I was listening to a co-worker telling stories of his vacation today. He traveled back to Mississippi for a reunion and was telling how much his relatives feared the impending new millennia. I guess other parts of the country (or groups) have been getting more hype about this topic and it occurred to me that I haven't weighed-in yet on the subject of Y2K.
First of all, why should I weigh-in at all? I'm not a fundamentalist minister or right-wing militia kook (two of the groups who have embraced the so called Y2K issue.) On the other hand, I am a senior software engineer. I have supported my family these past 18 years by programming computers. I knew about this problem back when only geeks like me knew what a "k" was and at that time, we just called it "the millennia bug." We knew about it, hell we caused it! We've also worked to eliminate it wherever and whenever we could get the bean-counters to let us. This is and always has been an economic problem.
As I'm sure you're already aware, computer memory was once fabulously expensive. A multi-million dollar mainframe like the Burroughs' system that I cut my teeth on had only 30KB (thirty thousand bytes) of memory. That was all we had and all we needed. We wrote programs to do everything from pay the troops to account for weapons. Today, a one-line Microsoft program that does nothing more than print the words "Hello World!" takes up nearly 500 KB. So, we optimized like you wouldn't believe. We accounted for every byte and reused the space when we were done (in the same program). More often than not, we used 2-digit years. Sometimes we just used a single digit (that's one-half of a byte!). We didn't do it to pad our retirement. We did it because no one could afford to waste memory.
But as memory prices fell and the end of the century approached, we warned managers and accountants alike that major upgrades were needed and begged to be allowed to work on the problem as we performed other maintenance. Every time I made this pitch I was told that it was a good idea, but the year 2000 was too far off and we had other priorities. Only during the last year or two has anyone paid heed, and now it's costing a lot more to fix. Well, that's OK with me.
But there are a lot of kooks out there who are trying to horn-in on our racket. They don't know their butt from a byte so instead of making money fixing the problems, they are making fortunes by scaring people. They sell videos and beg for contributions and foretell everything from major outages to nothing less than the apocalypse. Well, Chicken-Little, I'm sorry to tell you that the sky isn't going to fall on January 1st and the only thing we have to fear is doomsday cults and militias with dogs telling them that god's too lazy and needs their help killing everyone.
Am I saying that there will be no impact at all? Nope, I've already seen it on reports and letters that are computer generated or preprinted with the dates as 1900. Is this something to fear? If you go out to dinner and the health certificate on the wall expires in 1900 should you assume that it actually expired a century ago? If you're that stupid, you shouldn't be allowed to eat in a restaurant.
Will the world end? Nope. Will people die as a direct result of this computer bug? Nope. Maybe from hysteria or from their cult-leaders telling them to drink poisoned kool-aid in preparation for joining god or the comet or whatever. But that's part of why I wanted to write this. I wanted to tell you, as many other responsible professionals are also doing, that it's not going to be that bad. We had to scare the accountants a bit because they were too damn cheap to fix the problem when it was easy and now they have to pay. That doesn't mean we'll let the world end. After all, if we did, what would we do with all the money we just made?