The expression Y2K, shorthand for the year 2000 (Y=year; 2=two; K=the symbol for 1,000), helped define the closing days of the twentieth century by spotlighting some pitfalls of the computer age. Y2K represented a major problem—some called it a crisis of global proportions—caused mainly by older computers whose programmers and software designers failed to foresee what could happen in the year 2000. Often called "the Y2K bug," this problem came about because early computer designers used only a two-digit year—uniformly dropping the "19" that stands at the beginning of every year from 1900 to 1999. What the designers failed to take into consideration was the problem posed by the year 2000. Computer logic meant the machines would translate the numbers 00 not as the year 2000 but as 1900. In the closing days of the century, the world was put on notice that computers using the two-digit formulation could malfunction because of this inability to distinguish years belonging to different centuries.
Because computers had become intertwined with almost every facet of life in America and virtually the rest of the world, some doomsayers predicted that banks would fail, military systems would become paralyzed, planes would fall out of the sky, elevators would stop, stock exchanges would collapse, and life in general would be dramatically disrupted.
Although the problem had been known about for years, governments and businesses waited until the last few years of the twentieth century to tackle the potential crisis. For example, it was not until September 1997 that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. government watchdog over the stock exchange markets, issued a notice to investors to pressure investment companies to make their computers "Y2K compliant"—a phrase meaning that computers had been checked and fixed, if necessary, to avoid any year 2000 problems when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. The SEC also urged investors to press publicly traded companies to take steps to avoid a Y2K disaster, including assessing the cost of fixing their computers and making sure their officers and board members took out personal liability insurance for what could be an avalanche of lawsuits.
With great fanfare, U.S. President Bill Clinton announced in December 1998 that the Social Security Administration, which then handled some 40 million checks each month for pensioners, disabled people, and widows, was Y2K compliant. Nevertheless, some Republicans took issue with the Democratic president's claims that checks would go out on time, noting that some banks that receive checks for recipients and are vital to the system might be noncompliant.
Later, the Agriculture Secretary, Dan Glickman, announced at a Senate hearing on the Y2K problem that there would not be widespread food shortages in the United States because of the millennium bug. "There are some fear-mongers there," Glickman said, as he urged people to avoid stockpiling or hoarding food as the year 2000 approached. Glickman conceded, however, that although he did not see major food shortages, "there will be some glitches" and disruptions in the marketplace.
While American businesses and local, state, and federal governments were spending millions of dollars to correct the problem with computers, some developing countries lagged. The World Bank reported that some areas, notably sub-Sahara Africa, could run into major problems with electricity, food, and health care. In early 1999, with less than a year to go before the 2000 bug might hit, the Bank found in a survey of 139 countries that only 21 had taken major steps to solve the problem, although 54 had some kind of national policy to deal with the bug.
By the end of 1999, observers hoped that the steps taken by companies and governments would prevent Y2K from causing any major disasters. The fear of Y2K ebbed and swelled in different areas across the globe, depending on whether the most important computer systems had become Y2K compliant. But certainly, Y2K had done more than create a global panic; it deflated the esteem some held for the early designers of software machinery, who had been looked upon as geniuses and had become millionaires and billionaires virtually overnight. Their use of the two-digit code saved steps in millions of computer applications, but at the same time lobbed a gigantic, ticking time bomb into the next century.
Further Reading:
De Jaeger, Peter, and Richard Bergeon and Robin Guenier. Countdown Y2K: Business Survival Planning for the Year 2000. New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1998.
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