Where were you at the beginning of the year 2000? Along with the excitement about entering a new millenium, there came some anxiety about our if computers could handle it – or if there would be system failures with potentially catastrophic consequences.
This goes back to the early days of computing. To save precious memory, dates in computers had just been entered as two digits, e.g. 77 instead of 1977. What the pioneers didn’t think about was what would happen if the year changes from 99 to 00. Would computers think it was 1900 again? It was hard to predict. Hospitals, airplanes and banks rely on computers, so you don’t want to risk a machine shutting down because its confused about the double zero.
Then the year 2000 came along and – nothing happend. There were some failures here and there, but no plane crashes or blackouts in hospitals. Since then the so called Y2K bug is seen as a joke, a hoax or an example of a media fed mass hysteria. That’s how I remember it too: A big fuss over nothing.
A success, not a failure
But that’s not the real story at all. It blew my mind when I heard on the Fast Forward Podcast that it was a story of success, not failure.
The catastrophy didn’t just fail to happen, it was most likely prevented with a lot of effort. Companies and governments worldwide spent about 600 billion US dollars to deal with this bug. It took a while we took the problem seriously – it was first mentioned in 1958 – but eventually we did.
This is a good example for the prevention paradox, most often talked about in a public health context. You try to prevent illness and injuries from happening because prevention is cheaper than treatment. But if illness and injuries don’t occur you can never be quite sure if it was because of the prevention measures or if these things would never have occured in the first place.
In the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, this may sound very familiar. Many countries took drastic measures because they feared hospitals would reach their capacity limits, like they did in places like Italy or New York.
Measures like social distancing, lockdowns and the wearing of masks in public were encouraged and enforced. So far, many places were lucky not to have overfilled hospitals. Not surprisingly, a number of people are questioning if any of the measures that likely prevented the disaster were necessary to prevent it.
Putting off a problem
With the beginning of the year 2020, parking meters in New York and credit cards in Poland stopped working. It was a result of a quick fix that many organizations used for the Y2K bug. Instead of solving the problem, they had put it off.
After the first lockdown due to the pandemic, things went back to mostly normal pretty fast in Switzerland. It’s the end of June 2020 and we’re at the start of the second wave. The case numbers haven’t exploded – but they very well may if we don’t do something about it.
If we put off a problem we shouldn’t be surprised if it comes back.