January 15, 2014 • 35 mins
Despite all the Y2K hype, the world kept turning on January 1, 2000. Did we have nothing to fear to begin with, or did we narrowly avoid technological Armageddon? We explore how the Year 2000 Problem worked.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Still get in touch with technology with text stuff from
com Hey everyone, and welcome to text stuff. I'm I'm sorry,
there's a little bug in my throat Jonathan Strickland and
I'm Lauren focal Bomb. You know, I've just been having
trouble all the day, Lauren. It just feels like something
(00:25):
very basic and the very code of me is just
not right. And now everything's just diligion all over the blade,
almost as though there's there's some kind of a programming
error or not error but over sight. Yeah, like like
someone to cut short and now things aren't working. Also
building up to something terrifying. Yeah, it's gonna build up
(00:45):
to a NonStop replay of Prince over and over again,
which it starts out awesome, but as it goes on,
let me tell you that gets old. Okay, we're talking
about a Y two K bug obviously, people, Yes, yes,
that is what our episode is about. To day, all
of our fans who hate it. Whenever I do cheesy humor,
I apologize, You don't really apologize. It is who I am.
(01:07):
So the reason why we're talking about Y two K
bug years after the whole issue happened is because you know,
we ask you guys what you want to hear. And
in this case, a listener named James sent us a
message on Twitter and said, hey, guys, you should do
an episode on the Y two K Bug. Heart heart James. Well, James,
we heart heart you two. Now we're going to do
(01:29):
our episode on the Y two K Bug. It's a
pretty interesting story because it's one of those things where,
you know, it really illustrates a few basic things about
computing and human nature in general. One of those things
is that when something new is created, no one who
is around has any idea of how long it's gonna last,
(01:49):
and they don't have any any appreciation of things that
they do then lasting into well into the future, right, well,
especially things like computer programming. I mean, no one in
say the nineteen sixties or seventies was expecting any of
the programs that they were writing to last for forty years. Yeah,
computers were developing very quickly, and the general thought was that,
(02:12):
you know, this is changing so fast that programming is
going to change in at a crazy speed too. But
as it turns out, while the hardware changed, the practices
that were established early on remained pretty much standard, and
also a lot of this old programming would find its
way into subsequent generations of software. So even if it
(02:33):
wasn't something that people were continuing to do later on, uh,
there'd still be these old fragments of code incorporated into
stuff that did have it. Now we're kind of dancing
around what that old thing was. Oh, oh, the old thing,
of course being I just got really excited that I
knew the answer to this um being the digits in
(02:55):
the year. Yeah, So here was the issue back in
the fifties and six these when programmers were having to
put a code in for the year, which is important
for certain types of calculations, right, anything that's time based, obviously,
you need to have a way of recording the time
so that you can compare times from different points and
draw your calculations based on that. You know, for for
(03:16):
for example, when people have been depositing paychecks or right,
so if you if you have a bank account that
has interest, for example, time is obviously a factor there.
It's not just the amount of money that you've been
continuously putting into or taking out of that bank account.
It's also the amount of times since you established that
bank account. And there's some complicated calculations that are very
(03:37):
time sensitive, so you have to have that kind of
stuff built into your algorithm, right right, Or in other cases,
you know, records of dates of birth or dates of
medical surgery or all kinds of things. Yeah, so many
different applications, to the point where there were even technologies
that you wouldn't imagine would ever need to know what
year it is that had the stuff built into it.
(03:59):
And here's the problem when you have two digits for
your year. See the computer programming getting started in the
nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, they figured, hey, we've got
practically half a century before we have to worry about
two digits turning into zero zero. Clearly we're gonna totally
fix this later. And computer memory right now is incredibly expensive,
(04:20):
so let's let's let's be really conservative and just use
two digits for the year, and we'll be fine until
these other problems work themselves out. Oh and and I
mean computer memory was so precious and saving especially across
the course of for example, an entire spreadsheet full of
interest calculations, saving two digits per year was big. So
so just by doing a month, month, day, day, year, year,
(04:42):
you know, just just the two digits each, you could
save a huge time and hassle for yourself at the
at that current moment, right right, because I mean, you know,
think about just a few years ago how expensive it
was to buy say a terrabyte for a hard drive,
compared to today. Now it's much more affordable. Oh well,
you know, as as opposed to when I was a kid,
when a tearabyte was and a completely unimaginable amount of information. Yeah,
(05:06):
when I was a kid, I couldn't imagine ever filling
up a megabyte of space. So you know, as time
has gone on, memory has become less and less of
a problem in the sense that we were able to
make more of it more affordably. But back then very
expensive and precious stuff that you only had so much
to work with, and it was expensive to use. So
(05:27):
cutting it down to two digits made sense of the time.
But the problem was that when you roll over from
nineteen nine to two thousand, in the computer terms, it
goes from n to zero zero, which meant that people
weren't really sure what was going to happen. Right, Would
the computer think that it was all of a sudden
would that completely bark all of your calculations for for example,
(05:49):
interest rates, yeah, or the the age of a person.
So your example, if it's figuring out the age by
subtracting the current date from your date of birth, or
the date of birth from the current data, I should say, so,
let's say it's ninety nine and you were born in ninety.
Then that's pretty easy. It's years old. Okay, got it.
But then let's say it goes zero zero and you
(06:09):
were born in ninety, so it's zero zero minus ninety. Suddenly,
like oh um am, I getting negative numbers because now
a negative age that doesn't make sense. And so you
can have all sorts of computer problems, ranging from the
financial industry to health to all pretty much everything that
had any sort of code in it that included the year,
(06:30):
which extends to things like like elevators that had microchips. Yes, yeah, elevators.
I mean that's pretty that that was a real concern.
People are like, I do not want to be in
an elevator on New Year's Eve because you don't know
if that thing is going to make it to the floor.
You want by two, right, And I mean, and of course,
you know, they weren't afraid that the elevator was going
(06:51):
to slow down to a rate, to a negative motion
rate or anything like that. But they were afraid that
the code and the microchip crashing would I don't know,
cause a fire and make the elevator drop or just
or just stop or just stop entirely, and refused to open.
People had a lot of just uncertainty about exactly what
was going to happen to code and whether or not
(07:12):
it was going to crash an entire system. When this
this year changed, over right, and so this this fear
started to kind of rear its head in the ninety nineties. Uh,
it really reached a fever pitch in nine. That was
when I think the general public became really aware of it.
Before that due to media complete over saturation. Yeah, yeah,
(07:33):
I got a little, a little crazy, a lot crazy,
depending upon where you lived in the United States, it
certainly became crazy. So you had you had the computer
scientists who were and programmers who were saying earlier than this, like, hey, guys,
maybe we should should fix this. This is you know,
this is a problem, and instead of perpetuating it across
multiple industries at infinitum, maybe we should address it. And
(07:57):
that way just establish a new rule going forward. Now,
computer memory not such a big deal, Now, why don't
we Why don't we fix it before we get Hello? So, anyway,
is this thing on? Hello? And the problem was that
a lot of people didn't listen until it started getting
closer to two thousand, and people began to really worry
about the possibility that this could bring about, if not
some sort of technological armageddon, at least a lot of
(08:19):
glitches and problems that could have been avoided. So then
they had to say, well, what are we going to
do about it? The obvious solution was also the most
time consuming and expensive one, which was the manually go
through and start updating code and changing it so that
it's a four digit year instead of a two digit
year and uh and then thus increasing the usefulness till
(08:43):
at least nine thou right, Yeah, I mean, I mean,
you know, the alternate there's to recode just so that
programs would recognize that zero zero probably meant two thousand
instead of nineteen hundred. But that's a less effective solution.
