like even a few years younger, you probably don’t even remember it. Y2K stands for year 2000 but it refers almost exclusively to a computer programming issue that arose. People often refer to it as a “bug” but it wasn’t really. It wasn’t like a virus or anything, it was just a flaw in the way they had set things up when computers first became a thing. 

 

Basically what happened was, in the early days of computers, which was honestly not all that long ago - we’re talking mid 1900s. Memory was incredibly expensive. It also took up a ton of space, like rooms and rooms of physical space to store information. So only really necessary information was stored, it was kept to a bare minimum. One way they minimized this information storage was by shortening years to just two digits. So instead of 1960 it was just 60. They left off the 19. In 1964, IBM introduced their System/360 machines which made computers a business necessity. These were much smaller machines, but still pretty huge. I mean they fit in a room at least but they were roughly the size of like a double refrigerator, and weighed a few thousand pounds at least. Also they cost 2 million dollars so most businesses just rented them for around $20,000. But while this was a major upgrade that made computers much more accessible, they kept the same system of just using 2 digits for the year. And with each new upgrade, the year remained just 2 digits. So, to cut to the chase here, at some point people started to think “huh, what’s going to happen when we get to the end of the century, when 99 turns into 00? How will the computers know that it’s 2000 and not 1900? We haven’t given them that information.” 

 

And I get the whole saving space, cutting down on memory thing, I get that, but I cannot understand why they didn’t foresee this problem from the very beginning. So I asked Peter. 

 

[Peter de Jager interview]

 

Now, that might not seem like a huge deal - computers not knowing what year it is - and they certainly didn’t anticipate how big of a deal it would become when they first made the decision to shorten the year. And at first, it was just minor, almost comical issues cropping up: According to a Guardian article, in 1988 a case of canned meat was rejected by a supermarket after being flagged as very expired. The expiration date said 00 which computers were reading as 1900 instead of 2000. That made the meat 88 years expired instead of good for another 12. In 1992, a Minnesota woman named Mary Bandar was prompted to register for Kindergarten because computers thought she was 4 years old. In fact, Mary was 104 years old. But her birth year in the computer just said 88. How was it to know that meant 1888 and not 1988. 

 

But as we approached the turn of the millennium, we became more and more dependent on computers for things like banking, utilities - power plants - transportation - buses and air traffic, military missiles and such and if all of these systems went haywire at the stroke of midnight in the year 2000, it could lead to an absolute breakdown of society. If the power failed, if people couldn’t get their money out of the banks, if transportation stopped or airplanes fell out of the sky, if missiles were accidentally launched, nuclear weapons detonated. It was potentially a recipe for an apocalypse brought on by technological failure. I asked Peter how grave the situation really was. 

 

[Peter de Jager interview]

 

After some initial dragging of feet that annoyed Peter to no end, most of the world finally started to act. In 1996, a US Senator from New York named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a letter to then President Bill Clinton to alert him of the results of a study carried out by the Congressional Research Service. In this letter he says quote “each line of computer code needs to be analyzed and either passed on or be rewritten… the computer has been a blessing; if we don’t act quickly, however, it could become the curse of the age.” end quote. Each line of computer code. I don’t profess to know much about computer programming but I know that analyzing each line of computer code that existed was an absolutely colossal job. 

 

And this is what finally got the ball rolling in the US after years of ignored warnings. Clinton launched a Council on Y2K Conversion. In a 1998 speech he said quote ‘if we act properly, we won’t look back on this as a headache, sort of the last failed challenge of the 20th century. It will be the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met” end quote. He also said quote “Any business that approaches the New Year armed only with a bottle of champagne and a noisemaker is likely to have a very big hangover New Year’s morning.” end quote. The rest of the world sprang into action too. The United Nations convened an international conference on Y2K and the World Bank backed the International Y2K Cooperation Center to help other countries prepare. And this, if you couldn’t tell from that $1 trillion dollar price tag, was a massive undertaking that had to be completed in a relatively short amount of time with a very finite deadline. 

