August 19, 2021 • 43 mins
Y2K was a special time when we all thought nothing bad would really happen at the stroke of midnight, but secretly worried the world would end. Turns out the mitigation efforts worked and we hardly noticed.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you should Know.
This is a really good one too. I don't want
to I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because
(00:21):
we haven't recorded it yet. But I think this is
going to be pretty good because it's very interesting and
surprising and still kind of unresolved. Yeah, what city were
you in? You have to tell me what you were doing?
But what city were you in on December thirty feet?
(00:41):
I was in hot Atlanta? What about you? Okay, I
was there too. Uh. That's when I lived in the
big warehouse on the West End and we had a
big party, probably the biggest New Year's Eve party I've
ever thrown. And it was one of those parties where
people come that don't know you, oh wow, and all
of a sudden it was like, all right, here we go.
That kind of party. It's like weird science or sixteen
(01:03):
candles or something. Yeah, it was great. By the guy
from the Hills Have Eyes showed up on a motorcycle
who's also in goonies. That wasn't the guy from the
Are You sure. Oh no, no, you're right, you're right,
you're right. No, it was I think it was. He
was just in makeup. No, the guy from the Goonies
was football player John Matuzak, right, same guy. Oh that's
(01:27):
the guy from the Hills have eyes. No, I don't know.
I'm just trying to end up. Yeah. Yeah, so that's
what I was doing. I was throwing a big old
party and uh, not worrying too much about the Y
two K bug or my bank account being empty because
I didn't have much in it anyway, or being stuck
in an elevator or falling out of the sky in
(01:47):
a plane. Yeah, it was a good time to be
young because you didn't really care that much. You didn't
have as much to lose as if you were like
some I don't know, middle aged fat cat or something.
You're probably sweating it a little more than you were,
like in your twenties at the time. Probably a lot
of people who are listening to this right now, we're like,
what you guys just said, why to K bug? What
(02:08):
is that? And uh well, let Uncle Josh and Uncle
Chuck tell you all about why two K because it
was one of the weirdest times to ever live through
and Chuck, you and I were Cold War kids, like
we we lived through time where people thought, like, you know,
we could go to a nuclear apocalypse with with the
(02:29):
Soviet Union at any given moment, it could just happen everybody.
That's how we lived, and the Y two K bugs
still managed to stand out from that backdrop. Yeah. So
the idea was, and we'll get more specific, but the
one sentence descriptor is, computer code in early days was
written with just two digits, not nineteen fifty whatever, just
(02:53):
fifty whatever. And the idea was that was going to
cause a lot of problems when the calendar flipped to
two thousand and anything, like I said, from elevators being stuck,
to Wall Street going down to elevators being stuck. I mean,
there were all kinds of crazy scenarios um that you
(03:14):
might or might not have worried about as that date approached. Uh.
And that was the Y two K bug or the
millennium bug. And you know, some people really really freaked out,
and some people took advantage of people freaking out, and
some people didn't worry at all. And we're gonna tell
you all about it. Yeah, that was a really great
elevator falling down pitch. Thanks so um. The thing about
(03:39):
the Y two K bug is that if you hear
about it today, you're gonna hear a couple of different
responses potentially, and probably the more prevalent of the two
is that it was all just a big hoax, a sham,
maybe a big money suck. It was a bunch of
people just being paranoid, um. And whether that was rightfully so,
(04:00):
the or the paranoia was justified or not, you know, um,
because of the situation or the context that this is
happening in. We'll talk about that later. But every once
in a while you'll run into somebody and these are
the people you should probably listen to, who say, no,
it was actually a really big dealer. It had the
potential to be a really big deal And the reason
it wasn't a big deal is because the world, i
(04:23):
should say smart people in the world got behind solving
this issue, came together and solved this issue, and that
it was only people who weren't really paying attention who
saw nothing happened and said that was all just a
hoax or sham. And it's really interesting because to this day,
depending on what media coverage you read. And I'm not
even talking like left and right. I mean just like
(04:45):
the author. Uh, it can change from author to author.
Um that those two different approaches to the explanation will
be will be used depending on who you're reading. And
I just find that fascinating that we still haven't resolved
it fully. Oh yeah, Like you could go to any party,
any dinner party, and bring this up and and get
(05:06):
probably equal amount of those reactions. I bet, yeah, get
everybody really riled up. Um. All right, So I said
that it has to do with computer programming, and in
the early days of programming, like I said, they were
not using the first two numbers of the year um
because they weren't just lazy. Um. Those computers didn't have
(05:28):
a lot of computing power. They had about one or
two killer bits of memory. And it requires eight bits
or one bite to represent a single alpha numeric character.
So if you could save sixteen but sorry, sixteen bits
per operation that you're running by just not using nineteen, uh,
(05:51):
then you're saving a lot of memory, like well well
needed memory. Yeah. I mean like this is at a
time where like those bits were vital. To day, we're
just like drowning in in um RAM and yeah and bites.
So I saw somewhere that like somebody went down the
list of what a main frame a main frame like
(06:11):
just there was huge room, yes basically, but like where
there's a whole room full of whoppers that those things
maybe had two gigabytes of storage and just like some
paltry amount of of RAM. And so just you know,
it's such a cliche to say now that like, you know,
we we like there's more there's more data storage and
(06:33):
like a calculator that we used today than they used
to to go to the moon. But it's it's absolutely true.
And so to save that that that amount of data
made a lot of sense. But then the other thing
that kind of legitimized that decision is that these people
are writing code and like the fifties and the sixties,
and they're like this stuff is going to be gone,
like it'll have been wiped out and like rebuilt from
(06:56):
scratch by the time this becomes a problem in the
year two thousand and they were really really wrong with that,
you know idea, which it makes sense that they would
think that, but it turned out that it was really
wrong because a lot of the software in the world
that was running really important stuff like things like financial markets,
or things that monitored drinking water purity, or things that
(07:21):
ran freezers that kept smallpox from thawing out. You know,
like these were all run on software in a lot
of cases that were built and kind of tar papered
over with fixes and patches and expansions that that were
originally created and like the fifties or sixties, and that's
that's not a good thing to figure out when you're
(07:42):
like five years out from the millennium when this problem
is going to actually happen. Yeah, And it also was
complicated by the fact that these programmers weren't all aligned
on how to even enter dates in a uniform way.
Some people used the Julian format, which is the two
digit year and then the three digit account of the
(08:05):
days in the year, so, uh, January one would be
nine sevens or zero one. But not everyone did it
that way. So it's not like you could just go
through and say, you know, the nineteen point to twenty
I don't know nothing about coding, right, but you know,
(08:25):
just some simple line of code that just basically changes
everything in a uniform manner. No, and so even even
in like the software itself. Like even if one piece
of software did use the same kind of date throughout
that one piece of software, Um, that software, that code
was written to accommodate you know, X number of bits
(08:46):
for a date. So if you just went in and
added two extra digits for the date field, that could
throw off everything else in the software without any without
you having any way of predicting what it will throw off.
So if you went in and made that fix, it
could create even bigger problems then then, uh, than if
you just didn't make the fix to begin with as
(09:08):
far as the software operating was concerned, right, Uh. And
the other thing we need to point out and is
that the fact that it was the millennium didn't matter. Um,
it mattered, and we'll and we'll get to the sort
of cultural um hysteria that kind of followed. I think
that had a lot to do with the fact that
it was a millennium, But it could have been eighteen
(09:31):
hundred and nineteen hundred as far as the software new,
and it would have presented the same problem exactly that
it was just the prefix was changing. And what the
big concern was is that when it turned over to
zero zero the computers hadn't been taught that that meant
now the century now two thousand, technically not century, don't
at me um, but that they were going to go
(09:52):
back to nine hundred, which is what they were programmed
to think, and that that could cause all sorts of
cascading events, everything from Chuck's fabled falling elevator too, air
aircraft computers powering down midflight and just planes falling out
of the sky. Yeah, or computer just I had the
idea that a computer systems were just gonna go and
(10:16):
like smoke would come out of them and everything would
just shut down. Power would go out, your cable would
go out, like just nothing would work anymore. And that
was the way that everybody was touting and talking about.
