Throwback: The Year Double Zero

Speaker 1: We have never done a rerun before, but I was very excited to revisit this episode about y two k.

Speaker 2: It will be 2,000.

Speaker 1: So we rebooted and started properly making the show, three years ago now, which is very weird. And two years ago, at the end of that first year making it consistently, which back then meant like once a month, we did an episode about y two k. It was a subject I was very excited to learn and talk about. It was honestly one of the first ones we did that flexed a bit outside of the cybersecurity beat. And listening to it now, I am struck by a bunch of things. First, there's some different music that we don't use anymore and I miss some of it. But the big thing was how much the story of what happened at the the dawn of the year 2000 felt relevant to what we had just experienced over the course of 2020, but kind of remixed almost. Like y two ks was a problem that was predicted and handled so well that people thought that it wasn't a problem to begin with. It was retroactively dubbed hysteria when in reality, institutional responses were so thorough, they basically addressed the problem before it became one. 2020 was kind of a negative image of that or like a remix. It had all the same elements in a totally different order to completely different outcomes. We certainly had not predicted the problem well enough to prevent it, but it was a big problem that required this massive coordinated response to address. And, it's hard not to see shades of one story in the other. Together, they kind of constituted almost a set of case studies of what it looks like when you manage to solve a problem before it becomes one, and what it looks like when you do not, which is the conclusion I think you hear us wander up to by the end of the episode.

Speaker 2: Just stay at home. In in one minute. The ball will drop, and you will see pandemonium. Listen to him.

Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy the rerun. It was a lot of fun to make. I got to watch a whole wild Leonard Nimoy computer documentary, which if you're bored, you should hunt down on YouTube. We are taking the holidays off, so y'all will get a rerun. But we're gonna be back in a few weeks. And in 2023, my resolution is that we keep just widening the scope of stories about technology that we tell. And to tell some that aren't just about hacking into stuff, but hacking things together, making cool new stuff, and still a bunch of stories about people hacking things apart. Thanks for listening this past year. Hope you enjoy this hacked throwback, year double zero. We'll catch you in the next one.

Speaker 2: In 10/2021. Happy 2000.

Speaker 1: This takes place on a day back in the year 2000. And on that day, a technician from the National Reconnaissance Office is sitting at their computer terminal. It's their job to monitor the feeds from a collection of spy satellites, live images captured by the satellite, piped back to their offices in Virginia for collection and analysis. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, crystal clear images from around the world populate these screens. And on this day, all at once, the technician watches as the feeds from five satellites turn to static. Nothing. No more images, no more video. All five satellites are now feeding them an endless stream of what would later be described as garbled nonsense. Now up until that day, the Pentagon had never disclosed to the public when a spy satellite had malfunctioned, and that day was gonna be no exception. They held no announcements. They posted no releases. There was no sign that anything had gone wrong with the hardware. So for four days, the NRO worked in secrecy digging through the software, trying to figure out what was corrupting the signal from these five satellites. For four days, they looked and they fiddled until finally, one by one, they were able to bring the SPICE satellites back online. It's worth mentioning that on the same day, back in 2000, the exact same time of day, other strange things were happening all around the world. In Japan, for two minutes, a danger alarm began to fire at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa. Luckily, it was a false alarm. In Sheffield, in The United Kingdom, one hundred and fifty four pregnant women received emails with incorrect medical data about their children. In Upstate New York, a man received a bill for $91,000 because his VHS rental of the John Travolta thriller, The General's Daughter, showed up in the store's rental system as being one hundred years overdue. All around the world, on the same day as the clocks bore the exact same time, things were going just a little bit funny. You know what time of day that was?

Speaker 3: 12:01AM.

Speaker 1: 01/01/2000.

Speaker 3: No surprise.

Speaker 4: These global issues are the direct result of an equally real human oversight many people now refer to as the y two k or year two thousand problem.

