By Gary Bennett
Looking back, New Year’s Eve 1999 was momentous on several fronts. It was the end of the year, decade, century and even the millennium, but few remember it could have been the end of civilization as we knew it.
I am overstating that last item, of course, but fears were rampant because of a little thing called the Y2K computer bug.
The shorthand form of the year 2000 (Y2K) became synonymous with impending doom. It referred to possible failures to computer systems because years (back in those days) were denoted as two-digit numbers instead of four. Therefore, no one could be sure how computers would react to the rollover from 99 to 00. Some believed computers would think it was 1900 instead of 2000, making any calculations that relied on time, like interest payments on savings or Social Security payments, to fail.
As incredible as it sounds now, this glitch was simply due to pure cost savings and an amazing lack of foresight. Early in the computer age, which dates from the 1940s, data storage was extremely expensive and programmers compensated by taking shortcuts wherever possible. One easy shortcut was to denote years as a two-digit number instead of four. No one worried about the year 2000 because it was so far away, and it wasn’t at all clear this new technology would catch on.
At the turn of the century, I was working for the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (BNA) in Washington, D.C. It was a large publishing company that specialized in reporting on legislative and regulatory news coming out of the federal government. It is now part of Bloomberg. BNA reported extensively on governmental efforts to stem this coming catastrophe. We even had a publication called the Y2K Reporter.
During the late 1990s, the federal government finally recognized the problems this computer glitch could cause and they went to work in a bipartisan fashion to fix the problems unimaginable today. By some estimates, the federal government spent upwards of $600 billion to remedy the 2-digit year glitch.
I was not a reporter or a computer programmer at BNA but a communications-type person. Nevertheless, I was on high alert New Year’s Eve, ready to make my way to the office in D.C. if the unimaginable happened. And believe me, doomsday scenarios were running wild: Jets would fall from the sky at midnight, the power grid would fail, and people would not be able to withdraw funds from banks were a few of the wildest.
Luckily, nothing much happened. There was some minor glitches to nonessential government programs but no widespread systems failures like some predicted. Our Y2K Reporter folded up the following year, and New Year’s Eve the following year was much more pleasant.
So, on Dec. 31, 1999, I was not ready to “party like it was 1999,” as Prince suggested, but was suffering from high anxiety like millions of other Americans and looking askance at my big, old desktop computer.