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Sunday, December 29, 2019

Apocalypse Then: When Y2K Didn’t Lead To The End Of Civilization - Forbes

For a time 20 years ago, millions of people, including corporate chiefs and government leaders, feared that the internet was going to crash and shatter on New Year’s Eve and bring much of civilization crumbling down with it. This was all because computers around the world weren’t equipped to deal with the fact of the year 2000. Their software thought of years as two digits. When the year 99 gave way to the year 00, data would behave as if it were about the year 1900, a century before, and system upon system in an almost infinite chain of dominoes would fail. Billions were spent trying to prepare for what seemed almost inevitable.

An article in Vanity Fair in January 1999 laid out the prospect: “It is an instant past midnight, January 1, 2000. . . . The power in some cities isn’t working. . .. Bank vaults and prison gates have swung open. . . . Hospitals have shut down. . . . so many countries degenerating into riots and revolution. . . . No one will know the extent of its consequences until after they occur. The one sure thing is that the wondrous machines that govern and ease our lives won’t know what to do.”

But then, when the end of the year did come, and midnight struck in time zone after time zone around the globe, almost nothing happened.

There had been a mass of preparation and just as much panic. The story is a testament to how little we can understand of the strength or fragility of our vast information networks, and how even less we can understand of what the future holds at any time.

It begins half a century earlier, at the dawn of computing, when data was stored by punching holes in 3-by-7-inch paper cards, stacks of which were fed into machines to do individual calculations. Memory was so expensive, and took up so much space—rooms and rooms full for some early computers—that the information recorded was kept to the barest minimum. Thus years were recorded as two digits. And once they began to be input that way, they kept being input that way.

In 1964 IBM made the computer a business necessity by introducing its System/360 machines. Those big boxes, relatively compact but still bigger than a refrigerator, retained the standard two-digit year format. “I’m one of the culprits who created this problem,” a former economic consultant testified to Congress in 1998. “I used to write those programs back in the sixties and seventies and was so proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space by not having to put 19 before the year.” That ex-consultant was Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

In 1984 a woman who worked for an insurance company in Illinois entered into her computer an annuity due date in the early 2000s. Her computer interpreted it as a year a century earlier. It churned out nonsense. She and her husband then wrote a book titled Computers in Crisis: How to Avert the Coming Wordwide Computer Systems Collapse. Not many noticed. But by the end of the 1980s people in the Social Security Administration were beginning to find that they, too, couldn’t calculate figures for after 2000. In 1994 Social Security started going through all its millions of lines of relevant computer code to try to fix the problem. The Defense Department ran into similar difficulties and began a similar project. A senior Defense official said at one point, “If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.”

By the second half of the 1990s, concern about the big coming clock change was rampant. Congress dutifully began investigating the matter and failing to pass bills to do something about it. In 1998 Washington took action at last: President Bill Clinton signed an executive order creating a Council on Year 2000 Conversion, and he put in charge of it an O.M.B. deputy director named John Koskinen. Clinton told America that “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.” By then big business was not only stirring but seriously investing in preventive measures. AT&T found itself using up $500 million a year in the late nineties. C. Michael Armstrong, the company’s CEO, complained about his Y2K team, “They were given an unlimited budget, and they managed to exceed it.”

The time blossomed into a golden age for IT people, survivalists, and especially end-times Christianists. A computer consultant named Peter de Jager made Y2K his specialty, and he became so well known, giving so many speeches and seminars, that the American Stock Exchange launched an index of the stocks of Y2K-related businesses that it called the “de Jager Year 2000 Index.” The New York Times named him “the Paul Revere for the year 2000 computer crisis.” 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.”

Amid all this, the fact that the year 2000 marked the second millennium since the birth of Christ, and that the Book of Revelation could be read to suggest that a millennium meant the beginning of global end times, hardly went unnoticed. Jerry Falwell proclaimed that “Y2K may be God’s instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation,” to “start a revival that spreads [over] the face of the earth before the Rapture of the Church.” He began taking orders for a video titled A Christian’s Guide to the Millennium Bug, at $28 a copy. He also began storing up food and ammo. “I’ve got to be sure that I can persuade others not to mess with us,” he explained. His fellow evangelist Pat Robertson said, “There’s no question there’s going to be serious disruptions.” James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, warned, “There will be some tough times before we’re through with it.”

Books with titles like Y2K=666? and Spiritual Survival During the Y2K Crisis proliferated, as did websites like josephproject2000.org, which sold bulk foods. The excitement grew so great that Reverend Steve Hewitt, the editor of Christian Computing magazine, took to traveling the country counseling calm among the pious. “I’m at war to stop the panic,” he said. “Windows 98 is not a spiritual issue. Pentium II is not a spiritual issue.”

In February 1999 the United Nations set up an International Y2K Cooperation Center. In December 1999 the United States and Russia opened a joint Center for Year 2000 Strategic Stability to try to avert accidental missile launches or nuclear attacks. Meanwhile, for individual personal protection, a Massachusetts company marketed an $89 Y2K Survival Kit that included an abacus, a flashlight and a compass. But there were islands of calm, too. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said he expected a period “where people are distracted getting their things ready. But . . . in terms of the problems that will occur, it will be below the middle of the panic that some people have suggested.”

