Was the Y2K bug a hoax, or a disaster that was quietly prevented?
Programmers once saved memory by storing years as two digits, so 2000 would look like 1900. The world spent an estimated 300 billion dollars fixing it, and on 1 January 2000 almost nothing broke. Two stories have competed ever since: a triumph of preparation, or a costly overreaction.
The problem began with thrift. In the early decades of computing, memory was expensive, in 1975 anywhere from about 10 to more than 100 dollars per kilobyte, so programmers stored years as two digits and assumed a leading '19'. Bob Bemer noticed the danger as early as 1958 and spent some twenty years trying, without success, to get programmers, IBM, the US government and standards bodies to take it seriously.
By the late 1990s it was a global worry. Estimates of the cost to fix ran from 400 to 600 billion dollars, and some people stocked up on food, water and generators. Total spending likely passed 300 billion dollars, including about 134 billion in the US. When the date rolled over, there were glitches but few major failures: a Korean video shop charged a customer for a tape 100 years overdue, some Italian court computers miscalculated prison sentences by a century, and radiation monitors at a Japanese nuclear plant failed just after midnight, though officials said the public was never at risk.
Supporters of the remediation effort say that calm was the proof of success. Bill Clinton called it the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met, and retrospectives usually credit the programmers. Critics point out that countries such as South Korea, Italy and Russia spent little or nothing and had similarly minor problems, as did schools and small businesses with patchy preparation. One estimate suggested the US may have wasted around 40 billion dollars.
Both can be partly true. Much of the most critical software was fixed, and much else probably never mattered. The episode left a lasting lesson in how hard it is to prove that a prevented disaster was ever real, and a sequel is already scheduled: a similar date problem in older Unix systems falls in 2038.
Source: Wikipedia — Year 2000 problem · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