It wasn't even worse than that, people talking about nuclear
warheads launching themselves or blowing up like in their silos
and that kind of stuff. Like there was a real
apocalyptic vibe to the to the public idea about it,
(10:39):
but even to the sober, level headed people who are
actually working to solve the problem. You know, there's a
big problem with an airline computer, you know, resetting itself
because it thinks it's while the planes in the air
or um planes weren't around the right exactly. Does the
(10:59):
other a problem to Chuck is that they weren't sure
if the computers reset themselves and like shut down, if
they would have any way to get in there and
start them back up again. So it's not like you know,
I saw somewhere. It's not like it was going to
fix itself once you know, it got like a couple
of seconds past midnight on two thousand, that that wasn't
(11:21):
necessarily a given. So they also the other thing that
really drove this this I don't want. So there were
two things that happened. The public was panicking. The people
working against it were like concerned and and and actively
managing it. But for the people who were actively managing
it and who were concerned, another thing that was driving
(11:41):
it was actually it was driving it for everybody. Yeah,
I'm gonna settle on that. Um that we had no
idea how widespread the problem was. Even by the mid
to late nineties, they were like forty billion microchips out
there in the world doing their thing. We had no
idea what person standage we're going to be affected by
the white two K bug. We had no idea what
(12:03):
missile guidance systems or what satellites or what, um, you know,
a t M machine systems, We're going to be affected.
So we had to dive in and figure out once
people started getting this point across, like, guys, this is
actually a thing. And apparently people were raising the flags
or at least one person was raising the flags UM
as far back as the sixties and seventies I think, right,
(12:25):
or the seventies and eighties. Yeah, why don't we talk
about him and some others right after this? Okay, all right,
(13:02):
so you mentioned a light in the darkness, a man
on a mountain proclaiming this could be an issue. And
that man, uh in the nineteen seventies was Bob Behmer
or Bob Beemer, and he was he really played a
big role in the creation of askey code. And uh
(13:24):
he was the first person and this is in the
nineteen seventies, like I said to to actually write in
papers like, hey, you know, this could be a problem
down the road, This something we should probably take a
look at. Um. You know, if you're a UM a
blockbuster video, you're probably not gonna really try and get
ahead of this too much. You can probably start working
(13:44):
on this in like, if you are the financial sector
and your Wall Street, You're gonna start working on this
in the nineteen eighties because there's just so much more
at risk. Somebody's late fees running up is not a
very big deal. You can correct that. The financial market
not being open or available or crashing is a really
big deal. So they started throwing uh a lot of
(14:08):
money at this in the late nineteen eighties UH in
the financial sector to try and correct this ahead of time. Yeah,
and as a matter of fact, later we'll see later
on in the after effects, they credited this, um, basically
the upgrade that the New York Stock Exchange dedicated itself
to in the face of the Y two K bug,
as the same reason why the global financial markets didn't
(14:30):
like their systems didn't collapse um after September eleven. Yeah,
that because of this. Yeah. So UM if bob Biehmer
was the first old hermit prophet who came down from
the hills to war and everybody, Um, Peter de Yeager
was the guy who got all the press for it. Um.
(14:52):
He was the one who really basically dedicated his life
to making sure that everybody was good and scared out
this the public, the public, but also you know the
people who were like pulling the levers of government, the
people who are running the corporations, and the people are
running the financial markets. Like he he met with a
lot of different people. Um gave a lot of different
(15:14):
scary presentations. UM. I saw that he would like it
wasn't just some pet presentation. He gave everywhere necessarily too.
I saw he met with the Canadian government and was
trying to get the get across like this is a
really big deal and it's a really big problem and
you're not equipped to deal with this as it stands now.
This is a new thing for you. And he pointed
(15:35):
out that the Canadian government meets its deadlines. It's it's
deadline goals for projects six percent of the time. He said,
this cannot happen, Like, you can't miss this goal, this deadline. UM.
So he would like kind of go in and like
make it apparent to each each group based on their
own needs or their own desires or their own perspective. UM.
(15:58):
But he did. They also gave lots of interviews. He
was on sixty minutes UH and he made a bunch
of money during I think during he made in today's
dollars something like two and a half million dollars consulting
and giving speeches and lectures. But from what I understand,
and he gets a lot of guph today, as we'll see,
But from what I understand, he was a true believer
(16:19):
who in some ways maybe saved the world from some
really big problems that we we will we will never
fully understand because we didn't experience them. Yeah, this is
a hard one to judge in retrospect. It's like, how
do you judge the thing that didn't happen right exactly?
(16:40):
Is it a cry wolf? Or was it uh? Or
did we slay the wolf? So Peter Yeager kicked the
whole thing off of the article called Doomsday two thousand
and in his in his um defense, his editor probably
came up with that, not him. Editors typically write the headline,
so it's possible. Who knows he could have suggested it
(17:02):
he was He was that much of a doomsayer for
sure that he would have been totally comfortable with that. Yeah,
and this is where you know, the the American public
like eventually it made its way to sixty minutes and
once Morley Safer is on there on a Sunday night
talking about it. Then you know the American public is
going to get on board. And they did, and it
brought out some some cooks. It brought out people, uh
(17:25):
preppers and survivalists. Uh. There are a lot of internet
scams going around at the time. There was a lot
of religious religiosity, um sort of really heated up, like uh,
sort of doomsday preachers and stuff like that started coming
out of the woodwork a little bit more. Anyone that
thought that they could make money off of this thing,
(17:48):
uh through fear kind of came out of the woodwork.
And you know, when something like that's happening, you've got
that on one side, and then you've got a lot
of people on the other side just thumbing their nose
at it and saying, this is all a big scam,
This is all a hoax. Look at all these kooks
that are trying to get you know, separate us from
our money. Um, it's just a big scam, and we
(18:09):
don't have anything to worry about. It's weird, It almost
sounds familiar in some weird way. Yeah, what we've been
experiencing a Yeah, this is definitely like it was a
peek behind the curtain of what could what could come,
although it was not nearly a stark although I don't know,
maybe I wasn't paying as much attention then as I
(18:30):
am these days. But it didn't definitely, it didn't seem
it didn't seem like, you know, there was anything approaching
the incivility and just outright like anger that that we
experienced today, especially you know in America, um, compared to them,
But there were there were definitely two sides to this issue,
and they definitely were entrenched against one another. It just
(18:52):
wasn't like neither side hated the other. They just thought
the other one was dumb, right, uh. And you know,
one of the big reasons that it was such a
big kerfuffle culturally was that this it sort of it
was all about timing and the calendar flip aligned at
a time where we were computers were really becoming super
(19:13):
super entrenched in everyone's daily life. Um. Of course, you know,
people have been using computers for a while, but as
far as like really everyday stuff like running your bank
through there and paying your bills and credit cards and
acting as your own travel agent, and the government everything
was reliant on computers by this point kind of for
the first you know, this was the first big wave
(19:36):
so as far, and it made a good point in
here as as far as your average person on the
street knows, is their computer comes to them in a
box and they take it out, and it's just a
little magic machine that runs on ferry dust, and we
know nothing about how it works or how it should work.
And so all of a sudden, everyone has got these
little magic boxes that they don't really understand that they're
(19:58):
super reliant on. And there are people out there saying
things are about to get really bad with your magic box. Yeah,
And then a lot of people are just like, all right,
I guess it's time to freak out a little bit. Yeah.
I mean, people definitely did freak out, and I think
it also, I think part of that freak out is
kind of like you were saying, like the Y two
K bug is the first time it was revealed to
(20:19):
us just how dependent on computers we've become. We we
never really saw that before. But you know, before up
to this point, it was all like ge whiz, you know,
like my insurance claim went through fifty times faster than
it would have five years ago. Instead now it's like,
you know, we're these all these things that were dependent
on are about to pull the rug out from our civilization,
(20:39):
and that that that really kind of got people scared,
even if people weren't sitting there analyzing and I mean
we're analyzing it in hindsight, at the time, people were
just scared, freaked out, nervous, angry, upset. But then the
fact that this was taking place already during a major
calendar calendar change, not just from um, you know, the
(21:00):
nine hundreds of the two thousands, but like a new
a new millennium, you know, um, that that really kind
of had people already primed. The weird timing of the
whole thing, Like you remember how big the X Files were.
