The Glitch That Threatened The World

it's 1995 everyone was talking about the OJ Simpson trial friends was on its second season and kio's Gangsta's Paradise was the song of the year our story starts in Michigan as some customers shop at an upscale grocer called the produce Palace after handing over their credit cards to the cash register attendant those cash registers promptly glitch out okay no big deal they thought we'll just restart the cash register and try again but the credit cards glitched out the register again and again an hours pass and these registers are still not functioning people begin to angrily leave with without their groceries this was truly a nightmare and it can all be traced back to one simple software [Music] bug so in the early days of programming computer memory was expensive and therefore it was incumbent upon programmers to minimize the usage of this memory whenever possible one of the ways that early code was written to save space was since computers only gain usage in the 20th century programs could simply cut the 19 part out of the Year allowing them to store the last two digits of the year instead of all four cutting out only two numbers in the data might not seem like a lot but you multiply these kilobytes over larger and larger data sets and it begins to add up this practice did accomplish the goal of cutting memory which was important but it also had an unfortunate and unintended consequence this code would not correctly process any dates after 1999 for instance it would process the year 2000 as simply 0 which could also be seen as 1900 or 1800 or whatever there was noar guarantee that it would process it correctly as [Applause] 2000 so let's go back to the produce Palace in 1995 and are stuck grocery Shoppers many customers here had just received new credit cards or renewed their old ones and these new credit cards had an expiration date of the year 2000 the code in the cash registers was processing this expiration as a date of 1900 and it was ruining them leading to issues ranging from failing modems to corrupted records and this glitch was not just impact this one set of Shoppers the produce Palace ended up taking the manufacturer of these registers to court after a reported 105 separate occurrences of this software bug this led to an eventual settlement and payment of over $250,000 paid by the manufacturer but this was far from the last time that we heard about this specific software [Music] bug in the Years following the produce Palace cash register issues and the years leading up to the turn of the Millennia 2000 the fear of this software bug began to run rampant it quickly became a common belief that as computers all around the world switched from 1999 to the year 2000 that they would begin to fail and that would lead to widespread and catastrophic effects but it's 2024 and we're all still here and computers are more ubiquitous than ever so what happened let's look into it in September of 1993 the computer World magazine published their weekly issue very deep on page 105 was an article by a computer consultant named Peter dieger he wrote the information systems Community is heading towards an event more devastating than a car crash we are heading toward the year 2000 we're heading toward a failure of our standard date format worse than a car crash this does not sound good people began to note that this issue as identified by dieger might actually have some legs and this was also perfectly coinciding with a time in history where computers were moving from technology mostly relegated to back rooms to technology that was interacted with almost every person on a daily basis the 1990s saw the introduction of the iMac Windows 95 of Mosaic the first internet browser the proliferation of video games and a whole lot more so at the same time that people are beginning to use computers much more often you have deer warning us about this problem in what has now been called The Information Age equivalent of the midnight ride of Paul Riv Focus this evening the glitch that could shortcircuit cyberspace on New Year's Day 2000 is it possible that we're in for an international disaster because so many of the world's computers will be utterly confused by what date it is those same computers that we are now using all the time are probably about to start crashing whenever we get to the year 2000 and so the world began to take notice in 1995 David Eddie was in a chat bot with some fellow techsavvy computer nerds discussing the potential Millen Millenia code glitch during this chat he used the numeronym Y 2K to describe the glitch in this term Y is referring to year and 2K is referring to 2 kilo or more nicely you can think about it as 2,000 it was an effective way to refer to the bug and it caught on so now we have a simple term Y2K for this potential code problem so is at this time that concerned individuals began to brainstorm potential impacts why to haven't you heard at midnight every computer in the world is going to fail planes will fall out of the sky and all the world's nuclear weapons will explode annihilating the entire planet no if a cash register could get bricked by a credit card expiration date what else could happen when more date fields are updated to the year 2000 could that cause glitches in software programs with more widespread impact what about telephones the banks National Defense systems elevators may stop heat may vanish credit cards and ATMs May cease to function taking that even further could these glitches then have real world impacts could airplane computer systems crash mid-flight could power grids glitch out and plunge thousands into a world without electricity could nuclear weapons be mistakenly launched nice work Lieutenant very festive uh actually sir each of those lights represents a missile launching by itself the pattern is just a coincidence as months passed and we crept closer and closer to January 1st of 2000 these