And b I mean, you just need to change it
over at the next and of the century, not that
probably those same programs were going to be in use,
(09:03):
but you never know. The thing is that, you know,
you have these legacy systems that certain companies rely on
that were originally programmed, you know, thirty forty years ago,
and you know they continue to rely on them because
they do exactly what the company needs them to do,
right and Okay, so so either way, these changes might
have to be entered by hand thousands of times or
(09:25):
hundreds of thousands of times in a single program um,
and each change then has to be tested against errors.
Of course, eventually code was developed to help automate the process,
but you know, I mean it was just a big undertaking. Yeah.
You might remember if you watch the documentary Office Space
that the characters at in a tech the company and
(09:46):
office space where they that was their job. They went
into other companies and helped update their code to meet
the y two K issue, which kind of raises another question,
which is what was this company going to do after
or the year two thousand. But at any rate, that
was actually a very real concern. I mean, The Spaces
is a great parody of all of that kind of sure,
(10:07):
but but there was a concern that you know, with
with all of these extra programming jobs that were going
to be created, that that businesses would crash and burn,
and some of them did. I mean, most of them
just moved on to other things and found freedom and
not having to do this incredibly tedious work anymore. Right,
And then there was a lot of other crashing and
burning in the tech industry for unrelated reasons. Yes, that
(10:28):
was the whole dot com bubble burst, but it didn't
have anything to do with Y two K directly. So, uh,
here's the other problem is that a lot of these
programs didn't recognize even if even if two thousand was
going to be fine, even if they could recognize the
fact that was two thousand was a four digit year,
they didn't necessarily recognize that two thousand was going to
be a leap year. Right, And here's the reason why.
(10:48):
So leap years actually follow an algorithm, a set of rules. Obviously,
so the the basic rule is that for every four years,
you added an extra day, a leap day, at the
end of February to balance out the calendar year with
the solar year. Because the solar year is close to
three hundred sixty five point to five days, not quite
point to five, almost point to five, which is important. Yeah,
(11:11):
so if you stretch out over an incredibly long time
for us humans, let's say a few centuries, your calendars
will start to become misaligned because it's not quite three
hundred sixty five point to five days in the solar year.
So that means that occasionally you have to ignore the
leap year. And the way the rule goes is that
if the let's see if I can get this right,
(11:33):
if the century is divisible by one hundred but not
by four hundred, it would not be a leap year.
So if it's divisible by both one hundred and four hundred,
it's a leap year. So, in other words, sevent hundred,
eighteen hundred, and nineteen hundred were not leap years. Was
because sixteen hundred is divisible by four hundred. Two thousand
(11:55):
also divisible by four hundred, so it should be a
leap here. However, because you gut just have zero zero
as the digits, if the computer thinks it's nineteen hundred,
the computers also knows the rule that nine is not
a leap year, so so it says, hey, this, this
big zero kind of number is totally not a leap year, right,
So it's only three days not three hundred, you know,
(12:18):
three and we we don't have a fevery twenty nine
this year, is what I would say. But there was
totally a fevery twenty nine here, which meant that other
calculations would get thrown off because it wouldn't take that
leap day into account. So all these calendar applications weren't
also had to be corrected. So suddenly people were like,
oh boy, this is a big old mess here. We've
got to fix this and uh and so, so a
(12:40):
lot of time and effort and attention was directed to this.
And there was a third problem as well. Wasn't there
having to do with all of the nines? Oh yeah,
Oh I totally forgot about that. I'm glad you brought
that up. Yes, So, okay, in the old days, children
gather around this, gather around the digital fireplace, you know,
if Netflix still has that digital fireplace, ahead and start
(13:00):
started up back in the old days, children Sometimes programmers,
in order to designate the end of a program, would
just type out a string of nines. It was essentially
just the code to say this is where stuff ends, y'all.
Uh so had a date in Exeptember nine that if
you were to write it would be like n a
(13:21):
lot of nines. And the worry was that certain programs
which would see that as meaning this is where stuff
stops and would stop working. So you had a lot
of digit problems here. So some of this you could
count on, you know, just a a kind of a
jerry rigged system of this is how I'm going to
(13:42):
designate this is the end of a program, and it
was just kind of arbitrarily chosen that would be stuff.
Some of it was more of a practical consideration, the
idea of we need to save time and money, so
therefore we're shortening this year to two digits. In either case,
it ended up meaning lots and lots of for people
in the late nineteen nineties, and um, you got a
(14:04):
lot of attention. I mean there were there were things
like uh, industries that were already taking advantage of the
time in the nineties to address this. The software industry
was way ahead of the game. Oh yeah, yeah, I
mean back by you know, I think six uh, a
few people were on top of it. Certainly by a
lot of people had already kind of corrected the problem, right,
(14:26):
So the software that was being produced from that point
going forward had already addressed it. Now. Granted there was
still software that was out previously that had this old
code in it, but the new code coming out of
the software industry had had adjusted for this kind of problem.
But there were other industries that were lagging behind. And
in fact, according to one study, UH, the cap Jimini
(14:49):
America consulting firm did a study. They found that the
state and federal government systems were the furthest behind. And
when you think of all the information that state governments
and federal government here in the United States requires to
operate things like taxes that are dependent upon infrastructure. Infrastructure, yeah,
(15:10):
your water systems, all sorts of stuff that rely on
computer systems that are run by satellites, all all of
the stuff, communications, everything. I mean, there's entire industries that
are dependent either completely or in part on state and
federal systems. All of those were at risk because they
were the firths behind. They had the least amount of
(15:32):
progress on addressing the Y two K problem. UH. Such
a huge deal that the president at the time was
Bill Clinton, assigned the two thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure
Act into law, and that was designed to create a
collaborative environment among multiple industries, so that is one industry
developed the best practices and tools to address the Y
(15:54):
two K problem. It would be there was an incentive
to share the information across other industries so that we
didn't It's not a competition, it's it's hey, let's all
get this done together, kind of issuing like I would
like my stuff to continue not being on fire. How
about I give this information to you guys, and maybe
that will decrease the chance that my stuff will be
on fire. In two thousand and that was a that
(16:17):
was a big motivator. As it turns out, helped a lot. Uh,
there were other areas of the world that we're also
being very responsive to this. European Commission issued a report
about Y two K to the European Union member countries
that all kind of got them on the same page.
The British government announced that the British military would be
on hand to assist local police forces in the event
(16:37):
of emergency services breaking down as a result of the
Y two K problem. And there there was so much hype.
I mean, I mean, yeah, well, we'll talk more about
hype in a second. The United Nations held a conference
on it. They were trying to facilitate more sharing of information,
particularly but you know, that's that's cool, that's that's not hype,
that's preparedness, right. Well, they were particularly worried about a
(16:59):
lot of regions in Asia that were there were at
least thought of to be behind the curve on this
on addressing the HIT two K problem, So they wanted
to make sure that everyone in the world had an
equal chance of catching up so that they could minimize
any effects that the Y two K problem would have.
