Testing: 1, 2, 3
It looks like my blog code made it over the hump to 2006 with no problem. Ever since Y2K I've been uncomfortable having Web-based code running over New Year's Eve. Y2K is one story that the MSM completely misreported and might make an interesting history of technology book. When Y2K finally arrived and planes didn't drop out of the sky, the media shrugged and called the whole thing hype. They didn't mention that they had played a huge part in magnifying the hype. What they also didn't report was the tremendous effort by computer people all over the world to root out many potential Y2K bugs. At Andover.net we tested all of our code, our desktop machines, and our servers. We found plenty of problems that would have brought our sites down and fixed them in advance. Many corporations with much older hardware simply bought new machines as a way of protecting themselves.They also hired thousands of programmers to review decades of old code. I view it as the greatest engineering feat in history that was never reported.
The biggest promoters of the Y2K crisis also seem to be trying to forget it. My favorite doomsayer from that period was Gary North. He had built a bunker in an undisclosed location in the Ozarks and was stocking up on food and amunition. Since then he has become a financial advisor and removed all of his pre-Y2K predictions from his website. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, however, we can still appreciate the power of his rhetoric. Here is a quote from April 29, 1999:
The other unspoken aspect of Y2K was its role in the tech and stockmarket crash of 2000. But it wasn't the way North predicted:
It wasn't the Y2K bug that caused the crash directly. It was the hangover from the efforts to fix the problem. In the months leading up to Jan. 1, 2000 corporations were buying new hardware as fast as it could be manufactured, and the Federal Reserve was pumping liquidity into the system to prevent the bank runs that North was predicting. All of this activity inflated the bubble even further, as you can see on the chart. When Y2k passed safely, the hardware purchases stopped, the extra programmers were laid off, and the Fed pulled the plug on its cash machine. The result was a bubble pop that we are still recovering from.
Gary North was right about Y2K causing a cataclysm, trillions of dollars were lost over the following year. In this season of predictions we should remember that they often come true, just not the way we expect them to.
