![]() ![]() ![]() “There was no incentive for everybody to say, ‘we should put up a monument to the anonymous COBOL programmer who changed two lines of code in the software at your bank.’ Because this was solved by many people in small ways,” says Saffo. (One programmer recalls the reward for a five-year project at his company: lunch and a pen.) It was a tedious, unglamorous effort, hardly the stuff of heroic narratives - nor conducive to an outpouring of public gratitude, even though some of the fixes put in place in 1999 are still used today to keep the world’s computer systems running smoothly. ![]() The innumerable programmers who devoted months and years to implementing fixes received scant recognition. “…he people who knew best were the ones who were working the hardest and spending the most.” “Industries and companies don’t spend $100 billion dollars or devote these personnel resources to a problem they think is not serious,” Koskinen says, looking back two decades later. The notion that nothing happened is somewhat ludicrous,” says de Jager, who was criticized for delivering dire early warnings. It was called a big hoax the effort to fix it a waste of time.īut what if no one had taken steps address the matter? Isolated incidents that illustrate the potential for adverse consequences - albeit of varying degrees of severity - ranging from a comically absurd century’s worth of late fees at a video rental store to a malfunction at a nuclear plant in Tennessee. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterĪfter the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, however, Y2K morphed into a punch line, as relief gave way to derision - as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. As Saffo notes, “better to be an anonymous success than a public failure.” The former IT director of a grocery chain recalls executives’ reticence to publicize their efforts for fear of embarrassing headlines about nationwide cash register outages. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford University.īut even among corporations that were sure in their preparations, there was sufficient doubt to hold off on declaring victory prematurely. “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. ![]()
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