We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,138,864-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Y2K Problem
What it’s about: The weak sauce that passed for a global catastrophe 20 years ago. Like people’s checkbooks (ask your grandparents), computers tended to assume that every year started with “19” and only bothered filling in the last two numbers. Which meant that when the clock struck 2000, every computer would glitch, destroying the electrical grid, sending planes plummeting from the sky, destroying the monetary system… or causing some minor headaches for filing systems, depending on who you believed. Of course, none of that happened, largely because people saw the problem coming, reacted intelligently and responsibly, and fixed the problem before it could spiral out of control. It was a simpler time.
Biggest controversy: We avoided disaster in 2000 because of prudent planning and responsible action, or maybe those things are a waste of time. It’s difficult for people to view planning for a disaster that didn’t happen as worthwhile, even if the disaster didn’t happen because of all the planning. The world spent $300B on updating software to be Y2K compliant, and the majority of tech industry and government observers pointed to the lack of disaster as proof of success. But naysayers, fond as they are of saying nay, pointed out that countries that did almost nothing to avoid Y2K issues, and institutions that didn’t have the resources to spend (like small businesses and public schools), still had very few problems. There were also very few problems in advance of 2000, when people in the late ’90s still would have had to put dates a few years ahead into a computer occasionally. (Although the counterargument to that is that many Y2K compliance efforts began years in advance.)
Strangest fact: The Deep Impact space probe didn’t launch until 2005, but it still had Y2K issues. The probe was launched by NASA with the intention of releasing an “impactor” into comet Tempel 1, in order to study the debris caused by the impact. (It did so in July of that same year, and scientists learn that when you punch a comet, it kicks up a large, bright dust cloud that obscures your view and hampers your research efforts.) That being done, Impact was due to continue on to do more comet and asteroid flybys. But on August 11, 2013, NASA lost communication with the probe. It turned out that its internal clock was set to start on New Year’s Day 2000, and had 32 bits of data set aside to keep track of the time. Once the clock reached 2 tenths of a second to the 32nd power—or 13 years, 7 months, 11 days—it effectively reached the end of time (as far as the probe’s computer was concerned), and malfunctioned.
Thing we were happiest to learn: We were prepared for Y2K because there had been several previous Y2K technology problems. One of the first operating systems was Decsystem 10, which used only 12 bits of memory to store the date—that small amount of storage meant the clocks ran out in 1975, and widespread problems resulted that year. There was also a looming problem on 9/9/99, as it was common practice to type in “9999” as code for an unknown date. This wouldn’t cause any havoc with the computers themselves, as “9999” was simply a shorthanded invented by people using those computers, but it would have caused widespread confusion if left unaddressed. There’s also a future Y2K problem, as Unix—the operating system that underpins most of modern computing—uses a 32-bit clock, which started on January 1, 1970, and will run down on January 19, 2038. A suggested fix is a 64-bit clock, which will run down in the year 292,278,994.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Of course, the conspiracy nuts had a field day. Wikipedia breaks out an entire section on “Fringe group responses,” which covers everything from religious fundamentalists to survivalists to cults to the good old end-of-the-world-is-nigh crowd. Leading voices in the survivalist/prepper community played up the threat of a worldwide collapse. Religious fundamentalists, especially ones already predisposed to end-times theology, made apocalyptic predictions. Even a mainstream fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell predicted that Y2K “might” lead to the rapture, and advised his followers to stock up on food and guns. Christian ministries across North America were making huge profits selling prep kits, survival guides, and the like. Deseret News reporter Betsy Hart observed, “preaching chaos is profitable and calm doesn’t sell many tapes or books,” and the Baltimore Sun later noted that “not one of these prophets of doom has ever apologized for their scare-mongering tactics.”
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: Y2K wasn’t just an underwhelming historical event, it was an underwhelming movie! Y2K was a 1999 made-for-TV movie in which Ken Olin is a computer systems analyst (a perfectly cromulent action hero job in the late ’90s) who, after a Swedish nuclear plant melts down when New Year’s strikes in that time zone, has a matter of hours to save the Seattle nuclear plant where he works. Both the film’s realism and quality were savaged by critics, and speaking of savage, Wikipedia lists the disasters portrayed in the film as “power failures crippling the entire Eastern seaboard, computers unlocking all doors in a Texas prison, and Jay Leno continuing to broadcast.”