Speaker 1: Depending on who you ask and importantly when you ask them, the chaos proceeding y two k was either apocalyptic hysteria, an international grift by the software consulting industry, or a hard won lesson in the idea that if you solve a problem well enough, people will question whether or not it was a problem to begin with. This episode's gonna come out right around New Year's in that weird little window of time between Christmas and New Year's Eve in the twilight of a pretty crappy year. So we're gonna dive into the most famous New Year's in recent history, where the public at large was finally forced to reckon with how entangled with technology our world had become, and what it might mean for all of that technology to collapse out from under our feet, right as the clock struck midnight. This is the year double o, here on Hacked.

Speaker 5: When I get out here in these speeches and hearings and, other presentations, the first thing that comes up is that people say is say, how do we get into this mess?

Speaker 1: My my first question is where were you on Y 2 K?

Speaker 3: Who? Where was I on Y 2 K? That was a long time ago, Jordan.

Speaker 1: Scott out at the bar?

Speaker 3: I think I was. I had probably just, I think I was out at the bar. I think I just turned of age, which ages me, and I don't really know if I want that in the episode. But,

Speaker 1: I was also at the bar. Don't worry. I was nine, so it was a little bit weird, but people were cool about it. They thought the world was gonna end. So which of those three do you think it was?

Speaker 3: I think it was all three. Yeah. Like, the I think that they did a really good there was a lot of resources committed to to dealing with that issue. And I think that they did solve it in enough systems, and they did solve it well enough that it seemed like it wasn't a big deal after the fact if you discount all of the work that went into preparation for it. But also that a lot of software consulting companies made a pile of money. So I don't know if you call it a grift.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: But, definitely was, definitely was probably a very lucrative time to be in the development

Speaker 1: industry. I think that's a pretty good bird's eye view of where we're going. The way we get there is pretty interesting, but I I think that's kinda where this all ends up shaking out too. It's interesting that you have that much insight into this because my sense of y2k has always been like really superficial. I think because I was really young when it happened and I never really appreciated how much concern there was and how much money got spent on it. Oh,

Speaker 3: oh, loads. Heaps.

Speaker 1: So it starts back in 1959 with a woman named Grace Marie Hopper and an invention called COBOL.

Speaker 6: The story of YDK really begins several decades ago back in the fifties with a very enterprising woman by the name of Grace Murray Hopper. Her nickname was Amazing Grace because of all the outstanding accomplishments in her life. One of her accomplishments was the invention of the compiler for computer programs, which translates regular written language into the ones and zeros of binary code. Maybe even more importantly, Grace Hopper was centrally involved in the creation of COBOL.

Speaker 3: What is COBOL? COBOL is a programming language, The old school language that you don't run into anymore or you probably still do truthfully in the right corners of the world. And if you're a COBOL programmer, you probably get paid a boatload of money because there's probably only a few 100 of them left.

Speaker 1: I think what surprised me about COBOL, and really the the lifetime of that language and a few others like it was just how long it existed for. Like, Grace created it in 1959, and it was in widespread use well into the Internet era. And when she wrote it, they were using punch cards. And I have no way of knowing if she knew how long COBOL and other languages like it were gonna be in use. But for that entire window of time, like decades and decades and decades, people were writing stuff in COBOL. The programs that I think they probably thought were gonna be replaced.

Speaker 7: Of course,

Speaker 3: they thought they were gonna be replaced. Everything was short lived. You know? Mankind's, you know, got a real blessing of short foresight, and, I think this entire bug is based on that short foresight. So

Speaker 6: In the primitive days of computers, mainframes relied on the use of hollerith cards, which were cardboard cards with holes punched in them to create computer programs. They operated computers sort of like the way an old piano scroll would create music on a player piano.

Speaker 1: And they didn't really realize that these programs were gonna be persisting for decades and decades and decades, even as a lot of other things about computers were changing. So when she wrote it, she was using punch cards, which have 960 bits to them. Right now, I go to bandh.com. I can buy 32 gigabytes of DDR4, 3,200 megahertz memory.

