What was the Y2K bug? Millennium bug

Показать описание

LA Times on people stockpiling supplies (1999):

New York times on Y2K (1999):

Also sometimes known as the Y2K scare, Millennium bug or Y2K problem. This was an expected bug or glitch in computer software that was expected to create chaos and bring down computer networks all over the world as soon as the clock struck January 1st 2000.

Lets have a look at what the bug actually was. To understand this we need to look back a few decades to when computers had very little memory (RAM). One of the ways early computer programs saved space was to have the date abbreviate four digit years as 2 digits. Software treated all dates as being in the 20th century, so 1986 would display as 86 for example.
The issue was that when the clock hit January 1st 2000, no one had any idea whether computers would read the 2 digit abbreviation as the year 2000 or 1900 as it would be abbreviated to 00. So why is computers reading a date wrong such a big issue?
The issue is that pretty much anything that is automated or electronic runs on code, things like planes, satellites and power stations also rely heavily on software and code. Computers not being able to read the date correctly could cause them to error or the software to crash completely.

Banks using computers to calculate interest rates would calculate the rate for 100 years ago rather than todays rate. Power stations that relied on the date for scheduled automated checks such as power output and radiation levels would be in big trouble, if their computers read the date as 1900 no automated checks would be carried out by their computer systems as they were all scheduled for futures dates, potentially causing failures and blackouts all over the world.
Airlines and other transportation were under threat as booking and scheduling systems may go down if they're trying to read data from 1900 rather than 2000. Some people even predicted planes would fall from the sky due to software crashes causing any automatic processes to fail. Effectively if it was an electronic device it was suspected to be at risk of software errors or failing completely the second the date changed over to 2000.

So what was done to protect against the Y2K bug?
Work started in the early 90's to correct vulnerabilities to the bug, companies and governments around the world raced to become what was known as "Y2K complaint" at the time. Programmers simply changed the date to be a 4 digit number in effected systems in most cases, the sheer amount of systems and programs that needed altering lead to the project taking so long and being so expensive. It is estimated that around 100 billion dollars was spent in the US alone to fix the bug.

So what actually happened when the clock hit January 1st 2000?
Well in short, not much. There were a few reports of bus ticket machines failing to work and a couple of cases of alarms being raised at power plants in Japan. In New York a man was charged $91000 after a computer at a film rental shop calculated that the film he was returning was 100 years overdue, but this was quickly refunded. However nothing like what had been predicted might happen did end up happening. In hindsight a lot of people refer to the Y2K bug as a hoax or overreaction to a non issue because so many countries that did very little to protect themselves had very few issues, but its hard to say what the impact may have been if so much work hadn't gone into the Y2K project before January 1st in the worlds most computer reliant countries.

I have linked a couple of articles in the description below from the late 90's if you want to get a perspective on how concerned some people were at the time.

Thanks for watching please consider liking and subscribing if you found this video useful.

#y2k #computer #virus