There was also a rival straight-to-video movie, also called Y2K, that somehow managed to land Louis Gossett Jr., Sarah Chalke, and Malcolm McDowell, but there’s no Wikipedia page, so we’ll just have to hope How Did This Get Made gets around to it.
Further Down the Wormhole: Another technological milestone that’s worrying enough that Wikipedia categorizes it under “global catastrophic risks” is the singularity, a moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Actually determining machine intelligence has proven to be extremely difficult. Wikipedia quotes a Scientific American article by Gary Marcus, in which he points out that “virtually every sentence [that people generate] is ambiguous, often in multiple ways,” so that we can intuit what each pronoun implies in “she talked to her,” but machines can’t. (There’s an explanation in here somewhere as to why Data can’t use contractions.)
Ambiguity is the condition or quality of being ambiguous, a situation in which a phrase’s meaning is not clear, and can be interpreted in a number of ways. While a sentence can be heard or read correctly and still be misunderstood, there’s another layer of ambiguity when spoken language is misheard. Linguists use the term mondegreen for a mishearing that changes the meaning of a sentence. (It comes from someone mishearing the line “layd him on the green” in Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl Of Murray” as “Lady Mondegreen.”
English-language music has always been rife with such misunderstandings, from “I can see clearly now, Lorraine is gone” to “There’s a bathroom on the right.” But there’s even more room for misunderstanding when lyrics are in a language foreign to the listener. The Moldovan song “Dragostea Din Tei”’s chorus, “Vrei să pleci dar nu mă, nu mă iei…,” translates to “You want to leave but you don’t want, don’t want to take me.” But to Japanese audiences, it sounds very similar to “米さ！米酒だろう！飲ま飲まイェイ,” which translates to, “Rice, obviously! Rice wine, most likely! Drink drink yay!” Because Americans rarely listen to foreign-language music, this phenomenon—called soramimi—is largely unknown here, but is widely celebrated elsewhere in the world. We’ll investigate next week, now ’scuse me while I kiss this guy.
55 Comments
It’s okay, they solved it, Jay Leno can’t hurt you anymore.
Jay Leno has never run out of ways to hurt me
Unless he’s JayWalking.
Then he only hurts your car.
I’d prefer it the other way around.Side note: I’ve seen some of his early stand-up pre-Tonight Show, and I get why he ended up being Carson’s go-to as guest host. I also think that he got way too comfortable, lazy, and egotistical since getting the Tonight Show, and essentially turned into a caricature of himself. Also, the whole Conan fiasco, which did him and NBC no good at all. (Also, that debacle with him taking over the 10:00 slot five nights a week, but the less said and remembered about that, the better.)
It’s worth adding the article for y2k from last year’s 1999 week:https://news.avclub.com/looking-back-at-all-the-ways-y2k-was-used-to-sell-us-sh-1836982164
We went through all the data entry fields we could think of and then went after machine-calculated things like age of people and age of products, and fixed all the scheduling calendars we could find . On the night of Y2K, we stayed at work past midnight, desperately trying to stay awake and thoroughly annoyed that senior management had doubted our efforts.
Seems wrong that an AV Club article about the Y2K bug would touch on movies about it without mentioning Office Space, the Mike Judge comedy about disenfranchised office workers fixing the Y2K bug at a bank.
@HappyInParaguay: “Looks like you’ve been missing a lot of Office Space references, lately”
The AV Club: “I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob”
Soramimi sounds like a concept I am very familiar with. I lived in Europe for a while and had to regularly shuffle between English, German and Dutch speaking environments. Each language has a fair amount of phonetic overlap with the others, but they have just enough similar-sounding words that aren’t related that you can easily mis-hear a word and draw the wrong meaning. It often wasn’t until I read the printed lyrics of a song that I would realize I had completely misunderstood them.