Imagine the X Files now would be like a whole
hum Some people would watch it, some people be really
into it. You know, it might make a little splash
(21:22):
there for a little bit. But the The X Files
one of the biggest TV shows in the world, at
the very least in the West, because it was super
tapped into this millennial and not the not the generation,
but just like the end of this era or the
new era that this ants that everyone was carrying around
(21:43):
to some degree, whether you were aware of it or not,
you were worried, some small part of your brain was
worried because the calendar is about to change over to
the year two thousand. Yeah. I think the show that
does that best now is Black and Mirror. Definitely. I
loved Meet some X Files, but I'll take Black Mirror
over X Files. Yeah. It's really tough to rival Black Mirror,
(22:05):
it is, and I know people, boy, X Files people
are gonna be so upset. I loved X Files. I
did Ye Molder and Scully. I just watched them the
other day. It still holds up. Yeah, it was a
great show. It was a lot of fun, but a
show of its time, right exactly. Those overcoats they wear
were gigantic. They were big, Oh my god, shoulder pads. Yes,
(22:25):
they were so everybody's walking around like David Byrne and
stopped making sense. It was a little weird. Um. So
the cost of this thing was gonna be pretty big
and ended up being pretty big. It depends on who
you ask. If you see numbers on the internet of
five billion dollars, that is probably not true. That probably
(22:46):
came from people that were consulting saying you know, it
may cost up to five billion dollars to fix all
this and all over the world. Um, But they were
spending tons of money. They're like, I think there's an
article from the on Washington Posts that talked about General
Motors spending about six hundred twenty five mill x in
about a quarter of a mill I'm sorry, quarter of
(23:09):
a billion, Proctor and Gamble ninety million. So and you know,
then the federal government has to spend a ton of
money on their own systems. So it added up to many, many,
many billions, tens of billions of dollars. Let's just say that. Yeah. Also,
I don't want to let this opportunity pass by without
shouting out contemporary journalism. One other thing, chuck, though, the
(23:33):
US Senate conducted a special committee investigation into spending on
the Y two K bug, and it came up with
what I what I can tell is the um the
most widely accepted number at the time, this is this
dollars A hundred billion dollars were spent in the United
States alone, and that about eight points yeah, about eight
(23:57):
point four billion of that was by the US government. UM.
And that again, that's in two thousand dollars, so it
would be substantially more today, and that the US is
almost certainly uh the largest spender on this issue because
we were also at the time the most dependent country
(24:18):
on computers for the country that was the most dependent
on computers in the entire world. So we had the
most to lose, we had the most to gain by
spending this money, and the Senate report concluded even within
three months afterward, that it was money well spent. Yeah, well,
there you have a case closed. Case closed, although I
should probably say that to the end UM. In nineties six,
(24:42):
the Congressional Research Service said, you know what, we need
to do something about this, and Senator Daniel moyna Hans
went to Bill Clinton and said, hey, we need to
do something about this. So Clinton launched the Council on
Year two thousand conversion UH Congress Past the Year two
thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, and UM all this
(25:06):
sounds very fancy, but UH ED is quick to point
out and we are as well that you know, the
government can't get in there and just fix all the
bugs of all these companies. They gotta take care of
it themselves. So a lot of it was just hey,
you gotta get on this, like you gotta get ahead
of this. You're on this right stock market and you're
on this general motors, aren't you? And um sharing information
(25:30):
for sure, but UM a lot of it was just
kind of cheerleading yeah UM, and that I mean that
worked like getting people, you know, kind of snapped in
line and saying like, hey, the U. S. Government is
telling you this is a real problem and you need
to do this by this time or else you're gonna
have some big troubles. That gets people's attention for sure,
So you know, in that in a lot of senses,
(25:52):
that was enough. But the government also had all of
its own systems and UH software to look at and
go over and make sure that was um UH in
working condition or fixed if it needed to be fixing.
And then they reached out and helped other countries to
UM I saw that. I think starting in they started
an exchange program with Russia to make sure that nobody
(26:16):
was going to accidentally knuke anybody else. And as a
matter of fact, on the the the turn of the millennium,
there were um US observers and Russian observers in one
another's countries just basically to work together to make sure
that this this got all worked out. But I think
also it's just kind of a show of faith, like,
(26:36):
you know, we're not gonna nuke you, or we're not
gonna let you get new to our own people are
there kind of thing to which I thought was kind
of cool. Yeah. Other country countries took a little more
strict approach. Uh. The Dutch Central Bank said if you
we won't loan money to companies who weren't compliant. China said,
(26:56):
you know what, all the top airline executives have to
take flights on January first, um, and you know, so
you better make sure your stuff is running correctly. Yeah.
I think about that the nation or the government ordered
airline executives to be in the air at midnight um,
or they would I guess probably go to jail. Yeah.
And that sounds harsh and it is, but I think
(27:19):
it is an interesting incentive to say the least, it's pragmatic.
At least, you know, make sure your stuff works everybody. Um.
But the the Y two K compliance is what I
was talking about. That was like you could buy products
around that time that said Y two K compliant, Like
it could be a clock radio that says Y two
(27:40):
K ready. Um, all kinds of products were labeled Y
two K compliant, certainly anything to do with computing. Yeah,
And there was actually nobody watching to make sure that
that certification was actually accurate. There was there, I think
the Defense Department put out some like some guidance and
on what to do to be Y two K compliant,
but they were like find it, fix it all good
(28:02):
were the steps like they were that vague. There was
nobody's certifying it. And to me, yes, cheerleading from the
US government and raising awareness and maybe lending aid financially. Um,
that was some really good roles that it played. But
I feel like also it could have said, hey, if
you're running this kind of operating software you're or you're
(28:22):
producing dates using this time, here's a good fix you
might be able to use or to create some sort
of Y two K compliance guidance or steps. I feel
like it could have done a little more in that respect. UM,
but there was nobody Like you could have bought anything
and it could have had that sticker on it, and
it really didn't necessarily mean anything. And chuck, there were
(28:43):
some other governments had different responses. I saw that UM
the that Canada had thirteen thousand troops readied UM on
high alert just in case the the S went down. Yeah,
that was part of Operation Abicus. Yes, there's a really
great Globe and Mail article called Y two K The
Strange True History of How Canada prepared for an apocalypse
(29:06):
that never happened but changed us all. It was a
really good article. And then one of the other things
that Canada did was the CBC sent a pair of
engineers to a remote broadcasting station with UM with like
some video which I would love to get my hands on.
I couldn't find it anywhere that would that They were
to broadcast instructions on how to survive post apocalypse. Basically
(29:30):
that was their job. Oh wow. Yeah. So everybody's sitting
there ready and waiting, and it's finally December thirty one,
and whether you're ready or not, it's all about to
click over, right, Chuck, that's right. So we'll take another
break here and we'll talk about what happened on December
(29:50):
one pm right after this? All right? What what happened? Man?
(30:28):
I've been on pins and needles for a twenty seconds.
Not much. Actually, some stuff did happen, but for the
most part, nothing really happened. I mean for for you
or me, or just about anybody else out there. The
millennium came and went in the Y two K bug
fizzled out like a dud. That's right. I remember waking
(30:49):
up late in the day on January one, hung over.
My everything worked, my phone worked, my power was on.
There were no planes falling out of the sky. I
would rode elevator up and down all day long. But
some things did happen. Uh. And like I mentioned video stores,
you know sometimes there was one in Albany, New York
(31:11):
that had an assessed a late fee of over ninety
thousand dollars to a customer for the general's daughter. No less.
Oh is that what it was? One the movie? Yes,
that was the rental Oh boy, I think I actually
saw that for some reason. There's Travolta, right, yeah, the
a Trivolta that was in the post pulp fiction boom. Uh.
(31:34):
Let me see. There was a National Laboratory nuclear weapons
plant in Tennessee had some malfunctions. I think there was
some other nuclear malthfunctions in Japan, but nothing big obviously,
or you know, it would have been catastrophic, but really
mostly minor things happened. Yeah, there was like thirty thousand
(31:57):
cash registers in Greece that we're all running the same
software showed that that the year's nine hundred on receipts,
like nothing particularly bad. I think. In the US, the
most jarring thing that happened for the government was some
spy satellites were they went offline for three days. But
for the most part, people were able to see what
(32:18):
the problem was, deal with it, figure out a solution
or a patch, and then bring the thing back online
with minimal interruption or problems. And the fact is that
these the interruptions that did happen were typically pretty small,
pretty inconsequential, and we're dealt with pretty quickly. Yeah. In England,
(32:38):
in Sheffield, England, the National Health Services came under fire
because there was a misreading of UH the age of
pregnant mothers. Believe a hundred and fifty four women UH
in the program were affected, and you know they were
getting testing, like pre natal testing to see if there
(33:01):
was a chance that their baby could have Down syndrome.
