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“Despite a few sputters and glitches, the world’s computers appear to have survived the year 2000 rollover without major problems — and with humanity’s faith in technology intact, at least for another day.”
That was the lead of an article that ran on the front page of on Jan. 1, 2000.
Yes, the year 2000 software problem, known as Y2K, turned out to be a nonevent. That has led to a widely held view that it was a kind of manufactured crisis, a vastly overstated danger inflated by a self-interested cabal of alarmists, journalists and technology companies. And today, Y2K is enjoying a sort of cultural moment for its place in 1990s nostalgia, even serving as the tongue-in-cheek story line in a new comedy-horror film, “Y2K.” (The lights go out and the electronic devices turn evil.)
When Zachary Loeb, who was 15 at the turn of the millennium, decided to study Y2K as the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, he recalled that he had initially assumed he would be writing “a history of a techno-panic, hyped up by the media.”
But Mr. Loeb soon learned that it had been “a serious problem, and how seriously it was taken by serious people.” Now an assistant professor of history at Purdue University, Mr. Loeb is writing a book on the Y2K experience.
The Times took the year 2000 software problem seriously too. From 1998 through the first few days of 2000, the newspaper published nearly 140 stories about Y2K, based on a count of articles in The Times’s archives.
Beat reporters contributed articles that examined how the government, military, banking industry, airlines and other enterprises were preparing. There were articles on how Congress had formed committees and was holding hearings that included sworn testimony from legions of experts. President Clinton created the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion. The United Nations coordinated international efforts.
To recall, the Y2K problem was a byproduct of the unforeseen longevity of legacy technology. In the 1960s, storage on computers was a scarce, precious resource. To save memory space, programmers routinely lopped off the first two digits of the years in dates, substituting, for instance, “99” for “1999.”
So when 1999 ended, the thinking went, computers might be baffled by what came next, or might respond as though “00” meant “1900” instead of “2000.” Machines could crash or spew out erroneous data. That old code was lodged in computers that ran everything from power grids to bank machines to air traffic control systems. The potential risk was legitimately alarming.
Most of the spending on Y2K preparations, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, came in the late 1990s. It involved testing and fixing machines, and tweaking millions of lines of code. It was painstaking work, the digital equivalent of lace making.
But the problem had been known, if left largely uncorrected, for years. In 1988, long before the term Y2K was coined, The Times ran a front-page article with the headline, “For Computers, the Year 2000 May Prove a Bit Traumatic.”
It was written by Barnaby J. Feder, who in the late 1990s did most of The Times’s Y2K coverage. Barnaby left the paper in 2008 and went on to become a Unitarian Universalist minister in Vermont. In correspondence last week, he recalled that 1988 piece fondly. “It tells you how far ahead of the curve we were,” he said, “and something about the Times editors, who were willing to front it in 1988.”
I was drafted to write the lead Y2K piece as the new millennium began. I had written a couple of Y2K articles, but most of my time in 1998 and 1999 had been spent on a different technology story: the government’s landmark antitrust investigation and suit against Microsoft, followed by a lengthy trial, a ruling against Microsoft and an eventual settlement.
I wrote some background copy to prepare for the 2000 New Year’s article. What I didn’t do was write two different versions, as reporters sometimes do when the outcome of a news event is uncertain. By the evening of Dec. 31, 1999, the overwhelming consensus among people who had worked on the problem was that the necessary work had been done.
Planes weren’t going to fall from the sky, nor would there be massive blackouts. I spoke to John Koskinen, who was head of President Clinton’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion. He said that what we were seeing was what he expected: a few glitches here and there, but nothing serious, certainly not catastrophic.
At the time, Nicholas Donofrio was a senior vice president for technology at IBM. On the phone last week, he recalled, “It’s the crisis that never happened, because people all over the world got together and stopped it from happening.”
For the Y2K story, The Times had gathered reporting from around the world; from Japan, Thailand, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. I was in the newsroom in Manhattan, and pared down the dispatches, adding detail as I went.
For me, there was no frenzied writing on deadline. It was a mix of work and celebration in the newsroom; everybody got an engraved champagne flute and a fleece vest. A jazz combo of musicians, all Times employees, entertained us while we worked.
I walked outside into Times Square to watch the ball drop, heralding the New Year. And at about 3:30 a.m., shortly after midnight on the West Coast, I headed home, the world still intact.
