Page 24 - Yearbook issue try out

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If 2020 has been COVID-19 year, the
year 2000 had the millennium bug. As

frightening or fatal for mankind? Not
as it turned out. But it could have been
Armageddon for computer systems

across all aspects of society, as
DAVID COLLISON reports

HE millennium bug arose, very simplistically, “Open Channel D”: 1960s tech
because years were often stored without
Tthe century. This had typically been to save would fail; energy supply would falter; planes
space in early computers. So, 1985 was stored as would fall out of the sky; banks would lose all your
85. The cutover from 31 December 1999 to money.
1 January 2000 suddenly meant anything new
would appear to be from a century before the In the UK, widespread computer usage meant the
previous day. Many systems had to be rewritten to bug dwarfed IT challenges from earlier decades
cope. Some were even replaced. such as decimalisation.

Incidentally, let’s gloss over the millennium But the disaster did not happen. The public today
actually ending on 31 December 2000, and the has the view it was a non-event, which – thankfully
widespread popular use of the term “Y2K” for the – is largely true. They then, wrongly, extrapolate
year 2000 rather than 2048… this as a mountain made out of a molehill by
technologists.
The Y2K bug was pretty much global, endangering
most computer systems from the trivial to the For me, it was a busy time. I devoted significant
vital or dangerous. It spanned software, data, user energy – for years beforehand and on the night
interfaces and hardware’s firmware. Traffic systems – to ensuring my area of UK financial services
ran smoothly. I find the hindsight view extremely
frustrating and I know many others across various
industries agree.

Charitably, one could argue the bug was a
backhanded compliment to the IT professionals of
earlier decades whose software ended up lasting
far longer than expected. Less charitably, it was a
failure to plan ahead and maintain software.

The needs for efficient data storage and program
execution in the early days of IT perhaps excuse
the original implementations, but their persistence
and the weaknesses of much newer software were
very disappointing.

Party like it’s 1999
Y2K drove perhaps the first-ever thorough audits of
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