(2 of 2)
Meanwhile, the torch of Y2K awareness passed to a new generation. In the fall of 1977, a young Canadian named Peter de Jager signed on as a computer operator at IBM. His first task was to boot up a nationwide banking system run on an IBM 370. When the machine whirred into life, it asked for the date. As De Jager, a mathematics major straight out of college, entered the number 77, a thought occurred to him. Did this machine care what century it was? With the impetuousness of youth, he marched off to his manager and informed him the computer would not work in the year 2000. The manager laughed and asked De Jager how old he was. This isn't going to be a problem until you're 45, he said. Don't worry, we'll sort it out.
And that, at least for the next 13 years, was the attitude De Jager adopted. "We used to joke about this at conferences," he says. "Irresponsible talk, like 'We won't be around then.'" But by 1991, De Jager, a self-described "nobody" in the industry, had decided he would be around. Four years later, he was giving more than 85 lectures a year on the topic and posting regular updates to his site, the Web's first for Y2K warnings, www.year2000.com
And here's the curious thing. From 1995 on, Y2K awareness had a kind of critical mass. Congress, the White House and the media all got wind of the bug at about the same time. After making too little of the problem for so long, everybody began to make, if anything, too much of it.
Why then, and not two decades earlier? Why De Jager, and not Bemer? Proximity to the millennium may have had something to do with it as well as the increasingly ominous tone of the warnings. This was Bemer's dry 1979 prophecy of doom: "Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity." Twenty years later, here's De Jager's jeremiad: "The economy worldwide would stop...you would not have water. You would not have power..."
This alarmist language may yet be justified. By 1999 folly has compounded folly. In many cases, the original COBOL code has been rejiggered so many times that the date locations have been lost. And even when programmers find their quarry, they aren't sure which fixes will work. The amount of code that needs to be checked has grown to a staggering 1.2 trillion lines. Estimates for the cost of the fix in the U.S. alone range from $50 billion to $600 billion. As for Y2K compliance in Asian economies still struggling with recession? Forget about it.
The fact is that no one on the planet really knows what will happen when 01-01-00 rolls around. Whether we'll be glad we were panicked into action or we'll disown the doomsayers depends on how diligently the programmers do their job in the next 50 weeks. One thing is already clear. In a century in which man split the atom, spliced genes and turned silicon into data, the tale of Y2K--how we ignored it for 40 years, then flew into a tizzy--will not be remembered as our finest hour.