Speaker 6: The counter computer power you can now get on a laptop used to require a system that was so large. It literally had to be housed in its own building.

Speaker 1: And I did some math, which is always really dangerous because I have an English degree. Mhmm. But there are eight bits, a zero and a one in one byte. And there are a billion bytes in a gigabyte, which means 8,000,000,000 bits in a gigabyte, which means for a $150, I can buy 256,000,000,000 bits of memory. And Grace had 960 on a punch card. Which is all to say that for a really, really long time, memory was at a super high premium. And odds are pretty good if you were one of those people writing software, you were writing it in a very budget conscious storage medium.

Speaker 6: So as more and more COBOL programs totaling in the millions and and eventually billions were written on Hollerith cards, the sheer expense of computing began to really add up.

Speaker 1: And the other thing is that you didn't really know how long it was gonna live for. So in the nineteen sixties, memory is still at an insane premium, and the people writing these COBOL programs start to figure out ways to conserve space to be a little bit more cost effective, to get down the number of zeros and ones that they're using. And so over the years, 1965, 1966, 1967, this really obvious question emerges. Every time we write the year in our programs, we're wasting two whole bits writing '19. So to save space, let's write '65, '66, and '67, because they all start with a '19. And so for years and years as the world is becoming computerized, people all over the world are writing these programs. Programs that run power supplies and satellite communications and water and healthcare and transportation and food delivery. For forty years, the world is being written into this new set of languages like COBOL, languages that could do things that old ones couldn't. And the year is always being written in two digits.

Speaker 3: I think mankind has always looked to shorthand things. It's one of the things we do. We do it well, is that we figure out more effective ways to communicate the same information. So short handing our years to just the the the latter two digits of the year was always super easy to do, and everybody did it. It wasn't I wouldn't say it was just a programming thing. I'd say that most people did it just generically. And the I think the big problem here was is that, you know, they were probably writing these pieces of software thinking that they would be upgraded or removed or replaced within a few years or maybe a decade. But lots of businesses got ingrained business systems that lasted for twenty, thirty years. So, you know, something that was written in, like, 1975 is now gonna be, you know, still operational in 2000, which is kinda crazy.

Speaker 1: The distinction between normal software and a database was also really, really surprising to me. Like, I didn't realize how different they were and how much longer a database can live, that it can survive multiple iterations of the software wrapped around it?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I think the big thing is is databases. Even if you change the software application, the data storage itself, because databases are so structured, you can migrate the data. And so, you know, data that was created a system ago, you know, in a completely different platform probably was just transferred to the new system. You know, it was migrated over. So lots of that data, you know, be it, you know, utility records or whatever, health care records, you know, have probably lived on for for decades, even though they've gone through a system or two. We've we've gotten really good at migrating data.

Speaker 1: So this problem then emerges. Because come 2000, according to all of these programs that have been living a lot longer than people originally thought they would, programs using just the last two numbers to represent the year, what year is it?

Speaker 8: So in the year 2000, and they knew this at the time, you would have zero zero pop up, not two o, o o. So the computer thinks it could be 1900, o oh, oh. And if they

Speaker 1: think that they've leaped backwards a hundred years to the year 1900 or even thousands of years to the year zero, do they keep working?

Speaker 6: So, yeah, we may have saved a lot of money by eliminating those two digits, but here we are forty years later, and the cost to correct problems because of this omission is in the trillions of dollars.

Speaker 1: That's the y two k problem.

Speaker 3: That's the y two k problem.

Speaker 1: This sort of cultural realization that for decades, we've been building this whole modern society on a foundation of of software that as this theory went, come 01/01/2000 is gonna do something unpredictable and potentially really, really bad.