Not keep in mind, this is still at a time
where no one was really sure what was going to happen,
(17:20):
at least not on a global scale. There were some
people were saying like, well, you know, this system over
here is probably gonna be okay because it's not really critical,
and even even if it were, you know, it would
just be something that we could adjust by writing a
couple of extra lines of code to correct that problem
other systems. People are like, I don't know if that
airplane will stay in the air. I mean, that wasn't
legitimate fear some people, I don't know, Okay, maybe fear
(17:45):
that people people absolutely and and you know, on a
on a person to person basis. The amount of panic varied,
um and problem they were depending on how much media
they had consumed about it, and excitable they were to
begin with. I want to say towards the end of night,
a lot of the media coverage lent leaned more towards
the satirical and the the kind of jokey up, world's
(18:08):
gonna end next month kind of stuff, less less of
the actual fearmongering style, and more of the no one's
really sure, but you know, the worst case scenario could
be that kind of thing. So it wasn't at least
as as bad as you know, next month, everything you
know will be different because nothing's going to work, and
you know, start building your bomb shelter now. Um. You know,
(18:30):
there weren't a whole lot of serious reports that were
coming out like that, and I'm sure the Onion had
a lot of fun with it. Um. But anyway, so
we're leading up to what actually happened from the switch
over to two thousand and I know you're all dying
to know how it turned out, but you're just gonna
have to wait a second because we need to take
a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So we're
(18:52):
back now the clock is ticking down. I know you've
been waiting, waiting all episode to learn what would happen
about to turn to two thousand? What half? Okay, so
technically we're all still here, so I guess we can
draw some conclusions right off the bat. And and and
I mean, this event is in our relatively recent past.
It was really years ago, and most of you guys
are probably remembering this, some of you and some of
(19:14):
some of you folks who are in maybe middle school
or whatever, maybe this is all new to you, in
which case, hey, welcome to the ridiculous panics that the
rest of the world went through before you were born.
Your parents were silly. Yeah. So, as it turns out,
a lot of the work that was being done leading
up to two thousand was successful. I mean, and it
(19:35):
was a lot of work. It was. Uh. One estimate
said that globally the world spent about three hundred billion
dollars that's billion with a B to address the Y
two K problem, and about just a little less than
half of that was spent in the United States alone
to address this issue. And that ranged from everything from
(19:58):
wide computer networks to like we were saying, microprocessors that
control things like microwaves, and you know, really in that case,
it was more of testing it to see, you know,
if you were to to digitally alter the clock of
the machine, would it continue to operate properly? That kind
of stuff, right, And and in the most most cases
things things were absolutely fine. And and people people kind
(20:21):
of knew that, I mean know that there was a
little bit of this media frenzy, but um but a
p Poles indicated that Americans expected minor problems at worst, um,
but that some thirty percent had planned stockpiles just in case. Yeah, yeah,
that the food money, that kind of that was. Yeah,
they weren't necessarily creating an armed militia, although there was
(20:41):
some of that going on too at the time. Um,
but you know, it's it's one of those things where
I think a lot of people were jokingly saying, like, yeah,
I mean, everything's gonna be fine, nothing's gonna be a problem.
But then like, you know, but just in case, I
think I'm gonna take it easy this year, uh or
just that day specifically that yeah, New Year's Eve to
two thousand, to make sure that you know, let's let's
(21:03):
not let's not put ourselves in danger unnecessarily, but nothing's
going to happen, you know. Cautious optimism is probably how
I would describe it. Yeah, and basically, none of those
big doomsayer kind of things, the worldwide power failures, the
total breakdown of transportation infrastructure, that planes falling out of
the sky, none, none of that. None of that happened. Now,
to be fair, one reason a lot of that may
(21:25):
not have happened is because so much work was done
addressing the problem. Right, I still don't think that every
computer in the world would have simultaneously caught on fire
and started eating your face. No, that's the likelihood of
that was very low, pretty low. I mean, some other
spooky stuff would have had to have been going, but
that we're talking some paranormal activity stuff at that point.
But no, I think you know, here's here's the problem
(21:46):
with assessing how Y two K worked out, because a
lot of people said, oh, it was a lot of
worry over nothing, nothing really big happened. But part of
that was because so much work had been done to
address the issue on a on a code level, to
make sure that the code in some very critical systems
was updated to not have this problem. So you could
(22:07):
argue that the reason why there wasn't a problem was
because we caused such a fuss in the first place.
It's also possible that if we had never done anything
and someone in two thousand said, hey, guys, I just
thought of something that we probably should have thought about before.
That everything's fine now, but you know what could have
happened was blah blah blah. Sure that might have happened
to yeah, yeah, like this is that's what really happened.
(22:29):
But here's what could have happened. That's kind of the
opposite of the clue endings. But yes, um, yeah, so
the the you know, it's hard, it's impossible to say
in hindsight, right, how it would have turned out differently
had nothing happened. I imagine that we would have seen
a lot of other glitches and systems that would have
been time consuming to fix. And we did see some glitches, right,
It wasn't like everything went off without a hitch, right, Well, okay,
(22:51):
most of the glitches were kind of preemptive. Some some
large chemical plants and oil pipelines were shut down preemptively
during the transition and rebooted. UM service was suspended on
like major freight railroads and Amtrak on New Year's Eve
for for a final round of equipment and signal checks. Um. Yeah, uh,
you know, the workload on programmers over the past couple
(23:12):
of years had had been increased like twenty to sixty
percent in order to solve the problems. So that was
an effect anyway. Uh yeah, I mean there there were
you know, some of the some of the problems that
came up were very comical in nature. Yeah, there were,
I mean, okay, there were legitimate, like a few hundred
(23:34):
reports of errors amongst small businesses, but needs most most
of them were resolved in a matter of hours after
they had been reported. Um. There was the temporary shutdown
of a Defense Department ground station that that processed info
from a from a satellite from a spy satellite. Um.
But it didn't have any major consequences. There were there
were a couple of really good ones. Um for Okay.
(23:56):
So so this was when uh Al Gore was the
vice president. My favorite of the ye two K problems,
by the way, Um, for for a minute, his town
hall web page informed visitors that it was January three, uh,
nineteen thousand, one hundred if they arrived via Netscape and
January three, nineteen thousand eight D. I'm sorry if they
(24:20):
were coming in via Futurama. We know that by that
time Al Gore's head is in a jar. So maybe
it was accurate. It could be. It could have been
like this was a glimpse into the Futurama future. Um um,
there was a there was a glitch in the New
York Times. Oh I love this one, dude, No, this
one's my favorite. I retract by earlier statement, this one's
(24:41):
my favorite. They can both be your favorite. Um okay. So,
so there was a telephone service that would read an
automated selection of the New York Times and other newspapers
to um New Yorkers with with vision problems and um.
It informed clients that they would be hearing the January three,
nine hundred issues. So where we started recording, I said,
I could just mention the top headline, dirigible races reach
(25:04):
inevitable draw for the year running. I think I want,
I kind of want that alternate history right where you.
What would have been amazing is if it had actually
read the headlines from January three, dred at that point. Now,
that's not exactly that's not what happened. It just had
the date wrong. On the date part. The actual content
was the same was the one for January third, two thousand.
(25:25):
It's not like the computer glitched and went and looked
up some microfiche and brought it back and read it out.
I wish that had happened though. That would have been
so awesome. That would have been delightful. UM. I mean,
like other stuff, UH that there was some some legal
battles that arose over all of this. Xerox, Nike, Unitis,
and a whole bunch of other companies were a few
major other companies. UM uh sued their insurers for reimbursement
(25:49):
for having to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars
on these repairs. UM, citing language from nineteenth century business
contracts wherein insurers had to repay ship owners for money
spent trying to prevent ship from sinking. Yeah. Interesting sighting
of a precedent. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. UM.