“But naysayers, fond as they are of saying nay, pointed out that
countries that did almost nothing to avoid Y2K issues, and institutions
that didn’t have the resources to spend (like small businesses and
public schools), still had very few problems.”Hoo boy, the “Opposing Views” section of that Wikipedia article is weak. They have two cites for the countries that did almost nothing having no problems. One is just an assertion by a libertarian climate change denier with no background in tech that he made without giving any evidence. The second is an article about Italy which describes them getting a late start but then working like crazy to meet the deadline, citing one city that spent millions of dollars and an oil company that spent tens of millions. The article acts as a debunking of Wikipedia’s point.The cite they provide for public schools also doesn’t back them up — it says that 98% of schools expected to be compliant by the deadline and said schools were making big gains to date in complying.
It’s difficult for people to view planning for a disaster that didn’t happen as worthwhile, even if the disaster didn’t happen because of all the planning.Maybe they will understand the importance now that they are living through the results of dismantling all the preparations put in place over the last 50 years to deal with a viral pandemic.Or maybe they will just decide it is what it is.
I think there is a common thread among Y2K truthers, climate change deniers, and COVID gaslighters. The “opposing view” section cites one deceased libertarian academic Y2K denier who also was a climate change denier. Richard Epstein, the libertarian academic who insisted that COVID would only kill another 500 people in the US (and when he was wrong, secretly tried to change his prediction to 5,000 before giving up) is also a climate change denier. Bill Maher in March whined that Coronavirus “hysteria” was going to be a repeat of Y2K anxiety.There is a minority in the world of libertarians who believe that big problems exist and need collective action. Y2K ought to be a great example for libertarians, because the large majority of effort and expense was undertaken by the private sector in response to economic pressure wiithout government mandates.But most of them are so stuck in a smarty pants contrarian mindset that that they have to deny the existence of anything that requires communal action. It goes beyond any fear of the government — they can’t stomach the idea of people coming together under any circumstances, which means for them reality is the victim if that’s what it takes.
Is Maher really a libertarian?
He’s identified himself that way. I think 90% of self identified libertarians, maybe more, are using the term as cover for something else.
Still? I though he stopped calling himself that years ago.
I think he was a South Park style libertarian, which used to be much more en vogue and was something like a mix of anarchism, Objectivism (realizing it or not), generic Gen X disaffection and internet troll.
I believe “libertarian” is political-speak for “asshole,” and that believe has stood me well for decades.
Maher is a comedian I grew up watching (along with a hell of a lot of others in the late 80’s-90’s) that I liked, but it always seemed there was something off. I watched Politically Incorrect religiously when on CC and even when it went over to ABC (I think). But he’s off the rails anymore, and while I used to watch clips several years back when he moved to HBO, there’s no humor anymore, or even insight. He’s fallen into the Norm MacDonald phase, where you’re still a name, but nothing you say is relevant.
At least 90%.They want to embrace the “muh freeedoms” of it all, while trying to conveniently ignore the actual stuff behind it, like privatizing everything but the military (and often the military, too).
To me, he’s a fucking disappointment.
“I think there is a common thread among Y2K truthers, climate change deniers, and COVID gaslighters.”I love that you group all those morons together, because there is no way in hell that none of those people don’t believe all three. I also forgot all about the Y2K truthers. Geez, those were simpler times.I’m also feeling really old for that last sentence.
The lesson for engineers is to *mostly* avert apocalypses but leave yourself an opportunity for a diving save in view of management.
I remember standing on the back porch of a house with a few other people in the waning moments of 1999, anxiously waiting for the stroke of midnight and the chaotic inferno that would surely follow. A few seconds into what we thought would be the end of the world, there was no eternal darkness, no screams of agony, no planes falling from the sky. To make matters worse, a local church’s bells started playing “Ave Maria.” After a minute or two, one of the porch people broke the silence with a rueful, “well, I gotta go to work in eight hours…”
I went to Times Square with some friends, because we were stupid and young and thought “if the world is gonna end I want to be in the middle of it!”I don’t think it dawned on any of us that Eastern Time, USA is not the first place in the world it turns midnight and if Y2K was gonna happen we probably would have heard of Australia, Asia or Europe going full Mad Max.