Speaker 3: The bigger thing here is that I don't think that computers really care about what year it is. Right? So you just have to look at the year value as strictly numerical. So the problem becomes anything that's looking at date ranges or previouses, like, you know, everything before a specific date. All of a sudden, anything in the zero zeros is now a previous. Lots of access, authorities, things like that are all date stamped time stamps. So, you know, all of that stuff could potentially break because all of a sudden, it's gonna see it as, anything that was given out in, say, 1999 has a two year expiration. All of a sudden, zero zero, it's gonna be invalid. So there's just so many checks and balances that use date and use it in a mathematical sense, and all of that stuff would probably stop working.

Speaker 1: I had a tough time identifying exactly when people started getting worried about this, but I think the best indicator might be when they start spending money on fixing it, and the answer is, like, pretty late in the game.

Speaker 3: I think I think it was, like, a mid nineties, like, realization.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. And I'm pretty sure that's why it became a panic. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Of course. I I gotta say that, like, I think it was, like, '90 after '95. Like, I remember it became a real frenzy in, like, '97 to '99.

Speaker 1: We're gonna spend a lot of time hanging out in 1998 because that's when some, like, major figures show up on the scene.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: So these companies are now starting to finally spend a little bit of money hiring computer programmers and software consultants to go digging through all of their systems. Any software, any integrated chip, any machine really looking for any instance of a two digit year, year, which seems, at least to me, it seems, like, relatively straightforward as bugs go, until I considered the sheer, like, scope and scale of what they had to dig through.

Speaker 3: Every line of code for every piece of software. Yeah pretty substantial

Speaker 1: There's the conspiracy theory we talked about at the start of the show that the y two k problem was a grift from the software consulting industry And I don't I don't really buy that in terms of causality. I think it's a little bit too simple, but I do get how people get there because when we talk about like, oh, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on y two k. They're the people that a lot of that money was being spent on.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: We'll get to that a little bit later. But I wanted to do a bit of a section here about what it is that they were doing. If you were one of these software engineers, how do you squash the y two k bug when you find it?

Speaker 3: The reality is is that every piece of date code so anything that's referencing dates, accessing dates, storing dates, ranging dates, you know, looking and comparing dates, anything that touches any kind of date field has to be updated. Because you remember that, like, all the computer sees is a set of integers. Right? It sees 63 or 81, and all of the code that says if, you know, variable date is less than 90 our, you know, our current date value of '98, you know, then do this. You know, anything that looks at those date numbers had to be reviewed, updated, changed, and checked. And any date stores, so in the databases and all of this legacy data, you know, your cell phone bill or not your cell phone bill then, I guess. Would have been your well, it might have been your cell phone bill. But the you know, your phone bill from 1987 was stored in some crazy text database somewhere. Probably had a two digit date year. So they'd either have to update the databases to add the one nine to the front of it, or they'd have to write code that on, like, pulling those date fields, you'd have to prepend the one nine to them. So you'd have to do so much. You'd have to literally make a huge map of all your data, figure out where dates are, figure out how dates are used in all the code, and then go in and fix every little piece of that,

Speaker 1: which is

Speaker 3: what those software consultants got paid boatloads of money to do.

Speaker 1: So the purest option, you just talked about the first two, is something called date expansion, which is what you said. It's you manually expand a two digit field to include the century. Do that across everything. And that's great because it's permanent and it's easy to maintain, but it takes forever, so it costs a lot of

Speaker 3: money. Totally.

Speaker 1: Your other option which you talked about is date windowing where the programs determine the century value only when it was needed for a certain function. Mhmm. Only when you need to know the year does this little thing tack on those digits. But this one's not permanent because you every time you add new functionality, you also have to update the windowing. But it was cheap and worked in a pinch. Third one is something called date compression. And date compression is where you compress the date down into a binary 14 bit number which is like the event horizon in that sentence where I stop understanding what it means. And last, there were pre built solutions. Essentially software companies that would sell software kits to people or companies. These seem like varying shades of grifty, but it's hard for me to tell from looking at them.

Speaker 3: This date compression one sounds more interesting.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't really get how I understand the sentence that you compress the date down into binary 14 bit numbers.