And it led to two pregnancy terminations and four births
of children with Down syndrome, and for the life of me.
I couldn't find out if there were lawsuits or what.
I just saw articles that talked about penalties against the
NHS And it's one of those things that was really
(33:23):
hard to find in any kind of follow up. Right,
that was not one of the inconsequential ones I mentioned. No,
obviously not so. Um. The fact that, and from what
I could tell, Chuck, that was far and away the
most consequential outcome. Everything else is usually pretty um, you know,
either inconvenient or aggravating comical, like the guy who got
(33:45):
the dollar late fee for his video tape. Um. But
the fact that, you know, aside from the NHST issue,
the fact that it was generally small stuff that happened
for some reason made the public say, oh, well, this
was all just a hoax. It was all just as
scammed as suck money out of our preppers pockets and
(34:09):
um get us all riled up and scared and probably
control us with George Bush's new world order that ministry
talked about, um, and that the the whole thing was
was all just just who we that we were all
riled up for nothing, which I think goes to show
that that the public by and large is a dumb, dumb. Yeah,
(34:29):
I think we're seeing that now because Ed makes a
great analogy here. He says, hey, um, if if the
Y two K bug had been a flood, and we
spent hundreds of billions of dollars in countless work hours
building a damn to hold back the flood, when that
flood arrived and the damn held, you wouldn't say, well,
I didn't get wet, So the whole thing must have
(34:51):
been a hoax. And that that is almost a perfect
analogy for what happened in retrospect with the Y two
K bug. A crisis that would have been potentially really
huge and catastrophic was averted. And rather than saying poray
we did it, we pulled together, people just kind of said,
you guys got me all upset for nothing. Nothing happened. Yeah,
(35:13):
I mean, let's say that they um, let's say it
was all just minor problems that they didn't bother to
fix beforehand, and all of a sudden, instead of a
few minor annoyances and aggravations, there are thousands of those,
and those compound on one other another somehow and create
sort of a domino effect. It's not just that they
(35:34):
they corrected the main systems like the financial markets and
the nuclear codes and all those things that they needed
to correct. They corrected a lot of stuff that had
a downstream effect just to make our lives a little
less disrupted. Um. People looked at Italy at the time.
They were a country that didn't do a lot and
they didn't have a big fall out. But other people
(35:56):
who were a lot smarter and don't make knee jerk reactions. Yeah,
but you know what, Italy is really small compared to us.
They weren't nearly as computer reliant at the time as
we were, and America was fixing their stuff, which helped
fix stuff for all of the world because they were
reliant on us and our systems. That's right. So so
there's a pretty good argument you could make for all
(36:18):
those people are like, no, it's totally fine. See, those
people didn't do anything. They got a free ride, basically
because so much of the software that America was fixing
is used around the world. That's a really really important
point for because that's that's a that's a point that
a lot of people make. They'll point to countries surprisingly
like Japan. I can't believe it, but Japan did very
(36:39):
little to deal with it, and like you said, there
were some minor problems that some of their nuclear plants,
but the fact is a lot of them benefit. A
lot of those countries benefited from the US leading the
way on this. Yeah, And one of the strategies that
other people who didn't think we should be pouring all
this money into it beforehand was called fix on failure.
They said, why why don't we just wait and see
(37:01):
what happens and then we'll start to correct things as needed.
But that that's just not a very like we didn't
know what we didn't know, Like you said earlier, we
had no way of knowing what it was gonna cause,
and so fixed on failure was not a viable option
because trying to patch something that is in chaos all
of a sudden is not the best way to work. No,
I mean, like this is about to date this episode,
(37:23):
but the Spirit Airlines problems of of like the last
week or so, it's a really great example. Oh man,
there was some problems with shifting cruise around because of weather,
and all of a sudden, some flights um started being
ready without the cruise, and then that led to more
cruise being shifted around, and it was just this cascade
(37:45):
of flights where they were every day canceling fifty six
of their flights and just leaving people stranded. And it
was a really great example that um the what was
the name of the pipeline that got cyber attacked for ransomware?
That certain that was a really great example of like
just these you know, people waiting in line for gas
around the whole southeast and the East coast for a week,
(38:09):
more than a week. Like it's it's like at the
time at y two k um the idea that like
we could have just fixed this stuff really kind of
shows their naivety for how how embedded, how we didn't
really understand how embedded we already were with computers and
how dependent we were on them. And you can't fix
nuclear missile guidance system after it fails. You need to
(38:32):
do that ahead of time. So that fixed on failure ideas.
It was a pretty bad idea from the get go.
It was you mentioned, you know, one of the good
things that came out of this was the fact that
post nine eleven, our financial markets didn't crash because largely
because of a lot of the work they did for
Y two K and making those systems more robust and updated,
(38:54):
and that happened kind of across the board, like the
investment that a lot of people, I think a lot
of people and companies were like, well, I guess now
as a good time as any to really just sort
of update everything and to get our systems, uh, you
know more um, you know, up to snuff for today's
you know, some of the stuff was still running on
code from the seventies that have been built on and
(39:16):
built on. So that really helped drive the tech boom
in a lot of ways in that companies were investing
a lot more for the first time, uh in tech.
And also they you know, there were hundreds of thousands
of new developers that were trained and hired to deal
with this, and they were all of a sudden, we're
looking for jobs, and some of them didn't find jobs,
(39:37):
so they got creative and started writing apps and writing
code for other programs. And it really fueled not only
here in India. I know, it was a really big
deal that um their I T industry now compared to
where it was then, it's just like night and day
because of everyone that got hired to help with Y
two K. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Like they make the
(39:58):
case that the tech boom was a result of people
coming into this industry who wouldn't have otherwise been there.
And also the spending. The spending was just ridiculous, because
not only were people hiring I T people to fix
their software, like some companies were like, forget this, We're
just going to completely upgrade our systems. And these systems
could have kept hopping along or hobbling along for another
(40:21):
ten fifteen years, say, and then that system would have
had to have been replaced, and then some other company
does it another five years earlier, five years later, rather
than that. The United States and actually in a lot
of ways, the world's computer systems got upgraded all at once,
and that kind of laid that foundation with you know,
the industry being flush with tech workers to just really
(40:44):
take off, which is great. I saw in that same
article about that Center report, Chuck, that that said it
was money well spent. Somebody estimated that for every dollar
spent on fixing the Y two K bug, it led
to a return on investment of about six or seven dollars.
And that is an estimate in two thousand now today
in in hindsight, if the the Y two K bug
(41:05):
drove the tech booms that started in the early two
thousand's late nineties, like, it's just it's it's countless, So
it's probably in the trillions of dollars worth of value
that it led to toats. So I think we kind
of busted that myth in a way, didn't We kind
of like the world of World's Radio broadcast. I think
so as usual, gen X is correct. Go jen X.
(41:29):
If you want to know more about how gen X rules,
you can go onto the Internet and look at this
thing that we built called the Internet, and um, learn
some more stuff. What do you think of that? I
think it's great. And since I said learn some more stuff,
it's time for a listener maw. I'm gonna call this
Bob and Girls from our Child Labor podcast. Hi, guys,
(41:52):
I'm Amanda Marus Sars. I'm a long time listener and
love everything you guys do. In your Child Labor episode,
you mentioned you were unsure the dangers of working as
a Bob and girl or boy. Well, let me tell you.
I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts, where they claim the Industrial Revolution
was born. If you're from this area in elementary school,
you visit the boot Cotton Mill Museum for school field trips.
(42:14):
We learned about the history of h and cotton weaving
processes of the time. Something and always stuck with me,
being a little girl at the time of these trips
was the Bob and Girls. They were cite a list
of horrors that these child laborers went through, and getting
their fingers snapped off in the weaving machine crevices, to
getting their hair caught and essentially getting scalped. Man, I
knew I have it. I totally knew if there was
(42:35):
gonna be something really horrific about it. I just wanted
to polish off your episode with the most graphic details
that seven year old me could remember being plagued by.
That is from Amanda Maru's Stars. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Amanda.
That's exactly what I assumed was out there, So thanks
for filling in the blanks. Forest. I love it. If
you want to get in touch of this like Amanda did,
(42:57):
especially if you love everything we do like she says,
we love hearing from people like that. You can get
in touch with those via email. It's Stuff podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts My
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(43:17):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you should Know.
