The year 2000 is rapidly becoming a focal point for all who have the same anxiety about the potential for mass destruction. Although it is very easy to scoff at such fears, especially as they appear in some of the more ridiculous versions of the Apocalypse, such as a race of aliens returning to claim the earth as their own, silly and impressionable people are the not only ones who have succumbed to this pervading sense of gloom. Indeed, the Apocalypse has found credible and scientific expression a technical version of it -- the Y2K computer bug.
The Y2K bug is caused by a simple and easily solved problem. When computers were first being designed, the year 2000 seemed far away. Since it was much easier to keep track of the date using two numbers rather than four, it became fashionable to refer to the year using only its last two digits. The day January 1, 1999 would hence be expressed as 1-1-99. Whether from sheer laziness or because entering dates in this manner saved miniscule amounts of memory, nearly all computers used this programming technique. Eventually, however, the millennium would come, and they would have to face this glitch in their programming.
Now, suddenly it is 1999, and in only one year this method of keeping track of dates will become obsolete. Many computers still have not been correctly programmed, and as a result, people are starting to be concerned at what might happen January 1, 2000. What if, failing to recognize the current date as valid, computers are unable to function properly and thus shut down? All sorts of catastrophes have been imagined should this occur. Everything from nuclear meltdowns, plane crashes, massive power outages, and worst of all, the possibility of financial problems due to errors in formulas that calculate interest, have been imagined. In short, the Y2K bug is the modern version of the apocalypse. Its terrors are not hell-fire, plagues, and damnation as in the Bible, but instead derive from the chips, wires, and switches that make up the PC. The end result of both is the same however -- immense catastrophe which will devastate the earth.
Is the spreading panic justifiable? There are certainly some legitimate fears. Computers relying on equations involving the use of the date, such as interest formulas, might well become disrupted if the computer began calculating the day as 1900 rather than 2000. Most banks, however, are already addressing and correcting this problem. Most of the more threatening concerns raised by the Y2K problem are caused by the fear that networks will crash-- such as a network controlling air traffic or a power plant. It is one thing if an individual computer goes down, but quite another if an important network quits. In an article appearing on cnn.com, Bob O'Donnell addressed the issue of networks, or embedded systems: "The vast majority of embedded systems don't have any clocks and thus are immune to any type of date-related problem. A PC's microprocessor, for example, is technically an embedded system, and its calculations are not the least bit affected
by date or time." In other words, computers don't care whether it is 2000 or 1999. In fact, they do not even know what the date is. The fear that such computers will suddenly malfunction in the year 2000 is therefore unfounded. Furthermore, to use the example of airplanes, the flight-computer on board a jet will not suddenly alter its course when the year 2000 arrives. Even if the computer decides that it is 1900, that fact would have no bearing on the elements that affect a plane's journey, such as winds and other air-traffic. While the Y2K bug will cause the disruption of some computers, it will thus not prove to be the apocalypse that many fear it will be.
As millennia-mania begins to spread throughout the world, various scenarios for disaster will appear. Some of them will artistically expressed in beautiful and moving poetry, prose, drama, and music. Others will be ridiculed by the majority of people as being foolhardy and immature delusions. Yet the most prominent of them all, Y2K bug will be forgotten hours after the year 2000 arrives. For while it embodies all of our darkest fears about what is yet to come, perhaps sparked by the terror we all have of our own inevitable death, its phantoms are merely of the mind and the psyche. Perhaps they point to larger cultural phenomena as yet hidden and unaddressed.