Speaker 3: To do that properly, you'd still have to go through all of your preexisting dates and data and and update them because I imagine it's compressing them down with the the 19 before them. Just so that when you get to the two thousands and 2000 and ones, the binary numbers shows that it's, you know, of greater value than nineteen eighty seven.

Speaker 1: I feel like the only context, and there might be an exception to this, but would be instances where memory was still at a premium. Yeah. Otherwise, if you're going in and you're finding every instance, you can just, do a date expansion.

Speaker 3: Well, that's the that's the other big costly thing here is that any kind of, like, embedded systems, so things that are, like, literally on chips and built into hardware, you know, running pumps and valves and stuff like that, those systems, like PLC stuff, would be super annoying to have to go around and update every single, you know, HVAC control system and things like that. Like, just can you imagine how many of those are installed in the field and then have to go around and do a software update on every single piece of integrated chip hardware? Like, oh my god.

Speaker 9: Computers talk to one another. Information is transferred from one system to another. And if that information is not transferred because the computer in question doesn't understand the change of date, if the data that is transferred is affected by a date and causes a a loss of of, integrity of that data.

Speaker 1: And if this all seems like a lot of crap to have to deal with on one computer or machine, imagine when they start talking to each other. Mhmm. The problems just multiply when stuff gets networked.

Speaker 8: In other words, the FAA, a year ago, had a problem with the radar system. Took it into the laboratory, thought they fixed it, this looks great, worked great. They got it into a tower, and when you suddenly have thousands of interactions from airplanes and everything else, people problems, you name it, and it didn't work.

Speaker 3: In these systems that were built long long before 2000, you know, any kind of network transmission was probably, you know, very constructed. Like, they transfer the exact information between each other. They had defined bytes. Like, these bytes are the date. This byte is the instruction. These bytes are the, you know, notes or message or whatever. And all of that transmission data would have relied on the the size value of the date field being a specific length. And then when you increase that, you know, naturally, all of a sudden, the thing that's reading the network packets from the other systems is has no idea what's going on because it's it doesn't know that it's a year. It doesn't know anything. It's just looking at lengths, and all of a sudden, lengths are different.

Speaker 9: That type of interconnection is really the the basis of the problem of y two k.

Speaker 1: So time keeps winding down shorter and shorter, and the amount of code keeps getting longer and longer. And so by the time the clock runs out, we find ourselves holding, like, a bill for a rush job, essentially. When the American government really started ringing the alarm, it's about 1998. The Clinton administration appointed a guy named John Kaskinen to run their counsel on the year 2000 conversion. And a lot of their efforts focused on, you know, doing the obvious thing, incentivizing companies to spend the money and do that costly testing and review. It was really this big massive mobilization costing billions of dollars and it was unfolding really right up until the last second. And so that's sort of how the government and companies responded to solving the problem, but it's really only half of the story of y two k because we haven't really gotten to how people responded. And that's the, like, it's the good stuff.

Speaker 10: The bug in our cultural software, our beliefs about the millennium were much more serious than the technical problem.

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Speaker 1: Let's go back to 1999.

Speaker 14: Come the year 2000, many computers will assume 2000 means the year 1900, back to the future. I think

Speaker 1: it's fair to say that if a bunch of governments and corporations start spending money, frantically trying to avoid a looming crisis, that that is newsworthy, and the media should probably be covering that. But in order to cover that spending they have to explain the emergency. It's a very serious emergency covered very seriously, and as a result, and I benefit from a lot of hindsight here, a whole bunch of dominoes kind of fall. First off, nervous people tune in. So the media keeps covering it because they like when people tune in, and the temperature of the whole situation rises a little bit. And some people, a small minority at first, get really really scared and they start running out and buying bottled water and seeds, and some of them start building bunkers, and so the media covers that, and the temperature rises a little bit. And then a bunch of people go like, man, I wasn't nervous before, but I don't even have canned food, let alone a bunker and it rises a little bit more. And then some other people start seeing all of this alarm and they think I like money and they start selling a solution. And to sell that solution, you have to sell the problem more, rising the temperature further. And before you know it, you've now not only got this problem that you're paying billions in consulting fees to solve, but you've got total panic.