This is a really good one too. I don't want
to I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because
(00:21):
we haven't recorded it yet. But I think this is
going to be pretty good because it's very interesting and
surprising and still kind of unresolved. Yeah, what city were
you in? You have to tell me what you were doing?
But what city were you in on December thirty feet?
(00:41):
I was in hot Atlanta? What about you? Okay, I
was there too. Uh. That's when I lived in the
big warehouse on the West End and we had a
big party, probably the biggest New Year's Eve party I've
ever thrown. And it was one of those parties where
people come that don't know you, oh wow, and all
of a sudden it was like, all right, here we go.
That kind of party. It's like weird science or sixteen
(01:03):
candles or something. Yeah, it was great. By the guy
from the Hills Have Eyes showed up on a motorcycle
who's also in goonies. That wasn't the guy from the
Are You sure. Oh no, no, you're right, you're right,
you're right. No, it was I think it was. He
was just in makeup. No, the guy from the Goonies
was football player John Matuzak, right, same guy. Oh that's
(01:27):
the guy from the Hills have eyes. No, I don't know.
I'm just trying to end up. Yeah. Yeah, so that's
what I was doing. I was throwing a big old
party and uh, not worrying too much about the Y
two K bug or my bank account being empty because
I didn't have much in it anyway, or being stuck
in an elevator or falling out of the sky in
(01:47):
a plane. Yeah, it was a good time to be
young because you didn't really care that much. You didn't
have as much to lose as if you were like
some I don't know, middle aged fat cat or something.
You're probably sweating it a little more than you were,
like in your twenties at the time. Probably a lot
of people who are listening to this right now, we're like,
what you guys just said, why to K bug? What
(02:08):
is that? And uh well, let Uncle Josh and Uncle
Chuck tell you all about why two K because it
was one of the weirdest times to ever live through
and Chuck, you and I were Cold War kids, like
we we lived through time where people thought, like, you know,
we could go to a nuclear apocalypse with with the
(02:29):
Soviet Union at any given moment, it could just happen everybody.
That's how we lived, and the Y two K bugs
still managed to stand out from that backdrop. Yeah. So
the idea was, and we'll get more specific, but the
one sentence descriptor is, computer code in early days was
written with just two digits, not nineteen fifty whatever, just
(02:53):
fifty whatever. And the idea was that was going to
cause a lot of problems when the calendar flipped to
two thousand and anything, like I said, from elevators being stuck,
to Wall Street going down to elevators being stuck. I mean,
there were all kinds of crazy scenarios um that you
(03:14):
might or might not have worried about as that date approached. Uh.
And that was the Y two K bug or the
millennium bug. And you know, some people really really freaked out,
and some people took advantage of people freaking out, and
some people didn't worry at all. And we're gonna tell
you all about it. Yeah, that was a really great
elevator falling down pitch. Thanks so um. The thing about
(03:39):
the Y two K bug is that if you hear
about it today, you're gonna hear a couple of different
responses potentially, and probably the more prevalent of the two
is that it was all just a big hoax, a sham,
maybe a big money suck. It was a bunch of
people just being paranoid, um. And whether that was rightfully so,
(04:00):
the or the paranoia was justified or not, you know, um,
because of the situation or the context that this is
happening in. We'll talk about that later. But every once
in a while you'll run into somebody and these are
the people you should probably listen to, who say, no,
it was actually a really big dealer. It had the
potential to be a really big deal And the reason
it wasn't a big deal is because the world, i
(04:23):
should say smart people in the world got behind solving
this issue, came together and solved this issue, and that
it was only people who weren't really paying attention who
saw nothing happened and said that was all just a
hoax or sham. And it's really interesting because to this day,
depending on what media coverage you read. And I'm not
even talking like left and right. I mean just like
(04:45):
the author. Uh, it can change from author to author.
Um that those two different approaches to the explanation will
be will be used depending on who you're reading. And
I just find that fascinating that we still haven't resolved
it fully. Oh yeah, Like you could go to any party,
any dinner party, and bring this up and and get
(05:06):
probably equal amount of those reactions. I bet, yeah, get
everybody really riled up. Um. All right, So I said
that it has to do with computer programming, and in
the early days of programming, like I said, they were
not using the first two numbers of the year um
because they weren't just lazy. Um. Those computers didn't have
(05:28):
a lot of computing power. They had about one or
two killer bits of memory. And it requires eight bits
or one bite to represent a single alpha numeric character.
So if you could save sixteen but sorry, sixteen bits
per operation that you're running by just not using nineteen, uh,
(05:51):
then you're saving a lot of memory, like well well
needed memory. Yeah. I mean like this is at a
time where like those bits were vital. To day, we're
just like drowning in in um RAM and yeah and bites.
So I saw somewhere that like somebody went down the
list of what a main frame a main frame like
(06:11):
just there was huge room, yes basically, but like where
there's a whole room full of whoppers that those things
maybe had two gigabytes of storage and just like some
paltry amount of of RAM. And so just you know,
it's such a cliche to say now that like, you know,
we we like there's more there's more data storage and
(06:33):
like a calculator that we used today than they used
to to go to the moon. But it's it's absolutely true.
And so to save that that that amount of data
made a lot of sense. But then the other thing
that kind of legitimized that decision is that these people
are writing code and like the fifties and the sixties,
and they're like this stuff is going to be gone,
like it'll have been wiped out and like rebuilt from
(06:56):
scratch by the time this becomes a problem in the
year two thousand and they were really really wrong with that,
you know idea, which it makes sense that they would
think that, but it turned out that it was really
wrong because a lot of the software in the world
that was running really important stuff like things like financial markets,
or things that monitored drinking water purity, or things that
(07:21):
ran freezers that kept smallpox from thawing out. You know,
like these were all run on software in a lot
of cases that were built and kind of tar papered
over with fixes and patches and expansions that that were
originally created and like the fifties or sixties, and that's
that's not a good thing to figure out when you're
(07:42):
like five years out from the millennium when this problem
is going to actually happen. Yeah, And it also was
complicated by the fact that these programmers weren't all aligned
on how to even enter dates in a uniform way.
Some people used the Julian format, which is the two
digit year and then the three digit account of the
(08:05):
days in the year, so, uh, January one would be
nine sevens or zero one. But not everyone did it
that way. So it's not like you could just go
through and say, you know, the nineteen point to twenty
I don't know nothing about coding, right, but you know,
(08:25):
just some simple line of code that just basically changes
everything in a uniform manner. No, and so even even
in like the software itself. Like even if one piece
of software did use the same kind of date throughout
that one piece of software, Um, that software, that code
was written to accommodate you know, X number of bits
(08:46):
for a date. So if you just went in and
added two extra digits for the date field, that could
throw off everything else in the software without any without
you having any way of predicting what it will throw off.
So if you went in and made that fix, it
could create even bigger problems then then, uh, than if
you just didn't make the fix to begin with as
(09:08):
far as the software operating was concerned, right, Uh. And
the other thing we need to point out and is
that the fact that it was the millennium didn't matter. Um,
it mattered, and we'll and we'll get to the sort
of cultural um hysteria that kind of followed. I think
that had a lot to do with the fact that
it was a millennium, But it could have been eighteen
(09:31):
hundred and nineteen hundred as far as the software new,
and it would have presented the same problem exactly that
it was just the prefix was changing. And what the
big concern was is that when it turned over to
zero zero the computers hadn't been taught that that meant
now the century now two thousand, technically not century, don't
at me um, but that they were going to go
(09:52):
back to nine hundred, which is what they were programmed
to think, and that that could cause all sorts of
cascading events, everything from Chuck's fabled falling elevator too, air
aircraft computers powering down midflight and just planes falling out
of the sky. Yeah, or computer just I had the
idea that a computer systems were just gonna go and
(10:16):
like smoke would come out of them and everything would
just shut down. Power would go out, your cable would
go out, like just nothing would work anymore. And that
was the way that everybody was touting and talking about.