The suits generally generally settled on on the side of
(26:10):
the insurance companies because I think arguing that because nothing
bad happened, then we shouldn't have been forced to prevent
something bad from happening is a weird argument, because if
nothing bad happened, that's possibly proof that the thing you
had to do worked oh well. And even I mean
even if you if you spend that money preventing a
ship from sinking or preventing a computer from crashing. Um.
(26:35):
You know, in this particular case, the companies had seen
the ship sinking several years before they actually informed the
insurance company that it was an issue. And so in
that case, the courts were like, you knew about this beforehand.
This interesting, this is stuff that you had to take
care of. And um, I see there were some other
like practical outcomes that were you know, just the way
(26:56):
people had reacted to Y two K and started stockpiling stuff.
That meant that once the new year happened and society
did not crumble, a lot a lot of people returned
to space heaters, um, like so many that that SEARS
started incurring a not incurring but um, but charging stocking
fee because people so many people were worried that the
(27:17):
infrastructure would be gone and that they wouldn't have gas
or electricity, you know, and then they once once that
those problems went away, like once two thousand came around
and everything was fine. Then they're well, I don't really
need this anymore. Uh, charity groups collected a lot of
extra cand goods that year. Uh. Not so many people
traveled by airplane on New Year's Day that year, right,
(27:39):
I mean not that many people travel on New Year's
Day to begin with, but even yeah, there were some
of those people who were worried about the whole airplane
dropping out of the sky thing. And here's the thing
is that while this hite two K problem sounds like
it's like, well, yeah, sure it happened once, bill, never
happen again. Alright, Alright, so there there are a bunch there.
(28:00):
There are like many, much multiple other problems, like like
the y t K problem. They're all time dependent and
they're all code dependent. However, the the year in which
each one would hit its big old problem is different
from one example to another, mostly because engineers have a
(28:21):
wicked sense of humor. Well I'm not sure, okay, So
so I don't I don't code. I'm not a programmer.
I I've never used any kind of back end sort
of thing. I know how to make things bold and
h ham l on my own, but that's that's about it. Um,
but so so apparently in various programs, UM, the beginning
of time starts on various dates. Yeah, the beginning of
(28:43):
time tends to be the date that whatever was created
was put into action, although not all of all the time. So,
and it can depend on the numeracle system that the
coding is using. UM. I know, for for IBM PCs,
the beginning of time is January one, up and uh,
it go the time itself goes up in seconds. So
(29:04):
the second is the base integer for this whole thing, UM.
And it's a thirty two bit integer. So that means
that if you if you do the math and you're thinking, okay,
it's a thirty two bit integer. Each second is another increment,
So every second that passes goes up another one. If
you're limited to thirty two bits and you're starting days
January one, nineteen eighty, you can extend that out and
(29:27):
you see that in two thousand one sixteen you have
hit the limit of of the integers you have. You
are no longer able to go up without rolling over.
It's kind of like those old alright, gather around that
digital fireplace, children, and the old days we had digital
uh like pinball machines, and once you hit a high
score at a certain level, it would turn over, meaning
it would go back to I actually did that on
(29:49):
the Star Trek one. I'll tell you about some time. Anyway,
I was, yeah, I had seventeen free replays by the
end of that. I ended up leaving because I couldn't
keep playing all day. I was in knowledge at the time,
money will spent, Mom and Dad. Anyway, two thousand, one
h and sixteen is when those integers will reach the limit,
meaning that, uh don't know what's going to happen after that.
(30:10):
It's not gonna be able to make these these time
dependent calculations accurately anymore, because it won't be able to
track time in a in a way that makes sense
to the computer anymore. So you would think, oh, well, clearly,
all right, so we've got the Y two K problem
and the two thousand, one hundred sixteen problem with IBM PCs,
but after that we're okay, right, well uh well, so
(30:33):
so Windows NT sets the beginning of time as January
one s one. So apparently they were thinking, like, okay,
Shakespeare would totally use Windows INT just before, you know,
shortly before he dies. So clearly he would have written,
you know, some of his greatest plays using a machine
(30:53):
using Windows NT. So let's start the I have no
idea why they chose January. Yeah, and okay, so, so
it uses a sixty four bit integer to track time,
so way more integers than you know, twice as much
as the thirty two bit intager that IBMPC did, and
furthermore uses a hundred nanoseconds as its increment. So so
it's problem is a ye, right, So it's here's the thing.
(31:19):
It covers a much greater span of time, right because
it starts in sixteen o one and it won't end
until four so that's later. But because of that hundred
nano second problem, that eats up those innagers pretty quickly.
If it had done it as a second intager, it
would extend much further out. But hey, good good news
(31:39):
for Apple users. According to Apple, um mac is okay
out to the year. Uh yeah, um so, I mean
not that it matters, because you're gonna update all your
stuff every year anyway, you Apple fanboys, I'm saying that
I'll love. I'm not entirely positive that you are. Really.
(32:00):
My wife has a iPhone I I love her. I've
got a Mac. I mean, I'm granted my Mac. It's
like eight years old at this point. It might actually
be an Apple computer non a Mac. They might have devolved,
but anyway, Yes, at any rate, all of these problems
are going to be a little bit easier to fix
than the Y two K problem, right, And and it's
(32:20):
one of those things where the Y two K problem
that was something that was so UH grounded in the
very basic code that so many different UH systems were using.
That's probably the scope of it was enormous, right, And
we didn't have the tools available than that we do
today for for going in and addressing propagating things. Only that,
(32:41):
but we've got a greater time scale for all of
these problems. It's not something that's you know, five years away.
Although we can't just have the attitude of oh, well
that's you know, that's like twenty more years. We don't
need to worry about that. No, we should definitely take
the steps to address these issues. So, yes, it is
one of those things where we see it over and
over again. Does it mean that we are done? That
(33:02):
no one is ever going to make this kind of mistake?
Just for the sake of convenience or or efficiency or economics. Uh,
we're never gonna make old mistake. No, we're human. We
make mistakes. That's kind of kind of thing. They're they're
warm and fuzzy. It's us. Yeah, well you know we're
(33:23):
good at that and making mistakes. I am great. I'm
like I learned from my mistakes. I can repeat them
almost exactly. So um, yeah, it's something that will price
see also pop up, and of course those people will
eventually be ridiculed like do don't you remember why t K?
And uh, you know, we'll just we'll relive this drama
multiple times. But hey, some of these are problems that
(33:45):
are so far in the future that it's our descendants
that are gonna be worried about them unless we find
some digital immortality or something. Yeah. See there you go say,
I think that what all of this is not taking
into consideration is that we are clearly going to hit
the singularity in yes, well you know, uh, we're getting
We're rapidly approaching what Kurtswil said would be the singularity.
And I'm a little skeptical right now, but hey, it
(34:07):
could be proven wrong. But you know, when we see
problems like this rise up. It does make you wonder
about that singularity and think maybe that maybe that would
only be really super awesome for a very relatively short
time until our code ran out. Oh yeah, exciting stuff, right,
all right, Well, the interesting thing is we would all
end together. That's kind of sweet and really nihilistic way.
(34:29):
I think I've got an idea of our science fiction novel.
Don't steal it. Okay, So we're gonna wrap up. Guys.
If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
here is how you can let us know about them.
You can take one of two routes. On your left
is email, and in order to take this route, you
need to type in tech stuff at Discovery dot com.
(34:51):
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Stuff hs W four. That is the handle we use. So, hey,
get in touch with us. I've had a long day
and I'm about to go to see s so I'm
(35:13):
a little loopy. Al Right, guys, that wraps up this discussion.