Speaker 15: It was always a concern to me that the panic would spread. Because once you start warning people and scaring them, it's a little hard to get them off the ledge.

Speaker 1: But we're ahead of the story. It's 1999 and people are losing their minds and this is where we'll play a montage of people losing their minds.

Speaker 16: Surf through the Internet these days and you keep coming across a strange new word, Teowawki. The word stands for the end of the world as we know it.

Speaker 3: Gary North has his his own natural gas well. He says it's his ticket for survival. That cheers me up.

Speaker 17: Scammers preying on a confused public.

Speaker 18: Said, yeah. I'm calling from Lake Boston, and I need to get decals mailed to you so you can put them on your credit card or they won't work after y two k.

Speaker 7: I believe that y two k may be God's engine to shake this nation, humble this nation, awaken this nation, and from this nation, start revival that spreads the face of the earth before the rapture of

Speaker 10: the church.

Speaker 3: People thought I was literally end of days.

Speaker 6: Will it be a nuclear power plant? Will it be the, airplanes in the sky? Will it be the food supply chains, transportation? There are so many possibilities.

Speaker 1: Until that day finally arrives.

Speaker 2: The ball is beginning to move. Macon feel it.

Speaker 1: December 31.

Speaker 2: And 10/2021. Happy two thousand.

Speaker 3: The ball's still dropped in Times Square.

Speaker 1: And everyone's still there.

Speaker 3: Everyone's still alive. Lights didn't even go out.

Speaker 1: No planes fell out of the sky. The power grid's still up. Goldman Sachs is still clicking along. Global finance is doing pretty well. So what the hell happened?

Speaker 18: The arrival of y two k did not bring the much anticipated and feared computer meltdown. It appears to have been more of a prankster than a real problem.

Speaker 16: Things couldn't be going more smoothly. So smoothly, some are even asking if all that preparing was necessary.

Speaker 1: I have a theory about where the panic came from.

Speaker 3: Let's hear it.

Speaker 1: It's a pretty roundabout one. You know the Drake equation.

Speaker 3: I do.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to guess how many alien life forms there are in the universe. And based on the sheer volume of space and planets, the Drake equation suggests that there should be anywhere from a thousand to hundreds of millions of civilizations in the Milky Way alone. And yet, we seem to be everything's really quiet. And, I think that's kinda what happened here. At least in terms of the panic. Instead of planets, we had, like, almost infinite lines of code and chips and systems that had to be searched through. And, they controlled such important things that if even a tiny fraction of those things went wrong, if even a tiny fraction of those planets had life, the world as we know it was gonna be changed in this really intense way. Like, odds were good, something should go wrong, and yet nothing. So, we come back to those three theories at the start of the show. Theory number one, international grift by the software consulting industry.

Speaker 3: It was it was a big gold mine, like a gold rush for for software consultants and patching and fixing and then analyzing and, you know, reporting and verifying. You know? There was an endless amount of work Mhmm. That time for that stuff.

Speaker 1: I get how people get there. Yeah. It's a big deal.

Speaker 3: Imagine if you're a Fortune 500 company and all of a sudden all your financial systems are gone. Imagine the loss of revenue per day Loss of value loss of cash flow loss of everything would be like critical so

Speaker 1: of the untold fortune spent trying to avert this thing It was spent on consultants and engineers, but I don't think that means they orchestrated it. Benefited? Yeah. But engineered? No.