It wasn't even worse than that, people talking about nuclear
warheads launching themselves or blowing up like in their silos
and that kind of stuff. Like there was a real
apocalyptic vibe to the to the public idea about it,
(10:39):
but even to the sober, level headed people who are
actually working to solve the problem. You know, there's a
big problem with an airline computer, you know, resetting itself
because it thinks it's while the planes in the air
or um planes weren't around the right exactly. Does the
(10:59):
other a problem to Chuck is that they weren't sure
if the computers reset themselves and like shut down, if
they would have any way to get in there and
start them back up again. So it's not like you know,
I saw somewhere. It's not like it was going to
fix itself once you know, it got like a couple
of seconds past midnight on two thousand, that that wasn't
(11:21):
necessarily a given. So they also the other thing that
really drove this this I don't want. So there were
two things that happened. The public was panicking. The people
working against it were like concerned and and and actively
managing it. But for the people who were actively managing
it and who were concerned, another thing that was driving
(11:41):
it was actually it was driving it for everybody. Yeah,
I'm gonna settle on that. Um that we had no
idea how widespread the problem was. Even by the mid
to late nineties, they were like forty billion microchips out
there in the world doing their thing. We had no
idea what person standage we're going to be affected by
the white two K bug. We had no idea what
(12:03):
missile guidance systems or what satellites or what, um, you know,
a t M machine systems, We're going to be affected.
So we had to dive in and figure out once
people started getting this point across, like, guys, this is
actually a thing. And apparently people were raising the flags
or at least one person was raising the flags UM
as far back as the sixties and seventies I think, right,
(12:25):
or the seventies and eighties. Yeah, why don't we talk
about him and some others right after this? Okay, all right,
(13:02):
so you mentioned a light in the darkness, a man
on a mountain proclaiming this could be an issue. And
that man, uh in the nineteen seventies was Bob Behmer
or Bob Beemer, and he was he really played a
big role in the creation of askey code. And uh
(13:24):
he was the first person and this is in the
nineteen seventies, like I said to to actually write in
papers like, hey, you know, this could be a problem
down the road, This something we should probably take a
look at. Um. You know, if you're a UM a
blockbuster video, you're probably not gonna really try and get
ahead of this too much. You can probably start working
(13:44):
on this in like, if you are the financial sector
and your Wall Street, You're gonna start working on this
in the nineteen eighties because there's just so much more
at risk. Somebody's late fees running up is not a
very big deal. You can correct that. The financial market
not being open or available or crashing is a really
big deal. So they started throwing uh a lot of
(14:08):
money at this in the late nineteen eighties UH in
the financial sector to try and correct this ahead of time. Yeah,
and as a matter of fact, later we'll see later
on in the after effects, they credited this, um, basically
the upgrade that the New York Stock Exchange dedicated itself
to in the face of the Y two K bug,
as the same reason why the global financial markets didn't
(14:30):
like their systems didn't collapse um after September eleven. Yeah,
that because of this. Yeah. So UM if bob Biehmer
was the first old hermit prophet who came down from
the hills to war and everybody, Um, Peter de Yeager
was the guy who got all the press for it. Um.
(14:52):
He was the one who really basically dedicated his life
to making sure that everybody was good and scared out
this the public, the public, but also you know the
people who were like pulling the levers of government, the
people who are running the corporations, and the people are
running the financial markets. Like he he met with a
lot of different people. Um gave a lot of different
(15:14):
scary presentations. UM. I saw that he would like it
wasn't just some pet presentation. He gave everywhere necessarily too.
I saw he met with the Canadian government and was
trying to get the get across like this is a
really big deal and it's a really big problem and
you're not equipped to deal with this as it stands now.
This is a new thing for you. And he pointed
(15:35):
out that the Canadian government meets its deadlines. It's it's
deadline goals for projects six percent of the time. He said,
this cannot happen, Like, you can't miss this goal, this deadline. UM.
So he would like kind of go in and like
make it apparent to each each group based on their
own needs or their own desires or their own perspective. UM.
(15:58):
But he did. They also gave lots of interviews. He
was on sixty minutes UH and he made a bunch
of money during I think during he made in today's
dollars something like two and a half million dollars consulting
and giving speeches and lectures. But from what I understand,
and he gets a lot of guph today, as we'll see,
But from what I understand, he was a true believer
(16:19):
who in some ways maybe saved the world from some
really big problems that we we will we will never
fully understand because we didn't experience them. Yeah, this is
a hard one to judge in retrospect. It's like, how
do you judge the thing that didn't happen right exactly?
(16:40):
Is it a cry wolf? Or was it uh? Or
did we slay the wolf? So Peter Yeager kicked the
whole thing off of the article called Doomsday two thousand
and in his in his um defense, his editor probably
came up with that, not him. Editors typically write the headline,
so it's possible. Who knows he could have suggested it
(17:02):
he was He was that much of a doomsayer for
sure that he would have been totally comfortable with that. Yeah,
and this is where you know, the the American public
like eventually it made its way to sixty minutes and
once Morley Safer is on there on a Sunday night
talking about it. Then you know the American public is
going to get on board. And they did, and it
brought out some some cooks. It brought out people, uh
(17:25):
preppers and survivalists. Uh. There are a lot of internet
scams going around at the time. There was a lot
of religious religiosity, um sort of really heated up, like uh,
sort of doomsday preachers and stuff like that started coming
out of the woodwork a little bit more. Anyone that
thought that they could make money off of this thing,
(17:48):
uh through fear kind of came out of the woodwork.
And you know, when something like that's happening, you've got
that on one side, and then you've got a lot
of people on the other side just thumbing their nose
at it and saying, this is all a big scam,
This is all a hoax. Look at all these kooks
that are trying to get you know, separate us from
our money. Um, it's just a big scam, and we
(18:09):
don't have anything to worry about. It's weird, It almost
sounds familiar in some weird way. Yeah, what we've been
experiencing a Yeah, this is definitely like it was a
peek behind the curtain of what could what could come,
although it was not nearly a stark although I don't know,
maybe I wasn't paying as much attention then as I
(18:30):
am these days. But it didn't definitely, it didn't seem
it didn't seem like, you know, there was anything approaching
the incivility and just outright like anger that that we
experienced today, especially you know in America, um, compared to them,
But there were there were definitely two sides to this issue,
and they definitely were entrenched against one another. It just
(18:52):
wasn't like neither side hated the other. They just thought
the other one was dumb, right, uh. And you know,
one of the big reasons that it was such a
big kerfuffle culturally was that this it sort of it
was all about timing and the calendar flip aligned at
a time where we were computers were really becoming super
(19:13):
super entrenched in everyone's daily life. Um. Of course, you know,
people have been using computers for a while, but as
far as like really everyday stuff like running your bank
through there and paying your bills and credit cards and
acting as your own travel agent, and the government everything
was reliant on computers by this point kind of for
the first you know, this was the first big wave
(19:36):
so as far, and it made a good point in
here as as far as your average person on the
street knows, is their computer comes to them in a
box and they take it out, and it's just a
little magic machine that runs on ferry dust, and we
know nothing about how it works or how it should work.
And so all of a sudden, everyone has got these
little magic boxes that they don't really understand that they're
(19:58):
super reliant on. And there are people out there saying
things are about to get really bad with your magic box. Yeah,
And then a lot of people are just like, all right,
I guess it's time to freak out a little bit. Yeah.
I mean, people definitely did freak out, and I think
it also, I think part of that freak out is
kind of like you were saying, like the Y two
K bug is the first time it was revealed to
(20:19):
us just how dependent on computers we've become. We we
never really saw that before. But you know, before up
to this point, it was all like ge whiz, you know,
like my insurance claim went through fifty times faster than
it would have five years ago. Instead now it's like,
you know, we're these all these things that were dependent
on are about to pull the rug out from our civilization,
(20:39):
and that that that really kind of got people scared,
even if people weren't sitting there analyzing and I mean
we're analyzing it in hindsight, at the time, people were
just scared, freaked out, nervous, angry, upset. But then the
fact that this was taking place already during a major
calendar calendar change, not just from um, you know, the
(21:00):
nine hundreds of the two thousands, but like a new
a new millennium, you know, um, that that really kind
of had people already primed. The weird timing of the
whole thing, Like you remember how big the X Files were.