I had spent a lot of the previous couple years inspecting for and correcting potential problems, and running some wide-scale tests. I woke up around noon on NYE, watching for breaking news that Australia and Japan had gone dark. When that didn’t happen, I stopped worrying.
I was at a crazy beach party with 15,000 people on Kho-Pha-Ngan in Thailand. Given Thailand’s very lax attitude to health and Safety, everyone was off their faces and armed to the teeth with the kind of fireworks that could be classified as Surface to Air Missiles. It certainly felt like an apocalypse!
I have a friend who, during the countdown, snuck down into his basement and, when his family yelled out “Happy New Year!”, flipped the breaker.
There’s some pretty good YouTube videos about y2k and how the IRS ran into a big problem with the bug. This one is very easy to follow and summarizes everything really well.
LGR makes some good content if you’re into tech and vidya-type stuff. His ones where he builds obsolete computers are pretty comfy.
I’ve always wondered about the Unix time problem. As incredibly durable and forward thinking as Unix ended up being, did they just not think that through? Was it one of those “I’ll be dead by then so it’ll be someone else’s problem” decisions? Was Unix not expected to become as popular and long lived as it has? Or was it just not possible/reasonable to use more bits to represent time back then? I’m sure someone realized in short order that 2038 isn’t actually that far into the future. But boy howdy did we manage to underpin a massive chunk of our infrastructure on it before deciding that something needs to (eventually) be done about it.
We build roads with the expectation they will be upkept and replaced when coming to the end of their life cycle. Same with plumbing. Pipes are not immortal.But expectations rarely match reality.
It’s pretty much been done on any Unix-like still under active development. 64 bit timestamps have been the norm for years and years and any remotely current compiler will ensure that time_t is a 64 bit type. At this point, the problem will only arise on old microcontrollers running some sort of embedded 32 bit Unix that predates the fixes and doesn’t get firmware updates.
Back when Unix was created in 1969 at Bell Labs it was considered a dumb cheap hack to make a cut down version of AT&Ts Multics for some older minicomputers laying around in the lab (so the developers could play early video games). No one thought it would be around in 1980, let alone 2038. Hell, it was originally developed for the PDP-11, which was a 16 bit micro (programmed by setting toggle switches on the front panel, or with a paper tape reader if you were fancy and had some cash for one). I’m sure it was considered very forward thinking when they switched to 32 bit timestamps. Because seriously, Unix in 2038? (At this point though, Unix is the Fortran of operating systems, where I don’t know what OS people will be using in 50 years, but it will be a Unix variant.)
I’d never looked too closely at the history of Unix beyond the broadest of overviews. Thank you for the insight 🙂
“(At this point though, Unix is the Fortran of operating systems, where I don’t know what OS people will be using in 50 years, but it will be a Unix variant.)“My father would be laughing so hard at this. He worked for Bell Labs/AT&T/Lucent his entire life. The number of tech manuals he had on the shelf was incredible. Always sent out during the 1980’s to do classes on Unix in NY or CA. He was the one teaching the classes, FYI. The one good thing I remember the comic strip Dilbert for was when he made fun of the Lucent logo: “the coffee stain of quality”. I swear my dad had that framed. Is Fortran still even used? I mean, there have to be some older systems that still haven’t been updated since, oh, 1962? Right?
Fortran still gets used all the time, and even gets updates; Fortran 2018 is the most recent standard. In fact, right now there are some people panicking because there isn’t a viable Fortran compiler[1] for AARCH64 (64 bit ARM, which is what Apple is switching their Macs to starting next year). There’s a lot of code to do highly optimized linear algebra that backs major R and Python projects through foreign function interfaces that is built on top of Fortran libraries. And a lot of people who do scientific programing in R and Python are Mac owners (especially MacBook Pros).
[1] LLVM has a Fortran 2018 parser in their tree now, but the byte code emitting code isn’t finished yet.
