CybersecurityIf You Think the Millennium Bug Was a Hoax, Here Comes a History Lesson
It’s not hard to find echoes of the late 1990s in the zeitgeist. Now as then, impeachment is on many peoples’ minds, and films such as The Matrix and The Sixth Sense continue to influence culture. Another feature of the same era that perhaps has a more important, if subtler, influence is the infamous Y2K bug. Y2K was the great glitch in computer systems that looked capable of destroying civilization at the stroke of midnight on the millennium. In the end, however, nothing much went wrong. Y2K is in danger of becoming one of those moments in history from which exactly the wrong lessons have been drawn.
It’s not hard to find echoes of the late 1990s in the zeitgeist. Now as then, impeachment is on many peoples’ minds, and films such as The Matrix and The Sixth Sense continue to influence culture. Another feature of the same era that perhaps has a more important, if subtler, influence is the infamous Y2K bug.
Y2K was the great glitch in computer systems that looked capable of destroying civilization at the stroke of midnight on the millennium. In the end, however, nothing much went wrong. Some people started to wonder if we had been misled all along. In fact, they couldn’t have been more mistaken. Y2K is in danger of becoming one of those moments in history from which exactly the wrong lessons have been drawn.
Many of the systems that were at risk from the Y2K bug dated from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. This was the era when the alleged insistence by Bill Gates that “640k [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody” was still ringing in people’s ears. Even powerful servers had only a few megabytes of RAM – a fraction of what you would find in most ordinary PCs today.
With so little space, programmers were always trying to come up with ways to conserve memory. Dates were one of those things that were integral to most computer programs, and years came to be stored as a number between “0” and “99” – so for example, “80” would represent 1980. The advantage was that only a single byte of memory would be used. But with the new millennium soon to come around, it meant that the year “99” would become “100”. As a result, computer programs would believe that the year was 1900 rather than 2000, which threatened to raise serious problems.
Bug on Out
It looked likely that financial transactions such as accrued interest would be calculated incorrectly. Monitoring software would suddenly believe it had expired and ceased to work, while navigation software would not be able to compute positions correctly. Still more alarming, failures in individual mission-critical systems might cascade. This could cause power grids, telecoms networks and financial systems to fail; oil rigs to stop pumping oil; hospital patient record systems to start prescribing the wrong drugs.