Get in touch with us. We will talk to you
again really soon. For more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it, how staff works dot com
Still get in touch with technology with text stuff from
com Hey everyone, and welcome to text stuff. I'm I'm sorry,
there's a little bug in my throat Jonathan Strickland and
I'm Lauren focal Bomb. You know, I've just been having
trouble all the day, Lauren. It just feels like something
(00:25):
very basic and the very code of me is just
not right. And now everything's just diligion all over the blade,
almost as though there's there's some kind of a programming
error or not error but over sight. Yeah, like like
someone to cut short and now things aren't working. Also
building up to something terrifying. Yeah, it's gonna build up
(00:45):
to a NonStop replay of Prince over and over again,
which it starts out awesome, but as it goes on,
let me tell you that gets old. Okay, we're talking
about a Y two K bug obviously, people, Yes, yes,
that is what our episode is about. To day, all
of our fans who hate it. Whenever I do cheesy humor,
I apologize, You don't really apologize. It is who I am.
(01:07):
So the reason why we're talking about Y two K
bug years after the whole issue happened is because you know,
we ask you guys what you want to hear. And
in this case, a listener named James sent us a
message on Twitter and said, hey, guys, you should do
an episode on the Y two K Bug. Heart heart James. Well, James,
we heart heart you two. Now we're going to do
(01:29):
our episode on the Y two K Bug. It's a
pretty interesting story because it's one of those things where,
you know, it really illustrates a few basic things about
computing and human nature in general. One of those things
is that when something new is created, no one who
is around has any idea of how long it's gonna last,
(01:49):
and they don't have any any appreciation of things that
they do then lasting into well into the future, right, well,
especially things like computer programming. I mean, no one in
say the nineteen sixties or seventies was expecting any of
the programs that they were writing to last for forty years. Yeah,
computers were developing very quickly, and the general thought was that,
(02:12):
you know, this is changing so fast that programming is
going to change in at a crazy speed too. But
as it turns out, while the hardware changed, the practices
that were established early on remained pretty much standard, and
also a lot of this old programming would find its
way into subsequent generations of software. So even if it
(02:33):
wasn't something that people were continuing to do later on, uh,
there'd still be these old fragments of code incorporated into
stuff that did have it. Now we're kind of dancing
around what that old thing was. Oh, oh, the old thing,
of course being I just got really excited that I
knew the answer to this um being the digits in
(02:55):
the year. Yeah, So here was the issue back in
the fifties and six these when programmers were having to
put a code in for the year, which is important
for certain types of calculations, right, anything that's time based, obviously,
you need to have a way of recording the time
so that you can compare times from different points and
draw your calculations based on that. You know, for for
(03:16):
for example, when people have been depositing paychecks or right,
so if you if you have a bank account that
has interest, for example, time is obviously a factor there.
It's not just the amount of money that you've been
continuously putting into or taking out of that bank account.
It's also the amount of times since you established that
bank account. And there's some complicated calculations that are very
(03:37):
time sensitive, so you have to have that kind of
stuff built into your algorithm, right right, Or in other cases,
you know, records of dates of birth or dates of
medical surgery or all kinds of things. Yeah, so many
different applications, to the point where there were even technologies
that you wouldn't imagine would ever need to know what
year it is that had the stuff built into it.
(03:59):
And here's the problem when you have two digits for
your year. See the computer programming getting started in the
nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, they figured, hey, we've got
practically half a century before we have to worry about
two digits turning into zero zero. Clearly we're gonna totally
fix this later. And computer memory right now is incredibly expensive,
(04:20):
so let's let's let's be really conservative and just use
two digits for the year, and we'll be fine until
these other problems work themselves out. Oh and and I
mean computer memory was so precious and saving especially across
the course of for example, an entire spreadsheet full of
interest calculations, saving two digits per year was big. So
so just by doing a month, month, day, day, year, year,
(04:42):
you know, just just the two digits each, you could
save a huge time and hassle for yourself at the
at that current moment, right right, because I mean, you know,
think about just a few years ago how expensive it
was to buy say a terrabyte for a hard drive,
compared to today. Now it's much more affordable. Oh well,
you know, as as opposed to when I was a kid,
when a tearabyte was and a completely unimaginable amount of information. Yeah,
(05:06):
when I was a kid, I couldn't imagine ever filling
up a megabyte of space. So you know, as time
has gone on, memory has become less and less of
a problem in the sense that we were able to
make more of it more affordably. But back then very
expensive and precious stuff that you only had so much
to work with, and it was expensive to use. So
(05:27):
cutting it down to two digits made sense of the time.
But the problem was that when you roll over from
nineteen nine to two thousand, in the computer terms, it
goes from n to zero zero, which meant that people
weren't really sure what was going to happen. Right, Would
the computer think that it was all of a sudden
would that completely bark all of your calculations for for example,
(05:49):
interest rates, yeah, or the the age of a person.
So your example, if it's figuring out the age by
subtracting the current date from your date of birth, or
the date of birth from the current data, I should say, so,
let's say it's ninety nine and you were born in ninety.
Then that's pretty easy. It's years old. Okay, got it.
But then let's say it goes zero zero and you
(06:09):
were born in ninety, so it's zero zero minus ninety. Suddenly,
like oh um am, I getting negative numbers because now
a negative age that doesn't make sense. And so you
can have all sorts of computer problems, ranging from the
financial industry to health to all pretty much everything that
had any sort of code in it that included the year,
(06:30):
which extends to things like like elevators that had microchips. Yes, yeah, elevators.
I mean that's pretty that that was a real concern.
People are like, I do not want to be in
an elevator on New Year's Eve because you don't know
if that thing is going to make it to the floor.
You want by two, right, And I mean, and of course,
you know, they weren't afraid that the elevator was going
(06:51):
to slow down to a rate, to a negative motion
rate or anything like that. But they were afraid that
the code and the microchip crashing would I don't know,
cause a fire and make the elevator drop or just
or just stop or just stop entirely, and refused to open.
People had a lot of just uncertainty about exactly what
was going to happen to code and whether or not
(07:12):
it was going to crash an entire system. When this
this year changed, over right, and so this this fear
started to kind of rear its head in the ninety nineties. Uh,
it really reached a fever pitch in nine. That was
when I think the general public became really aware of it.
Before that due to media complete over saturation. Yeah, yeah,
(07:33):
I got a little, a little crazy, a lot crazy,
depending upon where you lived in the United States, it
certainly became crazy. So you had you had the computer
scientists who were and programmers who were saying earlier than this, like, hey, guys,
maybe we should should fix this. This is you know,
this is a problem, and instead of perpetuating it across
multiple industries at infinitum, maybe we should address it. And
(07:57):
that way just establish a new rule going forward. Now,
computer memory not such a big deal, Now, why don't
we Why don't we fix it before we get Hello? So, anyway,
is this thing on? Hello? And the problem was that
a lot of people didn't listen until it started getting
closer to two thousand, and people began to really worry
about the possibility that this could bring about, if not
some sort of technological armageddon, at least a lot of
(08:19):
glitches and problems that could have been avoided. So then
they had to say, well, what are we going to
do about it? The obvious solution was also the most
time consuming and expensive one, which was the manually go
through and start updating code and changing it so that
it's a four digit year instead of a two digit
year and uh and then thus increasing the usefulness till
(08:43):
at least nine thou right, Yeah, I mean, I mean,
you know, the alternate there's to recode just so that
programs would recognize that zero zero probably meant two thousand
instead of nineteen hundred. But that's a less effective solution.