fears began to feel very real in 1996 Senator Daniel Monahan wrote to President Clinton warning that each line of computer code needs to be analyzed and either passed on or be Rewritten the computer has been a blessing if we don't act quickly however it could become the curse of the age and so efforts to fix the Y2K bug began in Earnest in the roughly four years between mahan's call to action and New Year's Eve of 1999 billions of dollars were spent with estimates ranging anywhere between between $100 billion and $500 billion being spent to fix Y2K starting with the most critical systems that would Society if they fell Healthcare Financial utilities teams across the world checked and rewrote Millions if not billions of lines of code moreover remediation was not limited to just specific programmers in the US President Clinton launched a full-fledged Council dedicated to addressing concerns with Y2K internationally the World Bank launched the international Y2K Co Operation Center that worked to help countries across the globe prepare for Y2K simply but if you were someone with the means and or the ability to fix Y2K bugs you're probably going to get contracted to do so now for years fears about Y2K were mostly limited to Tech circles programmers and Technology conscious folks but the awareness gradually expanded and ramped up as we approach the turn of the Millennia in 1999 Time Magazine and CNN conducted a poll to understand The public's level of concern about the bug and they found that 59% of respondents were either somewhat or very concerned in regards to the Y2K bug problem and these fears were directly reflected by how the public prepared for the dreaded New Year's Day I'm not going to fly with the year 2000 problem uh it's too dangerous to me as January 1st of 2000 approached people began hoarding supplies like food water generators kerosene heaters and cash in preparation for potential worst case scenarios here's where we have everything we've got a lot of stuff in here it's for Y2K we have about a year supply of food here the year 2000 arrived and the world held its breath January 1st came and went and everything was okay trains did not derail water still floated into people's homes and computers for the most part still functioned there were some Y2K code issues but most were similar in scale and severity to the produce palace's cash registers more annoying then actually harmful some of the more amusing issues from Y2K included a US man being issued a 90,000 plus fine for a video that he needed to return that was over a 100 years past its due date newborn in Denmark being registered as over a 100 years old at Birth and a German man having over $6 million credited to his account on December 30th 1899 certainly the Y2K date rollover had some detrimental effects they were just nowhere near the scale and the severity that would cause the feared effects of hunger war or societal [Music] collapse now let's refocus on the author of that 1993 article one of the first people to call attention to the Y2K bug Peter dieger after the years of remediation undergone by programmers around the world dieger was utterly convinced that the Y2K bug had been defeated in fact he was so convinced that he decided to spend the New Year's Eve rollover sitting on a flight on the way to London dieger explained that he was trying to make a statement here I had absolutely no concerns at any point during the flight I knew that we would come through it in the same way I knew that we would not have power failures and that the telephone systems would work dieger and his predictions were fully correct whether it was the years and billions of dollars spent addressing Y2K or if it was just never that big of a problem to begin with the incredible downfall threatened by Y2K never materialized y 2K Believers will hold tight to Vindication emphasizing that the only reason we didn't see those problems was because of all the years we spend rewriting code Y2K Skeptics will allege that we never needed to spend all that money in time and that you can simply chalk it all up to fear mongery whatever the case the world this time chose to be safe rather than sorry and we shouldn't have any regrets about [Music] that the Y2K scare persists today as a cautionary T about the potential pitfalls of technological dependence hey this milk's broken it's got to come computer chip in it everything does while that potential meltdown never occurred those fears were not entirely unfounded Y2K exposed the vulnerability of our ever more computer Reliant World technology has become deeply ingrained in modern society from Power grids and financial institutions to transportation and communication networks the potential for widespread disruption due to a software bug is scary so we must be vigilant to build systems and practices both in our daily lives and on a societal level that use technology as a tool without becoming fully reliant on it in essence Y2K serves as a reminder of the power and the fragility of our technologically driven world and so in 2024 we can look back at Y2K with a combination of relief and amusement relief that there was no widespread chaos as was predicted and amusement that we as a society were so concerned about the code glitch that we started pulling all of our cash out of the banks and buying generators let us hope that we never have to consider fears of this magnitude again thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this story you should subscribe here on YouTube for more videos like this for instance I just covered a story about Investors in 2020 who after covid wanted to buy a lot of Zoom stock but ended up buying the wrong company it's a really interesting story and you should go check it out I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Matt Cole

Views: 7,681

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Id: I0dt3Oge3Gk

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024