Imagine the X Files now would be like a whole
hum Some people would watch it, some people be really
into it. You know, it might make a little splash
(21:22):
there for a little bit. But the The X Files
one of the biggest TV shows in the world, at
the very least in the West, because it was super
tapped into this millennial and not the not the generation,
but just like the end of this era or the
new era that this ants that everyone was carrying around
(21:43):
to some degree, whether you were aware of it or not,
you were worried, some small part of your brain was
worried because the calendar is about to change over to
the year two thousand. Yeah. I think the show that
does that best now is Black and Mirror. Definitely. I
loved Meet some X Files, but I'll take Black Mirror
over X Files. Yeah. It's really tough to rival Black Mirror,
(22:05):
it is, and I know people, boy, X Files people
are gonna be so upset. I loved X Files. I
did Ye Molder and Scully. I just watched them the
other day. It still holds up. Yeah, it was a
great show. It was a lot of fun, but a
show of its time, right exactly. Those overcoats they wear
were gigantic. They were big, Oh my god, shoulder pads. Yes,
(22:25):
they were so everybody's walking around like David Byrne and
stopped making sense. It was a little weird. Um. So
the cost of this thing was gonna be pretty big
and ended up being pretty big. It depends on who
you ask. If you see numbers on the internet of
five billion dollars, that is probably not true. That probably
(22:46):
came from people that were consulting saying you know, it
may cost up to five billion dollars to fix all
this and all over the world. Um, But they were
spending tons of money. They're like, I think there's an
article from the on Washington Posts that talked about General
Motors spending about six hundred twenty five mill x in
about a quarter of a mill I'm sorry, quarter of
(23:09):
a billion, Proctor and Gamble ninety million. So and you know,
then the federal government has to spend a ton of
money on their own systems. So it added up to many, many,
many billions, tens of billions of dollars. Let's just say that. Yeah. Also,
I don't want to let this opportunity pass by without
shouting out contemporary journalism. One other thing, chuck, though, the
(23:33):
US Senate conducted a special committee investigation into spending on
the Y two K bug, and it came up with
what I what I can tell is the um the
most widely accepted number at the time, this is this
dollars A hundred billion dollars were spent in the United
States alone, and that about eight points yeah, about eight
(23:57):
point four billion of that was by the US government. UM.
And that again, that's in two thousand dollars, so it
would be substantially more today, and that the US is
almost certainly uh the largest spender on this issue because
we were also at the time the most dependent country
(24:18):
on computers for the country that was the most dependent
on computers in the entire world. So we had the
most to lose, we had the most to gain by
spending this money, and the Senate report concluded even within
three months afterward, that it was money well spent. Yeah, well,
there you have a case closed. Case closed, although I
should probably say that to the end UM. In nineties six,
(24:42):
the Congressional Research Service said, you know what, we need
to do something about this, and Senator Daniel moyna Hans
went to Bill Clinton and said, hey, we need to
do something about this. So Clinton launched the Council on
Year two thousand conversion UH Congress Past the Year two
thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, and UM all this
(25:06):
sounds very fancy, but UH ED is quick to point
out and we are as well that you know, the
government can't get in there and just fix all the
bugs of all these companies. They gotta take care of
it themselves. So a lot of it was just hey,
you gotta get on this, like you gotta get ahead
of this. You're on this right stock market and you're
on this general motors, aren't you? And um sharing information
(25:30):
for sure, but UM a lot of it was just
kind of cheerleading yeah UM, and that I mean that
worked like getting people, you know, kind of snapped in
line and saying like, hey, the U. S. Government is
telling you this is a real problem and you need
to do this by this time or else you're gonna
have some big troubles. That gets people's attention for sure,
So you know, in that in a lot of senses,
(25:52):
that was enough. But the government also had all of
its own systems and UH software to look at and
go over and make sure that was um UH in
working condition or fixed if it needed to be fixing.
And then they reached out and helped other countries to
UM I saw that. I think starting in they started
an exchange program with Russia to make sure that nobody
(26:16):
was going to accidentally knuke anybody else. And as a
matter of fact, on the the the turn of the millennium,
there were um US observers and Russian observers in one
another's countries just basically to work together to make sure
that this this got all worked out. But I think
also it's just kind of a show of faith, like,
(26:36):
you know, we're not gonna nuke you, or we're not
gonna let you get new to our own people are
there kind of thing to which I thought was kind
of cool. Yeah. Other country countries took a little more
strict approach. Uh. The Dutch Central Bank said if you
we won't loan money to companies who weren't compliant. China said,
(26:56):
you know what, all the top airline executives have to
take flights on January first, um, and you know, so
you better make sure your stuff is running correctly. Yeah.
I think about that the nation or the government ordered
airline executives to be in the air at midnight um,
or they would I guess probably go to jail. Yeah.
And that sounds harsh and it is, but I think
(27:19):
it is an interesting incentive to say the least, it's pragmatic.
At least, you know, make sure your stuff works everybody. Um.
But the the Y two K compliance is what I
was talking about. That was like you could buy products
around that time that said Y two K compliant, Like
it could be a clock radio that says Y two
(27:40):
K ready. Um, all kinds of products were labeled Y
two K compliant, certainly anything to do with computing. Yeah,
And there was actually nobody watching to make sure that
that certification was actually accurate. There was there, I think
the Defense Department put out some like some guidance and
on what to do to be Y two K compliant,
but they were like find it, fix it all good
(28:02):
were the steps like they were that vague. There was
nobody's certifying it. And to me, yes, cheerleading from the
US government and raising awareness and maybe lending aid financially. Um,
that was some really good roles that it played. But
I feel like also it could have said, hey, if
you're running this kind of operating software you're or you're
(28:22):
producing dates using this time, here's a good fix you
might be able to use or to create some sort
of Y two K compliance guidance or steps. I feel
like it could have done a little more in that respect. UM,
but there was nobody Like you could have bought anything
and it could have had that sticker on it, and
it really didn't necessarily mean anything. And chuck, there were
(28:43):
some other governments had different responses. I saw that UM
the that Canada had thirteen thousand troops readied UM on
high alert just in case the the S went down. Yeah,
that was part of Operation Abicus. Yes, there's a really
great Globe and Mail article called Y two K The
Strange True History of How Canada prepared for an apocalypse
(29:06):
that never happened but changed us all. It was a
really good article. And then one of the other things
that Canada did was the CBC sent a pair of
engineers to a remote broadcasting station with UM with like
some video which I would love to get my hands on.
I couldn't find it anywhere that would that They were
to broadcast instructions on how to survive post apocalypse. Basically
(29:30):
that was their job. Oh wow. Yeah. So everybody's sitting
there ready and waiting, and it's finally December thirty one,
and whether you're ready or not, it's all about to
click over, right, Chuck, that's right. So we'll take another
break here and we'll talk about what happened on December
(29:50):
one pm right after this? All right? What what happened? Man?
(30:28):
I've been on pins and needles for a twenty seconds.
Not much. Actually, some stuff did happen, but for the
most part, nothing really happened. I mean for for you
or me, or just about anybody else out there. The
millennium came and went in the Y two K bug
fizzled out like a dud. That's right. I remember waking
(30:49):
up late in the day on January one, hung over.
My everything worked, my phone worked, my power was on.
There were no planes falling out of the sky. I
would rode elevator up and down all day long. But
some things did happen. Uh. And like I mentioned video stores,
you know sometimes there was one in Albany, New York
(31:11):
that had an assessed a late fee of over ninety
thousand dollars to a customer for the general's daughter. No less.
Oh is that what it was? One the movie? Yes,
that was the rental Oh boy, I think I actually
saw that for some reason. There's Travolta, right, yeah, the
a Trivolta that was in the post pulp fiction boom. Uh.
(31:34):
Let me see. There was a National Laboratory nuclear weapons
plant in Tennessee had some malfunctions. I think there was
some other nuclear malthfunctions in Japan, but nothing big obviously,
or you know, it would have been catastrophic, but really
mostly minor things happened. Yeah, there was like thirty thousand
(31:57):
cash registers in Greece that we're all running the same
software showed that that the year's nine hundred on receipts,
like nothing particularly bad. I think. In the US, the
most jarring thing that happened for the government was some
spy satellites were they went offline for three days. But
for the most part, people were able to see what
(32:18):
the problem was, deal with it, figure out a solution
or a patch, and then bring the thing back online
with minimal interruption or problems. And the fact is that
these the interruptions that did happen were typically pretty small,
pretty inconsequential, and we're dealt with pretty quickly. Yeah. In England,
(32:38):
in Sheffield, England, the National Health Services came under fire
because there was a misreading of UH the age of
pregnant mothers. Believe a hundred and fifty four women UH
in the program were affected, and you know they were
getting testing, like pre natal testing to see if there
(33:01):
was a chance that their baby could have Down syndrome.
