Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 2.6.
Back in 1986, in a moment of idle curiosity, I wanted to see how far in the future I could reset the clock on my high school’s new Macintosh Plus. I discovered a Y2K bug of a different sort—it went as far as 2014 before it dialed back to 1915. I also recall how the computer neither shut down, nor exploded, nor refused to run my programs. I never expected it to act up anyway. Still don’t.
I was reminded of this recently, what with all the silly rumors regarding the Y2K bug, most of them generated by people who don't know squat about computers other than they seem to go berserk in a lot of science fiction movies. This may be why they expect the bug to make every system go FOOM on Jan. 1, 2000—even though less than 2 percent of computer systems are year-sensitive. Date-sensitive, yes: most of your bills are generated by computers that take note of the new month and send bills accordingly. Year-sensitive, no; this is limited to Social Security and other agencies which keep track of people's ages. And Social Security announced they’re Y2K-ready. The worst-case scenario of the Y2K bug is that a few people may get some funny figures on their bills, and THAT’S ALL.
Y2K is a manifestation of people’s fears of the turn of the millennium. It’s bad enough that Nostradamus predicted the end of the world in 2000; and even worse that some Christians are predicting the same thing (even though the Bible tells them not to). Now that this superstitious dread has a scientific phenomenon to attach to, people are attaching away. And the media isn't helping when it overemphasizes worst-case scenarios. The worst case of every situation requires us to stockpile cash, food and water, and buy a generator. But you didn’t see people doing it when Windows 95 came out—and that was buggier than Y2K will ever be.
No, the real Y2K problem is that some people still have "19--" on their checks and headstones. Anything other than that is hype and marketing. And SHAME on anyone who tries to profit from people's ignorance on this subject. We had a letter from one such person last week; she has since decided she doesn’t want to advertise in the Post, and good riddance.
If you disagree, fine. We’ll both see what happens in January.
—Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 4/17/2011. Some folks actually don’t know what the Y2K bug is. In a nutshell, microchips built before the 1990s were designed with two-digit dates in them: The year, as far as your computer knew, was 99. Not 1999; just 99. The number 19 was prefixed to the date for your convenience. What that meant, though, was that the next year was 00. Not 2000; just 00. And the number 19 would still be prefixed to the date; so if you needed it to be 2000 instead of 1900, you needed some kind of workaround. Which both Microsoft and Apple had come up with by then… but not every microchip was in an Apple computer, or ran Windows. The microchips in my microwave oven, fr’instance.
As I said, a lot of folks were predicting that every chip would self-destruct on January 1, despite the fact that the microchips in my microwave didn’t even use their date setting. Or the microchips in my alarm clock. Or my breadmaker. Or my coffeepot. Or anything. In the end, my prediction—that the most that would happen is a few funny figures on bills—was dead-on.
But that didn’t stop some folks from trying to take advantage of a largely ignorant public. About two weeks before this column ran, Jill had met with an advertiser named Ann Manion, who wanted everyone to know about her valuable new service. As I recall, her company would go through everything you owned, and Y2K-proof it for a tidy sum. Of course, anyone who had enough knowledge to Y2K-proof things should know that there was nothing to the Y2K fears. So I can’t help but conclude that this was a scam, pure and simple.
To herald her new business, she sent us the following letter, which I ran in the February 2 issue. I include the entire thing below.
We as a society are so unattached to the thought of flipping a light switch giving us light and turning a tap gives us water. We go to the grocery store to buy our food; we fill our gas tanks with fuel and plan our days around all of these essentials without giving them a second thought. This is our way of life and we do it without thinking. We never really concern ourselves with these very essential needs not being there when we need them.
Will our way of life be threatened as the clock rolls around to midnight, Jan. 1, 2000? Many experts proclaim a resounding YES!
“When you consider how important our electric utilities are to everything we do in life, then you’ll recognize that if we do not have our compliance for the Y2K and as things fall apart, it’s going to be devastating in our entire society,” says Rep. Connie Morella, R–Md. (
CBN News, June 9, 1998)“It is entirely possible that every organization in America could get its own computers fixed and still have major problems. When people say to me, is the world going to come to an end, I say I don’t know. I don’t know whether this will be a bump in the road, or whether this will in fact trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely devastating economic consequences in some parts of the world.” Sen. Robert Bennett, R–Utah, chairman, Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. (World Net Daily, June 1998)
These statements are only a sample of what we may be facing when the new millennium dawns. We must be prepared for what may come and work together as a community to help friends and neighbors reach that goal.
If you have Internet access, or know someone who does, please go to www.garynorth.com for a list of over 3,000 statements made by high-ranking government and business officials regarding the severity of the Y2K problem. After reading through this site, which contains a wealth of information, ask yourself if you want to risk not being prepared.
As you consider the possibility of the Y2K as a real threat, also consider the most important supplies you will need, which are storable food and water. For more information, please see our classified ad in this issue of Countryside Post.
—Ann Manion, of Matek.
This was totally a stealth ad: Free advertising, disguised as a letter or press release. And the only reason I ran it was so I could run the following comment right underneath it.
High-ranking government officials, business leaders, and reporters don’t know squat about Y2K outside of what they see in the media. Computer programmers and technicians do, and they aren’t worried. It’s always a good idea to stockpile food and water in case of emergency, but Y2K will not live up to its media hype, and I say this as a former computer technician and programmer. —K.
She was pissed. She called up and basically said that she was planning to run a ton of advertising in our newspaper, but if that was how we were gonna be, she wasn’t gonna run anything.
Considering that all she had run was a classified ad, I didn’t figure we had suffered any huge loss. And my predictions about Y2K, as you know, were dead on, whereas she and the 3,000 high-ranking government and business officials were not. Of course, notice that the folks she quoted were members of Congress who had made comments on
Well anyway. Jill was somewhere between displeased and amused with the scenario. On the one hand we lost a little cash, but on the other hand, Jill knew more about computers than I did, and knew there was nothing to the Y2K fears. To be fair, Manion might actually have believed the Y2K bug was a serious problem… but come on.