Notes on a panic: Y2Ks 25th birthday

Hong Kong stockpiled food, Virgin America grounded flights, and the U.S. Federal Reserve printed $50 billion in extra money, all in preparation for a date change. This was no simple turning of the calendar page though — it was Y2K and the entire globe was on edge as Jan. 1, 2000 drew near, anxious the world's computers would not recognize the new century and catastrophically glitch. Fears of train crashes, disappearing bank data, power outages, and even nuclear meltdowns permeated many minds.

The panic was overblown, of course, and the Earth kept turning on Jan. 1. There was indeed cause for concern but by the time New Year's Eve 1999 approached, threat levels were relatively low, recalls Chris Taylor, Mashable's senior editor and, a quarter-century ago, one of TIME magazine's journalists on the Y2K beat. Taylor chronicled the code conundrum that began in the mid-20th century when programmers wrote two-digit numbers to indicate years, mostly to save space on the punch cards used in COBOL, an early computer programming language.

"It was the middle of the century, and nobody cared much about what would happen at the click of the cosmic odometer," Taylor wrote in a Jan. 1999 issue of TIME. "But today the world runs on computers, and older machines run on jury-rigged versions of COBOL that may well crash or go senile when they hit a double-zero date."

The news story of the millennium

In his reporting from 25 years ago, Taylor tamped down Y2K panic and noted how programmers had been working to upgrade the code for many years leading up to the date change. Mostly forgotten now is that there was a minor dry run for Y2K a few months prior to the real thing.

"We didn’t fear the new year so much because there was a big test and that was 9/9/99, a number that often meant 'end of program' on many computers; people would just create 9999 codes to file [programs] away," Taylor says. Sept. 9 (and Sept. 10) went off without a hitch.

Taylor admits that some in the media took liberties with the perceived threat.

"The White House was already acting, Congress was already acting, [Y2K] was already a known thing but I think we elevated it to a level of mainstream panic," Taylor says of some journalists at the time. "[On TIME's Jan. 1999 cover] there's a picture with a guy with a sandwich board, he kind of looks like Jesus, and he’s holding a cross. And the sandwich board reads, 'End of the world!?! Apocalypse Now, will computers melt down? Will society? A guide to MILLENNIUM MADNESS.'”

TIME's cover story did recommend restraint, eventually. Author Richard Lacayo admitted "to the extent there is some consensus among sensible experts is that the dire predictions of major social disruptions are way overblown. The most likely problems involve temporary glitches, especially overseas, and billing and invoice systems that can cause some disruptions in business and government." That passage is five pages into the story, though.

Editors looking to sell magazines weren't the only ones hyping up the millennium bug. Hollywood got into it too in '99, releasing two disaster films — a TV movie and a straight-to-video production — that were both called Y2K.

Diagnosing the panic

The TIME cover with the doomsday prepper and his sandwich board was fitting, Taylor says, since much of the Y2K hysteria was wrapped up in religious paranoia, with the date ostensibly coming 2,000 years after Jesus' birth.

"If you want to have a computer bug that would spread widespread panic, have it coincide with a change from 1999 to 2000 where people were already freaking out about in an apocalyptic sense," Taylor says. "I was actually in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1999; I was part of the crew dropping confetti on the crowd and I wrote [in my diary], 'There was a sense that something might happen; that [New Year's Eve 1999 was] ground zero for nuts.'"

While worries over disruptions and human responses to them were at the heart of Y2K jitters, there also was a creepy realization that technology had fully infiltrated modern life, Taylor says. "That techno fear," he says. "The fear that computers would do what the computer did in War Games and launch a nuclear war. Another thing we forget in our miraculous world of tablets and smartphones and things that just work is that they just didn’t work then, so often. And we were right to regard [tech] with suspicion."

Then and now

Though governments, the banking industry, and transportation systems knew about the Y2K threat for decades, they finally took it seriously in the '90s. Still, late as it was, the Herculean preparation was impressive, Taylor recalls.

"People jumped into action," he says. "There was a report in the Senate [from the United States Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem]. There was this bipartisan effort to throw money at the problem to clean it up."

That urgency is missing 25 years later, as the AI revolution changes how we learn, work, and communicate.

"With Y2K, the problem was easy, we totally understood it. We didn’t put enough digits in the date field when we were programming computers," Taylor says. "With AI, it seems like we don’t even understand what we’re talking about. No one’s even on the same page. Some of us say AI is the greatest threat to mankind and others point out it’s barely got the complexities of an insect brain. It seems very appropriate for our time that we can't even agree on the basic structure of reality any more."

Taylor says "we're not approaching AI with the same collective action" as with Y2K, but he also doesn't view our modern concerns in apocalyptic terms: "The world is always ending, the end is always near."