As the Reagan era drew to a close, few even knew that a problem existed. Bemer had retired in 1982, assuming that Y2K would be ironed out long before it did any damage. If something like Pac-Man could be squeezed onto a chip, he reasoned, how tough could it be to add two digits? Not so so confident, Harry White continued to press old co-workers at the Standards Bureau. They were sympathetic, but did nothing. "No one wanted to step up to the plate," says White. "It wasn't politically expedient. The Republicans were saying, 'The less government in your lives, the better."' So deep ran the animus toward regulation that in 1988 Congress removed individual federal standards for computer purchases altogether.
Within a year, odd things began occurring. One of the first to notice was the Social Security Administration, which was stupefied to learn that a system which tracked collection of overpayments would not accept the date when a repayment schedule went beyond 2000. "We looked at each other and said, 'Whoa!' It didn't take a lot of brains to figure out that if that piece of software acted in that way, we probably were going to have a problem with a lot of software," S.S.A. computer expert Kathleen Adams recalled to a reporter. "And we came to the conclusion that we were going to have to literally look at every piece of software and fix it." Social Security had little choice: every month, its computers sent 50 million payments to 45 million people. "Guess who those people are?" Adams asked. "My mother is one. We ... can't mess up because we don't want to mess up Mom."
Mom notwithstanding, in 1994, Social Security began sifting through what it deemed its mission-critical computer code-some 35 million lines. The work consumed three years, and when it was finished S.S.A. had to turn its attention to millions more lines at the state level. They were a trifle compared with what awaited the Department of Defense, where there were hundreds of millions of code lines running on more than 1.5 million computers, 28,000 automated systems, 10,000 networks, and thousands of individual devices-many directed by exotic programming languages for which there was no readily available fix.
The potential for mayhem was demonstrated in 1993, when curious engineers turned computers ahead at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which alerts the president of approaching ICBMs. At the simulated stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000, every NORAD warning screen froze. It could have been worse. At other times, electronic foul-ups in Russia have prompted preparations for imminent nuclear attack.
Officially, nothing was done about occurrences like this until October 1995, when then acting assistant defense secretary Anthony Valletta attended a weekend retreat of interagency computer officials. During a break in the proceedings, Social Security's Adams stuffed a Y2K paper in his hand and launched into a hair-raising briefing. "I came running into the Pentagon on Monday and started telling some senior people," Valletta told The Boston Globe. "I got half of them saying, 'What are you, crazy?' and I got some people saying, 'That sounds like something we ought to check into."' When officials finally did, they were appalled. At the agency that outfits and equips the army, a Year 2000 computer entry deactivated 2400 inventoried items. Had the error not been caught, critical equipment would have gone missing. In still another instance, a 2000 date could not be processed by the system that keeps track of the deployment of U.S. forces worldwide. "If we built houses the way we build software," a top ranking D.O.D. official said later; "the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."
With their need for years-ahead planning, insurance companies and mortgage brokers had realized that long before. But in most boardrooms there was still in denial understandably, in the view of computer experts Dale Way and Mark Raselkorn. 'Why," they wrote in a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, "would [anyone] stand up and say, "Give me $40 million and I'll disrupt our whole information infrastructure, put all of our current operations at risk and, if I'm lucky, do something no one else has done and prevent a problem many people think is not real. and will not in any case happen for years, and otherwise will contribute nothing to our bottom line'?" Way and Ilaselkorn could think of only two kinds of managers who might: the insane and those with guns to their heads.
But in suburban Toronto, Peter de Jager, a bearded, South African-born computer consultant of prodigious girth and with a similarly sized knack for phrasemaking, was about to bring Y2K to the fore. He'd known about the problem since the 1970s, but he hadn't 'paid it any heed until 1989, when he saw a documentary on the 1965 East Coast power blackout-an event brought about by the failure of a single transmission line. If something so minor could visit such misery on so many, de Jager thought, what would happen if billions of lines of computer code suddenly went screwy?
Over the next four years. de Jager soaked up everything he could about computer dates, power grids, and systems connections. "It scared the hell Out of me!" he says. "First, because of what it could do to me and my family. Then something else occurred to me: What the hell is it going to do to the world?" In September 1993, de Jager published his worries in Computerworld. "Have you ever been in a car accident?" he wrote beneath the headline DOOMSDAY 2000. "Time seems to slow down.... It's too late to avoid it-you're going to crash. All you can do now is watch it happen.... We are heading toward the year 2000. We are heading toward a failure of our standard date format.... Unfortunately, unlike the car crash, time will not slow down for us. If anything, we're accelerating toward disaster." De Jager laid out just why-and noted the squandered billions that would be the consequence. "We and our computers were supposed to make life easier;" he wrote. "This was our promise. What we have delivered is a catastrophe."
By 1995, "the Paul Revere for the year2000 computer crisis," as The New York Times dubbed him, was pounding the lecture circuit'. "If today were December 31, 1999," de Jager told audiences, "tomorrow our economy worldwide would stop. It wouldn't grind to a halt. It would snap to a halt, You would not have a dial tone.... You would not have air travel. You would not have Federal Express. You would not have the Postal Service. You would not have water. You would not have power. Because the systems are broken."
Before long, de Jager was delivering 85 speeches a year. A book (Managing 00: Surviving the Year 2000 Computing Crisis) was also in the works, along with pricey seminars on videotape and a 600,000-visits-per month Web site-www.year2000.com. Such was de lager's influence that the American Stock Exchange named a listing of Y2Kremediation companies after him. During its first year in operation, the value of the "de Jager Year 2000 Index" jumped 100 percent-two and a half times more than the Dow. Its namesake, who was reportedly pulling in more than $1 million a year; wasn't doing badly, either-a fact de Jager's critics never tired of pointing out. Some scoffed at the need for doomsaying. In 1997, David Star; chief information officer for Readers' Digest, called the clamor over Y2K "the biggest fraud perpetrated by consultants on the business community since re-engineering." Added Money, "We cope with wars, huge upheavals, natural disasters of all sorts. And now we're going to be stopped in our tracks by a computer glitch?" Even the John Birch Society joined the chorus, suggesting that Y2K could lead to a government power grab reminiscent of the Reichstag fire.