As New Year’s Eve drew near, the Federal Reserve ordered the printing of an extra $70 billion in paper money, about $255 per person in the U.S., in case there was a run on the banks. The Chase Manhattan Bank set up 27 command centers to monitor its network around the clock. Citigroup opened a central command center in a secret location.

Then finally the clock struck midnight. The zero hour came first in to the South Pacific. In New Zealand, as a philosophy professor named Denis Dutton later wrote, “champagne and skyrockets were the only explosions of interest, since telephones, ATMs, cars, computers and airplanes worked just fine.” Midnight after midnight came and went around the globe. In Australia a machine that printed bus tickets got the date wrong. In Italy some prison inmates briefly had their sentences extended by a century. In England a tide gauge failed. In the U.S. a spy satellite ran on a backup system for a few hours. In Hong Kong, police breathalyzer equipment stopped working—admittedly on the worst night of the year for that. Around the world, cash registers here and there spat out the date as 1900, leaving customers with receipts they might want to keep as souvenirs.

Italy had started addressing the Y2K challenge later than many countries and had done far less than many, too. Many doomsayers expected especially extensive chaos there, in the land of dolce far niente. But little happened even in Italy, beyond those prisoners’ short-lived surprise. The trains were all stopped at midnight, because, as a spokesman explained, “Italians are skeptical, and we said . . . nothing’s going to happen. But we couldn’t take the risk.” Lorenzo Robustelli, one of the people in charge of Rome’s Holy Year celebrations, offered the rest of the world his sympathy: “I’m so sorry, but Italy works sometimes.”

In Slovenia, the uneventfulness of Y2K was so anticlimactic that a top official was accused of exaggerating the danger and fired from his job. As the BBC put it on January 4, “Those who were charged with tackling the millennium bug would have been damned if there had been major problems and are now being damned because there were not.”

There were those who looked back at the big scare as altogether a very good thing. “Y2K turns out to be a large net plus for the U.S. economy,” said Larry Kudlow, then an investment bank economist. “There is a certain sense of wry anticlimax out there,” said Michael Granatt, one of the heads of Britain’s Y2K effort, but, he added, “things don’t go right by accident. They go right through proper planning.” John Koskinen, President Clinton’s Y2K man, lamented that “the only way to be a hero would be for half the world to stop and then somehow get it started again, which was not one of our goals. Like a lot of things in government, if it works well nobody cares much.” A survivalist named Ben Levi who built a house in Colorado to withstand the apocalypse seemed let down. “In a way, I was kind of looking forward to it,” he later told the public radio show Marketplace. “Wouldn’t this be fun, because I really felt that I could meet the challenge.”

Undoubtedly, alarm about the disaster that never came did a lot to get governments and businesses to upgrade systems that had languished in growing obsolescence as the tech revolution swept ahead. And one benefit of all that activity revealed itself after the genuine disaster that struck America less than two years later. In 2005 Alan Greenspan said that “following September 11, 2001, we found that the Y2K preparations and fixes had far greater reach than we realized. In retrospect, they apparently also contributed directly to the success of the systems in crisis mode following attacks.” Lois Slavin, of MIT’s System Design and Management Program, agreed. She wrote that “system redundancies developed in anticipation of a Y2K glitch that never came helped the city’s transportation and telecommunications sectors provide an impressive level of service in the wake of the enormous devastation” of September 11.

One person who contributed to that New York preparedness was Richard Rescorla, the vice president of security at Morgan Stanley. He spent New Year’s Eve 1999 in a bunker from which he and a colleague, a coworker remembered, “were going around all through the World Trade Center, every floor. They kept inspecting it all night to see if anyone was around that could cause a problem.” Twenty-one months later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, he led Morgan Stanley employees out of the smoke-filled South Tower while singing songs through a bullhorn to keep their spirits up. Some 3,700 escaped. He went back in to look for anyone still missing. He was killed when the building collapsed.

That was an epic tragedy that no one foresaw. What are we to learn from the earlier one that millions foresaw and never came? Were we prudent and wise? Were we too easily panicked? Could it happen again, or, rather, really happen next time? Denis Dutton, the New Zealand philosopher, had thoughts about that. On the tenth anniversary of Y2K he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he argued that “the Y2K fiasco was about more than simple prudence. Religions from Zoroastrianism to Judaism to Christianity to U.F.O cults have been built around notions of sin and the world’s end. The Y2K threat resonated with those ideas. . . . The theme of our fancy inventions ultimately destroying us has been a favorite in fiction at least since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

“Turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions,” he wrote. But then he took a next step to what may prove to have been a stunningly wrong conclusion: “This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to . . . that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment.”

The future is always more unknowable than we like to admit. Denis Dutton was a very wise man, but he couldn’t foresee how the environmental woes he dismissively described would already be besetting us today. Nor could he know that among the cruel tricks of eventuality would be the New York Times running his own obituary a year to the day after his Y2K article, prostate cancer having seized him and cut him down. It may be hard not to smile at some of the excesses that occurred in the sometimes frenetic leadup to the eerie calm of the night of December 31, 1999, but no great harm came of it all, and it may have produced a great deal of good in the strength and flexibility and resilience of our information networks. Those networks are today, even more than 20 years ago, the central nervous system of civilization. Keeping them healthy cannot be overvalued.

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Apocalypse Then: When Y2K Didn’t Lead To The End Of Civilization - Forbes
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