Speaker 3: It's like you could I I I don't think it was orchestrated at all. And, like, the reality is is, like, you know, we're currently in a health pandemic. Mhmm. And a lot of health care professionals are working more and getting paid and, you know, other things like that. Do we think that they orchestrated it? Like, that just seems like an insane theory.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's almost like there's a lot of parallels, anyway, which isn't to say that there were grifters and bad faith actors. Like, there there were there were grifters. There were people taking advantage. There were a lot of survival guys written a lot of y two k branded rations. But, again, that's opportunism, not orchestration.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: So, I think if you want to get to why this happened, you got to keep looking which brings us to theory two, cultural hysteria slash technophobic panic. I'd say this is like half of it.

Speaker 3: Oh, easy.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We talked about the media feedback loop a little bit earlier, but the part we didn't discuss was this idea this is really this idea of computer literacy, which isn't to blame people back then for not seeing that everything was going to be fine because it might not have been okay. It's just to say that like for forty years the world had been changing and suddenly people who had been taught how to like take apart a motor and shop class realized they didn't really understand the mechanics of how the world worked anymore. Like, what was on the far side of every screen, every button, they just didn't really understand it. And so, the story comes along telling them that it's all built on this rashly foundation. There's like a prophecy of its failure. It kinda makes sense. It sort of feels a little bit right. It's not that it's too complicated for me to understand, it's that it was all too complex to begin with. So, I'm a buy some seeds and some land because planes are gonna fall out of the sky. And then there's theory three.

Speaker 10: You never get credit for the disasters you avert.

Speaker 1: That you never get credit for averting a crisis that never happened.

Speaker 10: Especially if you're a programmer and nobody understands what you're doing to begin with.

Speaker 1: People like to point to the fact that a lot of nations that have computers and use computers didn't do anything to address y two k and that they were generally okay, that they didn't spend the money, which means that everyone else wasted the money, which is initially intuitive, but not really how software worked in 1999. Because if a computer being used in South Korea or Russia where they didn't spend the money keeps working, you can't just ignore the fact that those that didn't prepare were protected by the efforts of those who did. You can't ignore the fact that those places benefited from high level software patches rolled out worldwide.

Speaker 3: I think this is, a bit of a metaphor for the entire IT industry. It's like, you know, the you know you have great IT when you don't know your IT people. You know what I'm saying? Mhmm. Like like, they're they're the unsung heroes because the only time you ever talk to them is when you're mad at them. Mhmm. It's like the once in a while when something goes wrong, they're the ones that, you know, get whipped in and pulled in to come firefight the problem. But as long as everything's running good, I, you know, I worked in tech for a long time and, you know, you don't you don't sell them or you seldom get a Friday message being like, hey, Scott. You know, everything was great this week. Like, I didn't have to talk to Jack once and, you know, just you guys just do such a good job. Thanks. It's like you never get that message. The only message you get is the one, you know, Sunday at 9PM being like, I my printer is not working or I can't connect to this or, you know, what happened to this? The firewall is not letting me in to access my computer. You know? Things like that where

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: You know, it gets escalated in people with so I think this is one of those things where it's like, it's just another example of, like, the tech people doing something and doing it well enough that they just don't get any recognition for it.

Speaker 1: I think the frustrating thing about this theory, and there's, like, a lot of frustrating stuff, those satellites that crash at the top of the show actually crashed because of a y two k software patch, not because of, y two k. But, frustrating part about this theory, and I think that this theory is true, is that no one can say that they know exactly what would have happened if things had happened differently. Yep. Like, no one can really say with certainty that things would have been okay because we we didn't allow for that situation to happen.

Speaker 3: Of course. Preparedness. Dealing with adversity.

Speaker 17: The Senate's final report on y two k found that government and industry did successfully avert a crisis at an estimated cost of $100,000,000,000.

Speaker 1: Which was only the American response and a small sliver of the global spend which crept over half 1,000,000,000,000.

Speaker 2: And I

Speaker 1: guess by crept over half 1,000,000,000,000, I mean 600,000,000,000 because a $100,000,000,000 isn't really creeping.

Speaker 15: My answer to people who said, well, I wasted a lot of money was the number of things that happened that went wrong that fortunately were around the edges demonstrated that if you didn't fix the systems, it wouldn't work automatically.