 

[Peter de Jager interview]

 

But despite all of the hard work behind the scenes to prevent a Y2K disaster, the fairly immediate response was - oh they tricked us. It was all a hoax. And part of what added to that sentiment was that certain people had taken advantage of the situation, extorting the public fear about a possible apocalypse to try to make some money. This was especially prevalent within the religious sector, where many began to think Y2K was the beginning of the rapture, the beginning of the end. People started selling videos and books about how to survive the end times, survival guides, and survival kits at exorbitant prices. According to a Forbes magazine article, “a Massachusetts company marketed an $89 Y2K Survival Kit that included an abacus, a flashlight and a compass.” Which, like, an abacus? How much math are you really going to be doing? You know they make solar powered calculators, right? I don’t get it. But the point is, where there is money to be made, there are always people willing to make it no matter how slimy their business practices are. If you’ve seen the show The Righteous Gemstones, highly recommend it’s hilarious, this is a big plot point in that show - selling overpriced survival kits leading up to Y2K. So it happened, you know, cause it was in a fictional television show. No, but it really did happen. IT companies were also making a ton of money. According to that Forbes article quote “Looking back a decade later, a senior v.p. of tech for Ace Hardware said, “Y2K put I.T. on the map.” The CIO of an offshore drilling company agreed: “It was a cathartic time, one of the best things that ever happened to I.T.” An executive of AMC computer wistfully recalled, “We made a lot of money on it. A lot of folks thought the gravy train would never end.”’ end quote. 

 

So you look at that and the fact that not much happened and you go “hmm… there was motivation to make this up, certain people made a lot of money. Maybe they just made it all up.” Which, just, side note, some things did happen but they were relatively minor. According to a Guardian article by Martyn Thomas, a software engineering and cybersecurity expert, quote “There were many failures in January 2000, from the significant to the trivial. Many credit-card systems and cash points failed. Some customers received bills for 100 years’ interest while others were briefly rich for the same reason. Internationally, 15 nuclear reactors shut down; the oil pumping station in Yumurtalik failed, cutting off supplies to Istanbul; there were power cuts in Hawaii and government computers failed in China and Hong Kong. A customer at a New York state video rental store had a bill for $91,250, the cost of renting the film The General’s Daughter for 100 years.” end quote. 

 

So stuff happened, but it wasn’t bad enough to deter thoughts of a Y2K hoax. Plus people pointed to the fact that certain countries like Italy, Russia, and South Korea did very little to remedy the problem and they were just fine. I asked Peter about this. 

 

[Peter de Jager interview]

 

I remember back when I was in the postpartum sleep deprived fog of new motherhood and desperately researching everything I could about how to survive a newborn, how to get him to sleep, how to get him to eat enough, how to get him to stop crying. I remember stumbling across one bit of advice in particular that has really stuck with me. It said “start how you want to end.” And what I took that to mean was, there are a lot of crutches, shortcuts that make things easier now: pacifiers and cosleeping and such that make things easier in the beginning (and don’t come at me moms, I know these crutches are sometimes necessary for survival) but they actually make things harder later, when your kid is way too old and refusing to get rid of the pacifier, when you still can’t get them to sleep in their own bed years later and every night is a battle. Sometimes shortcuts turn into longcuts. Shortening the year to just 2 digits seemed like a convenient hack in the 1960s but with a new century fast approaching, they couldn’t end that way and the process of fixing it was much more difficult and costly than if they had just done it right from the start. A week of sleep training your baby sucks. It’s the worst. It’s actual torture. But it’s still better than years of sleep deprivation, bedtime battles, and feeling like you never get a minute to yourself. Start how you want to end. 

 

And if you can’t, then be prepared to spend a great deal of time and energy fixing it later. Or hope that there’s an army of IT nerds willing to fix it for you, devoting hours and hours of tedious, mind numbingly boring work to quite possibly save the world with little to no recognition whatsoever 

 

[Peter de Jager interview]

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Please do check out Peter de Jager’s podcast, Y2K an Autobiography for more, I’ve linked to that in the description. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from the Y2K an autobiography hosted by Peter de Jager, National Geographic, Time Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Computerworld Magazine, The New York Post, The Conversation, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the New York Times. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.