Jan 1, 2020 11:27 PM
https://theconversation.com/if-you-think...son-129042
EXCERPT: It’s not hard to find echoes of the late 1990s in the zeitgeist. Now as then, impeachment is on many peoples’ minds [...] Another feature of the same era that perhaps has a more important, if subtler, influence is the infamous Y2K bug.
Y2K was the great glitch in computer systems that looked capable of destroying civilisation at the stroke of midnight on the millennium. In the end, however, nothing much went wrong. Some people started to wonder if we had been misled all along. In fact, they couldn’t have been more mistaken. Y2K is in danger of becoming one of those moments in history from which exactly the wrong lessons have been drawn.
Many of the systems that were at risk from the Y2K bug dated from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. This was the era when the alleged insistence by Bill Gates that “640k [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody” was still ringing in people’s ears. Even powerful servers had only a few megabytes of RAM – a fraction of what you would find in most ordinary PCs today.
With so little space, programmers were always trying to come up with ways to conserve memory. Dates were one of those things that were integral to most computer programmes, and years came to be stored as a number between “0” and “99” – so for example, “80” would represent 1980. The advantage was that only a single byte of memory would be used. But with the new millennium soon to come around, it meant that the year “99” would become “100”. As a result, computer programs would believe that the year was 1900 rather than 2000, which threatened to raise serious problems.
[...] The sheer scale of such failures would make recovery difficult. This would potentially affect countries’ economies and the wellbeing and even lives of people around the world. ... The computer industry’s response involved a massive software rewrite, with official “Y2K ready” certification issued after extensive testing. Different solutions were implemented for different systems, depending on their memory capacity...
[...] When the fateful day came and went with little more than minor problems, the questions started. A view took root that Y2K had been overblown... People could point to the fact that some countries, such as South Korea and Russia, had got away with doing little to mitigate the problem, not to mention small businesses.
But this ignores the fact that software patches for the bug were rolled out worldwide. Those who didn’t prepare were protected thanks to the efforts of those who did. There is ample evidence, thanks to preparedness exercises, code reviews and the like, that if not addressed, the impact of Y2K would have been much more significant.
Unfortunately, the contrarian view has wormed its way into other important areas of policy. Climate change deniers and anti-vaccination activists often raise the lack of impact of the Y2K bug as evidence that experts are not to be trusted. If we are eventually successful in dealing with problems like climate change in future, don’t be surprised if similar arguments about wasted time and effort appear.
By that time, the same people will probably also be able to point to a couple of sequels to the millennium bug that didn’t come to much either. [...] We can also look forward to the year 2038 problem. ... The Unix community is well aware of this bug, however, and most of these systems will again have been replaced long before 2038. So just like with Y2K, if the world survives these future problems, it will not have been because it was all hype. The more boring truth is often that a stitch in time saves nine... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: It’s not hard to find echoes of the late 1990s in the zeitgeist. Now as then, impeachment is on many peoples’ minds [...] Another feature of the same era that perhaps has a more important, if subtler, influence is the infamous Y2K bug.
Y2K was the great glitch in computer systems that looked capable of destroying civilisation at the stroke of midnight on the millennium. In the end, however, nothing much went wrong. Some people started to wonder if we had been misled all along. In fact, they couldn’t have been more mistaken. Y2K is in danger of becoming one of those moments in history from which exactly the wrong lessons have been drawn.
Many of the systems that were at risk from the Y2K bug dated from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. This was the era when the alleged insistence by Bill Gates that “640k [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody” was still ringing in people’s ears. Even powerful servers had only a few megabytes of RAM – a fraction of what you would find in most ordinary PCs today.
With so little space, programmers were always trying to come up with ways to conserve memory. Dates were one of those things that were integral to most computer programmes, and years came to be stored as a number between “0” and “99” – so for example, “80” would represent 1980. The advantage was that only a single byte of memory would be used. But with the new millennium soon to come around, it meant that the year “99” would become “100”. As a result, computer programs would believe that the year was 1900 rather than 2000, which threatened to raise serious problems.
[...] The sheer scale of such failures would make recovery difficult. This would potentially affect countries’ economies and the wellbeing and even lives of people around the world. ... The computer industry’s response involved a massive software rewrite, with official “Y2K ready” certification issued after extensive testing. Different solutions were implemented for different systems, depending on their memory capacity...
[...] When the fateful day came and went with little more than minor problems, the questions started. A view took root that Y2K had been overblown... People could point to the fact that some countries, such as South Korea and Russia, had got away with doing little to mitigate the problem, not to mention small businesses.
But this ignores the fact that software patches for the bug were rolled out worldwide. Those who didn’t prepare were protected thanks to the efforts of those who did. There is ample evidence, thanks to preparedness exercises, code reviews and the like, that if not addressed, the impact of Y2K would have been much more significant.
Unfortunately, the contrarian view has wormed its way into other important areas of policy. Climate change deniers and anti-vaccination activists often raise the lack of impact of the Y2K bug as evidence that experts are not to be trusted. If we are eventually successful in dealing with problems like climate change in future, don’t be surprised if similar arguments about wasted time and effort appear.
By that time, the same people will probably also be able to point to a couple of sequels to the millennium bug that didn’t come to much either. [...] We can also look forward to the year 2038 problem. ... The Unix community is well aware of this bug, however, and most of these systems will again have been replaced long before 2038. So just like with Y2K, if the world survives these future problems, it will not have been because it was all hype. The more boring truth is often that a stitch in time saves nine... (MORE - details)