Remember the humbug over the Y2K bug?

Well, almost. There was a glitch here and a flaw there. An ATM machine malfunctioned, but the tipsy user put in the wrong pin number. A car wouldn’t start, but it was because a drunk driver inserted the key into his own ear. The lights went out, but it was because the sloshed host tripped over a power cord.

Seen against the universal ballyhoo about the possible apocalypse at millennial mid-night, one could forget people for thinking it may well have been the hoax of the millennium. Seriously, theft have been few major problems reported so far. In Australia ticketing machines on some buses jammed, the monitoring system at a Japanese nuclear plant malfunctioned, and dates on an electric plant in Wisconsin jumped ahead 35 days. But, by and large, it was Y2KquiteOK.

Of course, there are still guarded warnings from the Cassandras that the Millennium Bug could yet strike through the first weeks of the new era. Besides, reports were yet to trickle in from Timbuctoo and Aracataca. But Timbuctoo, in which region this correspondent spent Christmas, has no computers to speak of and is still battling the YIK problem.

On the three continent swing one made in the 72 hours before the new millennium, the biggest bugaboo one encountered was the fear of terrorism, not computers.

The truth, some felt, was that the problem was overhyped by overwrought people overcome with overworry. On the other hand, the oracles of the tech world congratulated each other on the herculean task they had accomplished. Humankind spent between $ 300 billion to $ 600 billion (the bills are still coming in) on correcting one simple mistake in what some say is the largest human endeavour. Or the largest single peacetime catastrophe.

The Y2K glitch dates back to the 1960s when the world’s first computer programmers omitted the first two digits in year dates (to save then expensive storage space on disks), and allowed it to read only the last two digits like ’67, ’68, etc. The fear now was computers would fail to interpret the “00” date as 2000 and shut off or malfunction.

That it did not happen to the extent expected was not only an indication of the exaggerated fears, but also a tribute to a silent legion of programmers who worked to set it right. It was done so well and so correctly that regular folk laughed about the day of digital reckoning that never came.

A spokesman for Microsoft, the world’s largest software company told a wire service that everything seems to be working and they were cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine. “One of our field workers in Washington DC sent this note on his beeper. Nothing happened. Not even a light flicker. However one person narrowly missed getting hit by a flying champagne cork”…

Excerpted from `World sighs with relief, sneers at Y2K humbug’, by Chidanand Rajghatta, IE, January 1, 2000