And b I mean, you just need to change it
over at the next and of the century, not that
probably those same programs were going to be in use,
(09:03):
but you never know. The thing is that, you know,
you have these legacy systems that certain companies rely on
that were originally programmed, you know, thirty forty years ago,
and you know they continue to rely on them because
they do exactly what the company needs them to do,
right and Okay, so so either way, these changes might
have to be entered by hand thousands of times or
(09:25):
hundreds of thousands of times in a single program um,
and each change then has to be tested against errors.
Of course, eventually code was developed to help automate the process,
but you know, I mean it was just a big undertaking. Yeah.
You might remember if you watch the documentary Office Space
that the characters at in a tech the company and
(09:46):
office space where they that was their job. They went
into other companies and helped update their code to meet
the y two K issue, which kind of raises another question,
which is what was this company going to do after
or the year two thousand. But at any rate, that
was actually a very real concern. I mean, The Spaces
is a great parody of all of that kind of sure,
(10:07):
but but there was a concern that you know, with
with all of these extra programming jobs that were going
to be created, that that businesses would crash and burn,
and some of them did. I mean, most of them
just moved on to other things and found freedom and
not having to do this incredibly tedious work anymore. Right,
And then there was a lot of other crashing and
burning in the tech industry for unrelated reasons. Yes, that
(10:28):
was the whole dot com bubble burst, but it didn't
have anything to do with Y two K directly. So, uh,
here's the other problem is that a lot of these
programs didn't recognize even if even if two thousand was
going to be fine, even if they could recognize the
fact that was two thousand was a four digit year,
they didn't necessarily recognize that two thousand was going to
be a leap year. Right, And here's the reason why.
(10:48):
So leap years actually follow an algorithm, a set of rules. Obviously,
so the the basic rule is that for every four years,
you added an extra day, a leap day, at the
end of February to balance out the calendar year with
the solar year. Because the solar year is close to
three hundred sixty five point to five days, not quite
point to five, almost point to five, which is important. Yeah,
(11:11):
so if you stretch out over an incredibly long time
for us humans, let's say a few centuries, your calendars
will start to become misaligned because it's not quite three
hundred sixty five point to five days in the solar year.
So that means that occasionally you have to ignore the
leap year. And the way the rule goes is that
if the let's see if I can get this right,
(11:33):
if the century is divisible by one hundred but not
by four hundred, it would not be a leap year.
So if it's divisible by both one hundred and four hundred,
it's a leap year. So, in other words, sevent hundred,
eighteen hundred, and nineteen hundred were not leap years. Was
because sixteen hundred is divisible by four hundred. Two thousand
(11:55):
also divisible by four hundred, so it should be a
leap here. However, because you gut just have zero zero
as the digits, if the computer thinks it's nineteen hundred,
the computers also knows the rule that nine is not
a leap year, so so it says, hey, this, this
big zero kind of number is totally not a leap year, right,
So it's only three days not three hundred, you know,
(12:18):
three and we we don't have a fevery twenty nine
this year, is what I would say. But there was
totally a fevery twenty nine here, which meant that other
calculations would get thrown off because it wouldn't take that
leap day into account. So all these calendar applications weren't
also had to be corrected. So suddenly people were like,
oh boy, this is a big old mess here. We've
got to fix this and uh and so, so a
(12:40):
lot of time and effort and attention was directed to this.
And there was a third problem as well. Wasn't there
having to do with all of the nines? Oh yeah,
Oh I totally forgot about that. I'm glad you brought
that up. Yes, So, okay, in the old days, children
gather around this, gather around the digital fireplace, you know,
if Netflix still has that digital fireplace, ahead and start
(13:00):
started up back in the old days, children Sometimes programmers,
in order to designate the end of a program, would
just type out a string of nines. It was essentially
just the code to say this is where stuff ends, y'all.
Uh so had a date in Exeptember nine that if
you were to write it would be like n a
(13:21):
lot of nines. And the worry was that certain programs
which would see that as meaning this is where stuff
stops and would stop working. So you had a lot
of digit problems here. So some of this you could
count on, you know, just a a kind of a
jerry rigged system of this is how I'm going to
(13:42):
designate this is the end of a program, and it
was just kind of arbitrarily chosen that would be stuff.
Some of it was more of a practical consideration, the
idea of we need to save time and money, so
therefore we're shortening this year to two digits. In either case,
it ended up meaning lots and lots of for people
in the late nineteen nineties, and um, you got a
(14:04):
lot of attention. I mean there were there were things
like uh, industries that were already taking advantage of the
time in the nineties to address this. The software industry
was way ahead of the game. Oh yeah, yeah, I
mean back by you know, I think six uh, a
few people were on top of it. Certainly by a
lot of people had already kind of corrected the problem, right,
(14:26):
So the software that was being produced from that point
going forward had already addressed it. Now. Granted there was
still software that was out previously that had this old
code in it, but the new code coming out of
the software industry had had adjusted for this kind of problem.
But there were other industries that were lagging behind. And
in fact, according to one study, UH, the cap Jimini
(14:49):
America consulting firm did a study. They found that the
state and federal government systems were the furthest behind. And
when you think of all the information that state governments
and federal government here in the United States requires to
operate things like taxes that are dependent upon infrastructure. Infrastructure, yeah,
(15:10):
your water systems, all sorts of stuff that rely on
computer systems that are run by satellites, all all of
the stuff, communications, everything. I mean, there's entire industries that
are dependent either completely or in part on state and
federal systems. All of those were at risk because they
were the firths behind. They had the least amount of
(15:32):
progress on addressing the Y two K problem. UH. Such
a huge deal that the president at the time was
Bill Clinton, assigned the two thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure
Act into law, and that was designed to create a
collaborative environment among multiple industries, so that is one industry
developed the best practices and tools to address the Y
(15:54):
two K problem. It would be there was an incentive
to share the information across other industries so that we
didn't It's not a competition, it's it's hey, let's all
get this done together, kind of issuing like I would
like my stuff to continue not being on fire. How
about I give this information to you guys, and maybe
that will decrease the chance that my stuff will be
on fire. In two thousand and that was a that
(16:17):
was a big motivator. As it turns out, helped a lot. Uh,
there were other areas of the world that we're also
being very responsive to this. European Commission issued a report
about Y two K to the European Union member countries
that all kind of got them on the same page.
The British government announced that the British military would be
on hand to assist local police forces in the event
(16:37):
of emergency services breaking down as a result of the
Y two K problem. And there there was so much hype.
I mean, I mean, yeah, well, we'll talk more about
hype in a second. The United Nations held a conference
on it. They were trying to facilitate more sharing of information,
particularly but you know, that's that's cool, that's that's not hype,
that's preparedness, right. Well, they were particularly worried about a
(16:59):
lot of regions in Asia that were there were at
least thought of to be behind the curve on this
on addressing the HIT two K problem, So they wanted
to make sure that everyone in the world had an
equal chance of catching up so that they could minimize
any effects that the Y two K problem would have.