IBM, however, was taking Y2K quite seriously, and as far back as October 1995 had announced a series of steps to "assist customers in timely Year 2000 transitions." That IBM had played a leading role in creating the need for those transitions-and faced the prospect of whopping lawsuits wasn't mentioned. But the company left no doubt that big trouble was coming. "The problem is large; it's complex," IBM's press release quoted de Jager as saying. "IBM is right ... to address this issue today."
Internet publisher John Westergaard needed no convincing. His friend New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a different story: he still wrote on a typewriter. But that had not kept the two men from being close, nor had it prevented Westergaard from being Moynihan's campaign treasurer. And so, over lunch one day in early 1996, Moynihan listened intently as Westergaard spun a bloodcurdling tale of a phenomenon he'd never heard of. "I had' a fascinating lunch in New York," the senator told reporters when he got back to Washington. "A friend was talking about madcow disease for the computers of the world." He wasn't kidding, Moynihan said. "There is a bug in every computer that will cause it to go haywire January' 1, 2000, and the federal government better get its act together. If they can't pay their bills and issue checks in a normal fashion it is going to domino to all other things."
When the warning went virtually unnoticed. Moynihan asked the Congressional Research Service to prepare a report on possible Y2K consequences. What came back in June 1996 was chilling: hospital systems failing, airplanes not taking off or landing, records being scrambled-one cataclysm after another. Moynihan passed the news to Bill Clinton in a July 31, 1996, letter, along with a recommendation that the president appoint someone who would ensure that all federal agencies-and the companies that did business with them-be Y2K-compliant by January 1, 1999. "The computer has been a blessing," Moynihan closed. "If we don't act quickly, however; it could become the curse of the age."
Moynihan was not telling Clinton anything he didn't already know; eight months earlier; Howard Rubin, chairman of the computer-science department at Hunter College, had briefed the president in detail. "Clinton understood that technology is more than the Internet and pulling wires through high schools," says Rubin. "He really understood how everything was tied together [and Y2K's] potential for broad reaching consequences. He was very interested and very concerned." Al Gore was slower on the uptake. "How could this be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?" he exclaimed when Rubin finished; Rubin shot back, "No way are you going to be able to run for office in 2000 if government systems are failing around you." Gore had no reply. "He was educatable," says Rubin, "but with effort."
Moynihan, meanwhile, was getting only silence. Finally, three months after sending his letter, he received a reply from the Office of Management and Budget (O.M.B.). It thanked' him for' the. heads-up and pledged to keep an eye on the problem.
Far from reassured, Moynihan introduced bills calling for the designation of a Y2K czar, the establishment of compliance deadlines, and a bipartisan national commission to address what was called "a devastating computer problem which will have extreme negative economic and national security consequences unless dealt with."
The legislation went nowhere, even as reports of Y2K incidents piled up. In Pennsylvania, a computer network that scheduled patient appointments at three hospitals and 75 Clinics shut down after someone punched in a visit for January 2000. In Michigan, a produce store's brand-new cash registers crashed more than 100 times when customers tried to pay with credit cards expiring in 2000. In Minnesota in 1993, officials instructed 104-year-old Mary Bandar to report to kindergarten after a computer took her 1888 birth date to mean that she was 4 years old. During a Y2K test-run at a Maryland jail, computers decided that inmates who still had time to serve were ready to be released. Industry was getting hit as well. At Amway, a mixing system for a cleaning product rejected a batch of chemicals when a computer read a 2000 expiration date as 1900. At a Chrysler plant, a Y2K dry run locked every entryway and exit and wouldn't let anyone in or out. At a Fortune 500 financial-services company, computers sent out bills for 96 years' interest.
Glitches were also surfacing abroad. In Britain, computers at the Marks & Spencer department stores ordered a consignment of corned beef discarded after deducing that the "02" sell-by date meant that the meat was 94 years old. In Canada, the computer at a university admissions office created letters on behalf of foreign students informing Canadian immigration they had graduated 95 years earlier.
There were more ominous incidents: a Y2K test at a Honolulu electric company that simulated pulling the plug on some customers and sending too much electricity to others, which would have caused fires and exploding appliances; a Y2K run-through that simulated a cutoff of gas-detecting systems on a North Sea oil platform, which would have shut down its operations under normal conditions. The list stretched on-all too uncomfortably for most of big business. In 1996 its doubts were gone and the fix-it funds were pouring in.
The strategy for killing the millennium bug was relatively straightforward, and there were several methods of going about it. All, however, involved massive infusions of manpower. To fix everything in the United States, it was estimated, would require every single one of the 1.92 million software professionals in the country to devote nearly five lull months to working on Y2K. Problem No.1 was that this was impossible. Problem No.2 was that at a normal work pace the U.S. was at least 700,000 bodies short.
For big business, this produced Problem No.3: having to pay whopping prices for the help that was
available. In some instances, technology managers were commanding salaries of up to $1 million a
year. In others, senior programmers from the United Kingdom (a favorite recruiting ground for
talent) were demanding and getting-$7500 per day, plus Concorde flights home every weekend.
When, despite the lavish perks, the programmer shortage persisted, global investor George Soros
and the prime minister of Bulgaria offered a solution: hire low-cost techies from the Balkans.
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