TWENTY years ago we were thanking our lucky stars that we – the world’s computer systems, that is – made it through what was at that time the biggest scare of the modern age.
Y2K, or the Millennium Bug or Year 2000 Bug, will be well remembered by us ‘non-millennials’ as, on the eve of the 21st century, we all scrambled to protect our PCs from the big crash.
Perhaps we will never know whether Y2K was one of the biggest cons pulled off by those who saw a way to make money, whether our systems survived the turn of the century simply because the threat was not real or if a very real problem was prevented.
The Y2K bug was purportedly a problem in the coding of computerised systems that was projected to create havoc in computer systems and networks globally as it was not known whether computers would, when the clocks changed from 31 December 1999 to 1 January 2000, automatically tick over to the year 2000 or revert to 1900.
If the latter were to happen, the problems could have been endless.
Budgeting programmes of entire countries would have malfunctioned, flights would have ground to a halt, cars with onboard computers could have stopped working, and the list goes on.
For more than a year in the run-up to 2000, there was much fanfare warning of, and feverish preparations carried out to prevent the impending doom.
While the world’s population began to fear the worst, people started stocking up on canned goods and investing in generators.
It didn’t happen and here we are today, 20 years down the line, wondering what all the fuss was about.
But, according to experts, Y2K was legitimate and there actually were some issues as the date rolled over.
There were reportedly problems at more than a dozen nuclear power plants in the USA, delays in millions of dollars in medical aid payments, ATM issues worldwide and problems with the USA Department of Defence satellite-based intelligence system.
So, while those of us ‘laymen’ are somewhat prone to thinking Y2K was a non-issue and potentially one of the biggest cons in the world, experts say otherwise.
Millions, perhaps even billions of US dollars were spent on squashing the Y2K bug before it could inflict havoc on the world’s computer systems but, they say, the cost of doing nothing would have been much higher.
The problem did, however, highlight our dependence on computer systems which has only increased – somewhat drastically – in these first two decades of the 21st century.
Are we too reliant on computers which, as much of the world is linked via the internet, could be brought down by a major virus?
One can only hope that the experts know enough to prevent such a catastrophe.