Not keep in mind, this is still at a time
where no one was really sure what was going to happen,
(17:20):
at least not on a global scale. There were some
people were saying like, well, you know, this system over
here is probably gonna be okay because it's not really critical,
and even even if it were, you know, it would
just be something that we could adjust by writing a
couple of extra lines of code to correct that problem
other systems. People are like, I don't know if that
airplane will stay in the air. I mean, that wasn't
legitimate fear some people, I don't know, Okay, maybe fear
(17:45):
that people people absolutely and and you know, on a
on a person to person basis. The amount of panic varied,
um and problem they were depending on how much media
they had consumed about it, and excitable they were to
begin with. I want to say towards the end of night,
a lot of the media coverage lent leaned more towards
the satirical and the the kind of jokey up, world's
(18:08):
gonna end next month kind of stuff, less less of
the actual fearmongering style, and more of the no one's
really sure, but you know, the worst case scenario could
be that kind of thing. So it wasn't at least
as as bad as you know, next month, everything you
know will be different because nothing's going to work, and
you know, start building your bomb shelter now. Um. You know,
(18:30):
there weren't a whole lot of serious reports that were
coming out like that, and I'm sure the Onion had
a lot of fun with it. Um. But anyway, so
we're leading up to what actually happened from the switch
over to two thousand and I know you're all dying
to know how it turned out, but you're just gonna
have to wait a second because we need to take
a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So we're
(18:52):
back now the clock is ticking down. I know you've
been waiting, waiting all episode to learn what would happen
about to turn to two thousand? What half? Okay, so
technically we're all still here, so I guess we can
draw some conclusions right off the bat. And and and
I mean, this event is in our relatively recent past.
It was really years ago, and most of you guys
are probably remembering this, some of you and some of
(19:14):
some of you folks who are in maybe middle school
or whatever, maybe this is all new to you, in
which case, hey, welcome to the ridiculous panics that the
rest of the world went through before you were born.
Your parents were silly. Yeah. So, as it turns out,
a lot of the work that was being done leading
up to two thousand was successful. I mean, and it
(19:35):
was a lot of work. It was. Uh. One estimate
said that globally the world spent about three hundred billion
dollars that's billion with a B to address the Y
two K problem, and about just a little less than
half of that was spent in the United States alone
to address this issue. And that ranged from everything from
(19:58):
wide computer networks to like we were saying, microprocessors that
control things like microwaves, and you know, really in that case,
it was more of testing it to see, you know,
if you were to to digitally alter the clock of
the machine, would it continue to operate properly? That kind
of stuff, right, And and in the most most cases
things things were absolutely fine. And and people people kind
(20:21):
of knew that, I mean know that there was a
little bit of this media frenzy, but um but a
p Poles indicated that Americans expected minor problems at worst, um,
but that some thirty percent had planned stockpiles just in case. Yeah, yeah,
that the food money, that kind of that was. Yeah,
they weren't necessarily creating an armed militia, although there was
(20:41):
some of that going on too at the time. Um,
but you know, it's it's one of those things where
I think a lot of people were jokingly saying, like, yeah,
I mean, everything's gonna be fine, nothing's gonna be a problem.
But then like, you know, but just in case, I
think I'm gonna take it easy this year, uh or
just that day specifically that yeah, New Year's Eve to
two thousand, to make sure that you know, let's let's
(21:03):
not let's not put ourselves in danger unnecessarily, but nothing's
going to happen, you know. Cautious optimism is probably how
I would describe it. Yeah, and basically, none of those
big doomsayer kind of things, the worldwide power failures, the
total breakdown of transportation infrastructure, that planes falling out of
the sky, none, none of that. None of that happened. Now,
to be fair, one reason a lot of that may
(21:25):
not have happened is because so much work was done
addressing the problem. Right, I still don't think that every
computer in the world would have simultaneously caught on fire
and started eating your face. No, that's the likelihood of
that was very low, pretty low. I mean, some other
spooky stuff would have had to have been going, but
that we're talking some paranormal activity stuff at that point.
But no, I think you know, here's here's the problem
(21:46):
with assessing how Y two K worked out, because a
lot of people said, oh, it was a lot of
worry over nothing, nothing really big happened. But part of
that was because so much work had been done to
address the issue on a on a code level, to
make sure that the code in some very critical systems
was updated to not have this problem. So you could
(22:07):
argue that the reason why there wasn't a problem was
because we caused such a fuss in the first place.
It's also possible that if we had never done anything
and someone in two thousand said, hey, guys, I just
thought of something that we probably should have thought about before.
That everything's fine now, but you know what could have
happened was blah blah blah. Sure that might have happened
to yeah, yeah, like this is that's what really happened.
(22:29):
But here's what could have happened. That's kind of the
opposite of the clue endings. But yes, um, yeah, so
the the you know, it's hard, it's impossible to say
in hindsight, right, how it would have turned out differently
had nothing happened. I imagine that we would have seen
a lot of other glitches and systems that would have
been time consuming to fix. And we did see some glitches, right,
It wasn't like everything went off without a hitch, right, Well, okay,
(22:51):
most of the glitches were kind of preemptive. Some some
large chemical plants and oil pipelines were shut down preemptively
during the transition and rebooted. UM service was suspended on
like major freight railroads and Amtrak on New Year's Eve
for for a final round of equipment and signal checks. Um. Yeah, uh,
you know, the workload on programmers over the past couple
(23:12):
of years had had been increased like twenty to sixty
percent in order to solve the problems. So that was
an effect anyway. Uh yeah, I mean there there were
you know, some of the some of the problems that
came up were very comical in nature. Yeah, there were,
I mean, okay, there were legitimate, like a few hundred
(23:34):
reports of errors amongst small businesses, but needs most most
of them were resolved in a matter of hours after
they had been reported. Um. There was the temporary shutdown
of a Defense Department ground station that that processed info
from a from a satellite from a spy satellite. Um.
But it didn't have any major consequences. There were there
were a couple of really good ones. Um for Okay.
(23:56):
So so this was when uh Al Gore was the
vice president. My favorite of the ye two K problems,
by the way, Um, for for a minute, his town
hall web page informed visitors that it was January three, uh,
nineteen thousand, one hundred if they arrived via Netscape and
January three, nineteen thousand eight D. I'm sorry if they
(24:20):
were coming in via Futurama. We know that by that
time Al Gore's head is in a jar. So maybe
it was accurate. It could be. It could have been
like this was a glimpse into the Futurama future. Um um,
there was a there was a glitch in the New
York Times. Oh I love this one, dude, No, this
one's my favorite. I retract by earlier statement, this one's
(24:41):
my favorite. They can both be your favorite. Um okay. So,
so there was a telephone service that would read an
automated selection of the New York Times and other newspapers
to um New Yorkers with with vision problems and um.
It informed clients that they would be hearing the January three,
nine hundred issues. So where we started recording, I said,
I could just mention the top headline, dirigible races reach
(25:04):
inevitable draw for the year running. I think I want,
I kind of want that alternate history right where you.
What would have been amazing is if it had actually
read the headlines from January three, dred at that point. Now,
that's not exactly that's not what happened. It just had
the date wrong. On the date part. The actual content
was the same was the one for January third, two thousand.
(25:25):
It's not like the computer glitched and went and looked
up some microfiche and brought it back and read it out.
I wish that had happened though. That would have been
so awesome. That would have been delightful. UM. I mean,
like other stuff, UH that there was some some legal
battles that arose over all of this. Xerox, Nike, Unitis,
and a whole bunch of other companies were a few
major other companies. UM uh sued their insurers for reimbursement
(25:49):
for having to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars
on these repairs. UM, citing language from nineteenth century business
contracts wherein insurers had to repay ship owners for money
spent trying to prevent ship from sinking. Yeah. Interesting sighting
of a precedent. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. UM.
The suits generally generally settled on on the side of
(26:10):
the insurance companies because I think arguing that because nothing
bad happened, then we shouldn't have been forced to prevent
something bad from happening is a weird argument, because if
nothing bad happened, that's possibly proof that the thing you
had to do worked oh well. And even I mean
even if you if you spend that money preventing a
ship from sinking or preventing a computer from crashing. Um.