The massive wave of people applying for unemployment meant that the state of New Jersey was looking for COBOL programmers this spring – Fortran’s definitely being used still somewhere. *Everything* is still being used somewhere.
I also think that Prince’s strategy of dealing with 1999 was solid too
“Wikipedia lists the disasters portrayed in the film as ‘power failures crippling the entire Eastern seaboard, computers unlocking all doors in a Texas prison, and Jay Leno continuing to broadcast.’”My God! The horror… The horror…
It’s like Wikipedia and “The year 2000″ is reading our minds…
Man, in February or so at the beginning of all this shit I was the old man working with a bunch of young guys, maybe 20 year olds, and they asked me about SARS and, eventually, Y2K. That was great though, I was like “Gather round while I tell ye a tale!”
I just started a nonprofit working with college students from my alma mater, and far too often it regresses into me recounting what college was like in the ‘90s. “Look, everybody! An old man is talking!”
i once worked at one of the newport mansions & our deal was that it was 1891 in the house & the tour guides were servants or members of mrs. astor’s family & the visitors were her guests. it was a fun way to do tours. whenever we had a school group come through, they would spend the whole tour explaining microwaves & television to us.
Wikipedia lists the disasters portrayed in the film as “power failures crippling the entire Eastern seaboard, computers unlocking all doors in a Texas prison, and Jay Leno continuing to broadcast.”As a loyal Wikipedian, I know I should delete that blatantly unencyclopedic sentence, but I’m not sure I have the heart to do it.
I used to be a loyal Wikipedia editor a few years back, but I would leave that as it is. The snark at Leno needs to remain. It feels like O’Neill wrote it for some random AVC article back in the day.
Biggest anticlimax? You never met my wife.
You might be interested in this…podcast: Y2K an autobiography https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/y2k-an-autobiography/id1455676429
couldn’t you have at least mentioned dick clark melting down & the milk carton sprouting leaks? look out for that waffle maker! and who’s going to clean up all those jets?
Hey! I actually still use a checkbook to keep track of my transactions even though I no longer write any checks. For some reason, it’s just easier for me to know exactly what I have available then have to calculate pending transactions, etc.
Ya know they have these banking apps…just sayin’
Yeah, I do use my bank’s app of course. But to explain my thinking (and bore you to death): Say I have $500 but I want to put aside $350 for my car insurance next week. If I look at the app, I still have a $500 balance available, but looking in the checkbook ,I subtracted the $350, so I know I have $150 free to use. Basically, less thinking on my part.Sorry for that entire paragraph!
I actually totally get that, and forgot that this is the reason that I don’t do autopay for things like my phone bill, rent, credit cards, etc. Not to say I don’t have autopay for some bills (looking at you, Netflix and wi-fi). I just tend to be overly aware of what my checking balance is on nearly a day to day basis, and while it’s a pain (and yeah, I grew up with a checkbook and keeping that thing balanced), I find I do just as well keeping a mental balance is just as effective. But that’s just me.
I worked at 911 when we went from 199 to 2000. It was my first year, so you know I was working on New Year’s Eve. We had news people there waiting to see if everything would crash at midnight. My dad was a computer programmer for the city I worked 911 for. I remember him working his butt off that year (probably longer, but the overtime got more and more as that year went on.) I remember paying close attention to the TV as different places around the world entered 2000. I distinctly remember them showing Paris and how we were all just expecting it to go dark. I actually wasn’t at work at midnight. My shift ended at 2300. My mom was at my aunt’s house, so me and my date went there after work until midnight and when everything stayed normal, we went to a party.
“Like people’s checkbooks (ask your grandparents), computers tended to assume that every year started with “19”…”Ah, remember all the way back in January when the biggest crisis anyone could think of was the meme going around where if you write 20 on a legal document or check and then someone could backdate it to an earlier year in the 2000s and then somehow underpants … ??? … profit?
My father was a computer programmer going back to 1961 and he wasn’t worried at all about Y2K, saying we went through this already in 1970, when, apparently, most computer programs were using just 1 number for the year. Nothing happened then and not much happened in 2000.