Bugging out over the Y2K new year
From on-call radio workers to hoarding cash, preparations for the Y2K bug took hold fast, writes Eleanor Wenman.
A cybercafe at the turn of the millennium probably wasn’t the place many people wanted to be.
With forecasts of nuclear meltdowns and computers crashing the world, the
Y2K bug seemed a terrifying thing for your average person on the street.
Not so much for Phonenet at the Barbers owner Ian Cousins.
His Cuba St shop in Wellington had a barbers out the front and computers in the back, with 26 machines at the peak of the shop’s popularity.
‘‘It was a bustling little place,’’ he says.
Cousins and his half a dozen employees had started prepping for the millennium well in advance, updating their systems with patches coming in from software manufacturers. By New Year’s Eve, they were as prepared as they could be.
‘‘I think it was about 11 I finished up and we’d done all the last of our checks. Things were pretty quiet from about 9pm onwards – we had planned to stay open to midnight but we had no-one around. We decided to go home and party too.’’
He celebrated the countdown, the same as Kiwis all over the country, and when the clock ticked over, nothing happened.
The party continued.
The fears over Y2K can be traced back to a seemingly simple design flaw in computer software.
To save memory space, early computer programmers shortened years in their coding to the last two digits –
‘‘1998’’ would become ‘‘98’’ and so on. The year 2000 would be abbreviated to
‘‘00’’, which, as far as software was concerned, looked a lot like 1900.
Information sent through to any computerised object, such as an ATM, would run into troubles – the date could be off by 100 years.
Error messages could crash computers, daily interest rate computations could go off the charts as calculations jumped back a century, credit cards could be rejected since they expired decades ago, and even traffic lights and phone lines could be affected.
At its worst, people feared planes would fall from the sky as guidance systems crashed and nuclear power plants would go into meltdown following computer failure.
Cousins was back in his shop on the morning of January 1, checking everything out.
‘‘Everything ran beautifully, no problems. Then, of all things, I turned on our electronic till and . . . it didn’t work.’’
They’d forgotten to update it, focused as they were on the computers. In a matter of a couple of hours, they had it all fixed and business carried on, except now it was the first day of a new millennium – and also Cousins’ birthday.
‘‘We had champagne on in the cybercafe simply because it was the year
2000 and it was my birthday. People would come in and we would offer them a glass,’’ he says.
Around the country and the world, stories were the same, a little trip-up here and there, but no cataclysmic events. The morning after had a different feel to the feverish lead-up to Y2K.
In a speech given earlier in 1999 thenprime minister Jenny Shipley urged people to prepare.
‘‘What will happen if the tap doesn’t run, the jug doesn’t boil, the waste disposal system doesn’t work or hospitals can’t manage?
‘‘Ashburton could survive without traffic lights but could Auckland?’’ she asked.
The Reserve Bank urged people not to take money out of their accounts and kept currency in reserve in case people flooded to the banks.
With fewer than 10 days to go, the Evening Post reported backup system for 111 calls were set up, in case the phones crashed. Over New Year, fire stations were staffed with people on radios to contact emergency services.
The Southland Times reported banks were prepping their phone banking services, expecting an overwhelming number of calls as people rang to check account balances.
But work behind the scenes by coders and software manufacturers to fix the problem had started months and years before.
‘‘Everybody took it so seriously,’’ Cousins says. ‘‘Computer people were that way. The average person in the street thought it was a bit of a hit or miss.
‘‘But most of the key software manufacturers were well on the ball. They started quite early, taking care of what they could.’’