(26:35):
You know, in this particular case, the companies had seen
the ship sinking several years before they actually informed the
insurance company that it was an issue. And so in
that case, the courts were like, you knew about this beforehand.
This interesting, this is stuff that you had to take
care of. And um, I see there were some other
like practical outcomes that were you know, just the way
(26:56):
people had reacted to Y two K and started stockpiling stuff.
That meant that once the new year happened and society
did not crumble, a lot a lot of people returned
to space heaters, um, like so many that that SEARS
started incurring a not incurring but um, but charging stocking
fee because people so many people were worried that the
(27:17):
infrastructure would be gone and that they wouldn't have gas
or electricity, you know, and then they once once that
those problems went away, like once two thousand came around
and everything was fine. Then they're well, I don't really
need this anymore. Uh, charity groups collected a lot of
extra cand goods that year. Uh. Not so many people
traveled by airplane on New Year's Day that year, right,
(27:39):
I mean not that many people travel on New Year's
Day to begin with, but even yeah, there were some
of those people who were worried about the whole airplane
dropping out of the sky thing. And here's the thing
is that while this hite two K problem sounds like
it's like, well, yeah, sure it happened once, bill, never
happen again. Alright, Alright, so there there are a bunch there.
(28:00):
There are like many, much multiple other problems, like like
the y t K problem. They're all time dependent and
they're all code dependent. However, the the year in which
each one would hit its big old problem is different
from one example to another, mostly because engineers have a
(28:21):
wicked sense of humor. Well I'm not sure, okay, So
so I don't I don't code. I'm not a programmer.
I I've never used any kind of back end sort
of thing. I know how to make things bold and
h ham l on my own, but that's that's about it. Um,
but so so apparently in various programs, UM, the beginning
of time starts on various dates. Yeah, the beginning of
(28:43):
time tends to be the date that whatever was created
was put into action, although not all of all the time. So,
and it can depend on the numeracle system that the
coding is using. UM. I know, for for IBM PCs,
the beginning of time is January one, up and uh,
it go the time itself goes up in seconds. So
(29:04):
the second is the base integer for this whole thing, UM.
And it's a thirty two bit integer. So that means
that if you if you do the math and you're thinking, okay,
it's a thirty two bit integer. Each second is another increment,
So every second that passes goes up another one. If
you're limited to thirty two bits and you're starting days
January one, nineteen eighty, you can extend that out and
(29:27):
you see that in two thousand one sixteen you have
hit the limit of of the integers you have. You
are no longer able to go up without rolling over.
It's kind of like those old alright, gather around that
digital fireplace, children, and the old days we had digital
uh like pinball machines, and once you hit a high
score at a certain level, it would turn over, meaning
it would go back to I actually did that on
(29:49):
the Star Trek one. I'll tell you about some time. Anyway,
I was, yeah, I had seventeen free replays by the
end of that. I ended up leaving because I couldn't
keep playing all day. I was in knowledge at the time,
money will spent, Mom and Dad. Anyway, two thousand, one
h and sixteen is when those integers will reach the limit,
meaning that, uh don't know what's going to happen after that.
(30:10):
It's not gonna be able to make these these time
dependent calculations accurately anymore, because it won't be able to
track time in a in a way that makes sense
to the computer anymore. So you would think, oh, well, clearly,
all right, so we've got the Y two K problem
and the two thousand, one hundred sixteen problem with IBM PCs,
but after that we're okay, right, well uh well, so
(30:33):
so Windows NT sets the beginning of time as January
one s one. So apparently they were thinking, like, okay,
Shakespeare would totally use Windows INT just before, you know,
shortly before he dies. So clearly he would have written,
you know, some of his greatest plays using a machine
(30:53):
using Windows NT. So let's start the I have no
idea why they chose January. Yeah, and okay, so, so
it uses a sixty four bit integer to track time,
so way more integers than you know, twice as much
as the thirty two bit intager that IBMPC did, and
furthermore uses a hundred nanoseconds as its increment. So so
it's problem is a ye, right, So it's here's the thing.
(31:19):
It covers a much greater span of time, right because
it starts in sixteen o one and it won't end
until four so that's later. But because of that hundred
nano second problem, that eats up those innagers pretty quickly.
If it had done it as a second intager, it
would extend much further out. But hey, good good news
(31:39):
for Apple users. According to Apple, um mac is okay
out to the year. Uh yeah, um so, I mean
not that it matters, because you're gonna update all your
stuff every year anyway, you Apple fanboys, I'm saying that
I'll love. I'm not entirely positive that you are. Really.
(32:00):
My wife has a iPhone I I love her. I've
got a Mac. I mean, I'm granted my Mac. It's
like eight years old at this point. It might actually
be an Apple computer non a Mac. They might have devolved,
but anyway, Yes, at any rate, all of these problems
are going to be a little bit easier to fix
than the Y two K problem, right, And and it's
(32:20):
one of those things where the Y two K problem
that was something that was so UH grounded in the
very basic code that so many different UH systems were using.
That's probably the scope of it was enormous, right, And
we didn't have the tools available than that we do
today for for going in and addressing propagating things. Only that,
(32:41):
but we've got a greater time scale for all of
these problems. It's not something that's you know, five years away.
Although we can't just have the attitude of oh, well
that's you know, that's like twenty more years. We don't
need to worry about that. No, we should definitely take
the steps to address these issues. So, yes, it is
one of those things where we see it over and
over again. Does it mean that we are done? That
(33:02):
no one is ever going to make this kind of mistake?
Just for the sake of convenience or or efficiency or economics. Uh,
we're never gonna make old mistake. No, we're human. We
make mistakes. That's kind of kind of thing. They're they're
warm and fuzzy. It's us. Yeah, well you know we're
(33:23):
good at that and making mistakes. I am great. I'm
like I learned from my mistakes. I can repeat them
almost exactly. So um, yeah, it's something that will price
see also pop up, and of course those people will
eventually be ridiculed like do don't you remember why t K?
And uh, you know, we'll just we'll relive this drama
multiple times. But hey, some of these are problems that
(33:45):
are so far in the future that it's our descendants
that are gonna be worried about them unless we find
some digital immortality or something. Yeah. See there you go say,
I think that what all of this is not taking
into consideration is that we are clearly going to hit
the singularity in yes, well you know, uh, we're getting
We're rapidly approaching what Kurtswil said would be the singularity.
And I'm a little skeptical right now, but hey, it
(34:07):
could be proven wrong. But you know, when we see
problems like this rise up. It does make you wonder
about that singularity and think maybe that maybe that would
only be really super awesome for a very relatively short
time until our code ran out. Oh yeah, exciting stuff, right,
all right, Well, the interesting thing is we would all
end together. That's kind of sweet and really nihilistic way.
(34:29):
I think I've got an idea of our science fiction novel.
Don't steal it. Okay, So we're gonna wrap up. Guys.
If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
here is how you can let us know about them.
You can take one of two routes. On your left
is email, and in order to take this route, you
need to type in tech stuff at Discovery dot com.
(34:51):
In the two fields on your right is social media,
and that splits into three pathways that would be Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. All three of those doorways are labeled tech
Stuff hs W four. That is the handle we use. So, hey,
get in touch with us. I've had a long day
and I'm about to go to see s so I'm
(35:13):
a little loopy. Al Right, guys, that wraps up this discussion.
Get in touch with us. We will talk to you
again really soon. For more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it, how staff works dot com
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