And it led to two pregnancy terminations and four births
of children with Down syndrome, and for the life of me.
I couldn't find out if there were lawsuits or what.
I just saw articles that talked about penalties against the
NHS And it's one of those things that was really
(33:23):
hard to find in any kind of follow up. Right,
that was not one of the inconsequential ones I mentioned. No,
obviously not so. Um. The fact that, and from what
I could tell, Chuck, that was far and away the
most consequential outcome. Everything else is usually pretty um, you know,
either inconvenient or aggravating comical, like the guy who got
(33:45):
the dollar late fee for his video tape. Um. But
the fact that, you know, aside from the NHST issue,
the fact that it was generally small stuff that happened
for some reason made the public say, oh, well, this
was all just a hoax. It was all just as
scammed as suck money out of our preppers pockets and
(34:09):
um get us all riled up and scared and probably
control us with George Bush's new world order that ministry
talked about, um, and that the the whole thing was
was all just just who we that we were all
riled up for nothing, which I think goes to show
that that the public by and large is a dumb, dumb. Yeah,
(34:29):
I think we're seeing that now because Ed makes a
great analogy here. He says, hey, um, if if the
Y two K bug had been a flood, and we
spent hundreds of billions of dollars in countless work hours
building a damn to hold back the flood, when that
flood arrived and the damn held, you wouldn't say, well,
I didn't get wet, So the whole thing must have
(34:51):
been a hoax. And that that is almost a perfect
analogy for what happened in retrospect with the Y two
K bug. A crisis that would have been potentially really
huge and catastrophic was averted. And rather than saying poray
we did it, we pulled together, people just kind of said,
you guys got me all upset for nothing. Nothing happened. Yeah,
(35:13):
I mean, let's say that they um, let's say it
was all just minor problems that they didn't bother to
fix beforehand, and all of a sudden, instead of a
few minor annoyances and aggravations, there are thousands of those,
and those compound on one other another somehow and create
sort of a domino effect. It's not just that they
(35:34):
they corrected the main systems like the financial markets and
the nuclear codes and all those things that they needed
to correct. They corrected a lot of stuff that had
a downstream effect just to make our lives a little
less disrupted. Um. People looked at Italy at the time.
They were a country that didn't do a lot and
they didn't have a big fall out. But other people
(35:56):
who were a lot smarter and don't make knee jerk reactions. Yeah,
but you know what, Italy is really small compared to us.
They weren't nearly as computer reliant at the time as
we were, and America was fixing their stuff, which helped
fix stuff for all of the world because they were
reliant on us and our systems. That's right. So so
there's a pretty good argument you could make for all
(36:18):
those people are like, no, it's totally fine. See, those
people didn't do anything. They got a free ride, basically
because so much of the software that America was fixing
is used around the world. That's a really really important
point for because that's that's a that's a point that
a lot of people make. They'll point to countries surprisingly
like Japan. I can't believe it, but Japan did very
(36:39):
little to deal with it, and like you said, there
were some minor problems that some of their nuclear plants,
but the fact is a lot of them benefit. A
lot of those countries benefited from the US leading the
way on this. Yeah, And one of the strategies that
other people who didn't think we should be pouring all
this money into it beforehand was called fix on failure.
They said, why why don't we just wait and see
(37:01):
what happens and then we'll start to correct things as needed.
But that that's just not a very like we didn't
know what we didn't know, Like you said earlier, we
had no way of knowing what it was gonna cause,
and so fixed on failure was not a viable option
because trying to patch something that is in chaos all
of a sudden is not the best way to work. No,
I mean, like this is about to date this episode,
(37:23):
but the Spirit Airlines problems of of like the last
week or so, it's a really great example. Oh man,
there was some problems with shifting cruise around because of weather,
and all of a sudden, some flights um started being
ready without the cruise, and then that led to more
cruise being shifted around, and it was just this cascade
(37:45):
of flights where they were every day canceling fifty six
of their flights and just leaving people stranded. And it
was a really great example that um the what was
the name of the pipeline that got cyber attacked for ransomware?
That certain that was a really great example of like
just these you know, people waiting in line for gas
around the whole southeast and the East coast for a week,
(38:09):
more than a week. Like it's it's like at the
time at y two k um the idea that like
we could have just fixed this stuff really kind of
shows their naivety for how how embedded, how we didn't
really understand how embedded we already were with computers and
how dependent we were on them. And you can't fix
nuclear missile guidance system after it fails. You need to
(38:32):
do that ahead of time. So that fixed on failure ideas.
It was a pretty bad idea from the get go.
It was you mentioned, you know, one of the good
things that came out of this was the fact that
post nine eleven, our financial markets didn't crash because largely
because of a lot of the work they did for
Y two K and making those systems more robust and updated,
(38:54):
and that happened kind of across the board, like the
investment that a lot of people, I think a lot
of people and companies were like, well, I guess now
as a good time as any to really just sort
of update everything and to get our systems, uh, you
know more um, you know, up to snuff for today's
you know, some of the stuff was still running on
code from the seventies that have been built on and
(39:16):
built on. So that really helped drive the tech boom
in a lot of ways in that companies were investing
a lot more for the first time, uh in tech.
And also they you know, there were hundreds of thousands
of new developers that were trained and hired to deal
with this, and they were all of a sudden, we're
looking for jobs, and some of them didn't find jobs,
(39:37):
so they got creative and started writing apps and writing
code for other programs. And it really fueled not only
here in India. I know, it was a really big
deal that um their I T industry now compared to
where it was then, it's just like night and day
because of everyone that got hired to help with Y
two K. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Like they make the
(39:58):
case that the tech boom was a result of people
coming into this industry who wouldn't have otherwise been there.
And also the spending. The spending was just ridiculous, because
not only were people hiring I T people to fix
their software, like some companies were like, forget this, We're
just going to completely upgrade our systems. And these systems
could have kept hopping along or hobbling along for another
(40:21):
ten fifteen years, say, and then that system would have
had to have been replaced, and then some other company
does it another five years earlier, five years later, rather
than that. The United States and actually in a lot
of ways, the world's computer systems got upgraded all at once,
and that kind of laid that foundation with you know,
the industry being flush with tech workers to just really
(40:44):
take off, which is great. I saw in that same
article about that Center report, Chuck, that that said it
was money well spent. Somebody estimated that for every dollar
spent on fixing the Y two K bug, it led
to a return on investment of about six or seven dollars.
And that is an estimate in two thousand now today
in in hindsight, if the the Y two K bug
(41:05):
drove the tech booms that started in the early two
thousand's late nineties, like, it's just it's it's countless, So
it's probably in the trillions of dollars worth of value
that it led to toats. So I think we kind
of busted that myth in a way, didn't We kind
of like the world of World's Radio broadcast. I think
so as usual, gen X is correct. Go jen X.
(41:29):
If you want to know more about how gen X rules,
you can go onto the Internet and look at this
thing that we built called the Internet, and um, learn
some more stuff. What do you think of that? I
think it's great. And since I said learn some more stuff,
it's time for a listener maw. I'm gonna call this
Bob and Girls from our Child Labor podcast. Hi, guys,
(41:52):
I'm Amanda Marus Sars. I'm a long time listener and
love everything you guys do. In your Child Labor episode,
you mentioned you were unsure the dangers of working as
a Bob and girl or boy. Well, let me tell you.
I'm from Lowell, Massachusetts, where they claim the Industrial Revolution
was born. If you're from this area in elementary school,
you visit the boot Cotton Mill Museum for school field trips.
(42:14):
We learned about the history of h and cotton weaving
processes of the time. Something and always stuck with me,
being a little girl at the time of these trips
was the Bob and Girls. They were cite a list
of horrors that these child laborers went through, and getting
their fingers snapped off in the weaving machine crevices, to
getting their hair caught and essentially getting scalped. Man, I
knew I have it. I totally knew if there was
(42:35):
gonna be something really horrific about it. I just wanted
to polish off your episode with the most graphic details
that seven year old me could remember being plagued by.
That is from Amanda Maru's Stars. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Amanda.
That's exactly what I assumed was out there, So thanks
for filling in the blanks. Forest. I love it. If
you want to get in touch of this like Amanda did,
(42:57):
especially if you love everything we do like she says,
we love hearing from people like that. You can get
in touch with those via email. It's Stuff podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts My
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(43:17):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.