Speaker 1: The report also said that in hindsight, knowing what we know now, that these efforts did divert crises. Did they overspend? Potentially. IDC's Project Magellan two thousand and four estimated maybe about 30% overspending, but that's again really hard to guess. Not everything that was fixed needed to be fixed. That's fair to say. Apparently, a lot of embedded chips kind of would have just kept clicking along okay. But Koskin and that guy we've heard from throughout the episode is adamant that these little things that happened around the fridges, you know, the one hospital's medical records sending out false reports instead of thousands, the one guy with the crazy $100,000 VHS rental bill, that those really raise a question of if that's what's left over after we spent half $1,000,000,000,000, what would have happened if we hadn't? Totally.

Speaker 10: We have little Y two ks's happening all the time. Technologies are always created for one reason, but end up being used for an application that the creator can never imagine.

Speaker 1: I, it's been a really interesting reading about this, and I think that there are, like, a lot of lessons in this story. They're murky Mhmm. And they're frustrated by competing information, but they are buried in there.

Speaker 3: I think the the reality is is that, you know, I think for a lot of things, you know, business management systems and probably a lot of the people that got paid, the crisis that was averted was probably more of a reporting crisis because, like, a lot of reports would have miscalculated because, you know, like the what was the example you had of the guy who got a bill for, like, $10,000 for his VCR rental? Because it thought he had it out.

Speaker 1: John Travolta, general's daughter.

Speaker 3: It it would have been it would have been, like, those kind of crises. It wouldn't have been in in, like, most of the cases. But then there's a lot of other things where, you know, critical systems are sending information back and forth. And anything, like, dates are typically used, for validation, and anything that would have invalidated because the date field was wrong would have been a big problem. And but anything that was, like, more of a reporting thing, I think the crises would have been pretty, you know, soft tissue.

Speaker 1: I think that there's lessons about how we have a really bad habit of waiting until the last minute to solve a problem and how much worse problems get when we wait. I think there's lessons in the feedback loop about how a problem becomes a panic in culture and media and how alternatively, like, dangerous the pessimism that that breeds can be the next time we have to solve a problem.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And here's the thing, for however silly like Leonard Nimoy sounds in this episode, and I really, really like Leonard Nimoy, and it was hard. Hard listening to those clips. The lesson isn't really to ignore, like, these big problems that we don't understand. I think the lesson is to endeavor to, like, understand them so that we can do the right thing so we can solve them properly. I think when the feed from a satellite comes back garbled, you know, to shrug and say, like, oh, I guess that proves satellites were dumb and so I'm gonna begin with. Like, you you hunker down and you solve the problem.

Speaker 3: Totally.

Speaker 4: So let us use the y two k challenge as an opportunity to reflect on where we're headed as a civilization, perhaps the most important opportunity we've ever had. If the omission of two simple digits can have worldwide impact several decades after its inception, we must ask ourselves before we rush too far forward, what are we doing now in genetic engineering, with cloning, with the development of bacteriological warfare life forms, with death ray technologies, and pollution of land, air, and water that could have long term unpredictable worldwide effects? And what can we do as the inheritors, the caretakers of this world? What can we do to protect our home, our island in space?

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, everybody. If you wanna support the show, you can check us out at patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Some folks were very generous this month. Jimmy Cochran, your support means the world to us. That's patreon.com/hackedpodcast. You can find us on Twitter at hacked podcast. We got our archival for this episode from a few different sources, nineteen ninety nine's Y two ks Family Survival Guide with Leonard Nimoy. It's really good. It's on YouTube. You should check it out. The New York Times Much Ado About Nothing retro report and ABC's New Year's Eve 2,000 original coverage. Thank you for listening, everybody. This has been about a year back after a big hiatus, and it's been a lot of fun. Looking forward to what 2021 brings. Stay safe and have a happy New Year's.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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