Countries all around the world upped the ante for New Year’s Eve in 1999 to commemorate the start of the new millennium. Parties and events were organized by sovereign governments, private companies, and even religious & cultural groups. Walt Disney World in Orlando even featured an attraction known as the “Millennium Village” from October 1, 1999 to January 1, 2000. The world was united around the turn of the millennium.
The transition from 1999 to 2000, however, wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Many held the belief that computers all around the globe would crash as the clock struck 12. Fears of the collapse of the banking system and planes falling out of the sky were completely real! What led to this perception, and how come this never actually occurred?
Leading up to 2000, computers operated on a system employing two-digit placeholders for the year. For instance, a credit card's expiration date in a computer system might appear as (08/31/99).
The biggest question lay in how software systems would interpret "00." Rather than recognizing it as 2000, they would mistakenly interpret it as 1900. This could result in either system crashes or inaccurate information as 2000 approached.
So why did computer programmers not anticipate the potential repercussions of this practice? It was standard practice to use two digits for years before 2000 and was more efficient to store dates in this manner, rather than use the four-digit alternative. It is worth noting that the use of four-digit dates from standardization agencies only emerged relatively recently.
To resolve this issue, American business and technology teams embarked on a mission to reprogram all existing software before December 1999. While exact dollar figures vary, it has been estimated that the U.S. government and private sector firms spent a combined $100 billion to ensure computers remained functional into the new millennium. This undertaking spanned several years and led to two approaches: the first was updating software to adopt 2000 as the baseline year while retaining two-digit notation, while others opted for a complete transition to four-digit representation. Fortunately, the anticipated software complications never went through, and the digital landscape remained functional.
Comments