#the 2038 problem

I feel like sharing some information about the 90′s to people here. Particularly about Y2K, aka Internet Armageddon That Didn’t Happen In 2000 Thanks To People You Haven’t Heard Of Like My Mom.

My mom, among her teammates and people tasked with similar roles to her, never get any recognition for the work they did in keeping computers across the globe functioning in 2000. She was a project manager among a group of overstressed, underappreciated people that worked at a company called Intel that are responsible for preventing a global societal collapse in 1999. Y2K being allowed to happen the way people thought it would (and really, it was going to be worse than even Intel could forecast and they still don’t know how bad it would’ve been) would’ve undoubtedly destroyed the fabric of the internet in 1999 and 2000, and therefore, no social media platforms like this Hellsite right here. She’s actually on tumblr and has been following the Muskrat’s destruction of Twitter with mute, techie horror.

In the years leading up to 2000, the world was panicking on its tenderhooks due to the looming crisis that was Y2K. For those of you that are either too young to remember or just didn’t know about it, Y2K was a big deal. A planet-alteringly big deal. A “We don’t know how much would’ve crashed and burned in our world’s society and economy if we’d ignored it,” big deal. tl;dr: All computer software around the world wasn’t programmed to have their internal clocks transfer to January 1st, 2000. Instead, what was going to happen was every functioning computer in the world running Intel software - on New Years Eve, 1999 - would change calendars to January 1st, 1900.

This was a catastrophic prospect for everyone impacted by the computer age. People receiving social security benefits and paying off formal loans with interest rates would suddenly receive benefits and payment rates documented in 1900. NORAD, the international weather-tracking service kids use to track Santa on Christmas Eve and that warns people of natural disasters like hurricanes, would have gone dark with no timestamps to indicate major shifts in weather. Entire governments would lose all digital contact with one another. The WHO and CDC would go dark. Hospital networks would’ve gone down. The Stock Market would’ve gone to shit. No one in the world would’ve been immune. If Japan suffered a massive, horrific famine due directly to the 1929 crash of the US Stock Market before the Internet, imagine what would’ve happened if the very screens that displayed the global stock market records to major metropolitan cities around the world just... stopped working in 2000. Went dark. Blue-screened. An entire system built upon split-second trades, bids, buyouts, and reports for trade around the world would’ve shut down for a lot longer than just a split second.

By the time it was almost the year 2000, the Internet as we knew it was like a gigantic, invisible, planet-sized Rube Goldberg machine that a comparatively microscopic group of people were tasked with repairing before it could fail in ways they couldn’t foretell, without being able to live-test any of their solutions. It was “Fuck it, we’re doing it live!” to the extreme. Most of the programmers that had built the infrastructure for the Internet and computer technology as we recognize it, all the way back in the 60′s, were retired, dead, no longer working in those sectors, or simply hadn’t kept up with changes in the technology and couldn’t be brought up to speed to help in time. Even the highest echelons of the management at Intel itself didn’t really consider Y2K to be a big concern, except for my mom’s department. I still have lingering anxiety and trauma from hearing the sound of a woman’s voice shouting with panic and anger, because she was the one literally shouting into her phone to “Nah, we’ll be fine,” Luddite tech giants that NO, NOTHING WAS FINE AND EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO BE VERY BAD from the time I was born in 1992 to January 1st, 2000.

Any programs and companies relying upon Microsoft software, even Word and Excel, would have either suffered catastrophic errors, or ceased to function altogether, too. The team handling Y2K didn’t know how bad it could’ve actually gotten at the time, and they were still responsible for stopping it. To this day, my mom and the rest of the team members that worked with her can’t actually say how much of our technological lives would’ve been destroyed if they’d done nothing. The potential destruction was literally unfathomable. The global economy relied on computers and tech by the time Y2K became a major topic of concern to experts, much less casual everyday users.

This was before WiFi. This was before smartphones. HotSpots? The stuff of cyberpunk fantasies. This was before most cell phones had a text feature; you carried your cell phone and a pager separately, and if you thought character limits on Twitter were bad? lol. Ever had to make a collect call in a phone booth? Do you have any idea how badly we’d freak each other out over the thought of the germs on those things? If you couldn’t afford a collect call, which cost for every minute you were talking, you had to get creative and learn to say who you were and where you were to someone in the, “Caller, at the tone, please state only your name, beep” 3-second window of free time you got to contact someone.

You could’ve been stuck in a bad neighborhood at 3am. Taxis didn’t pick up hitchhikers like they do in New York, and you could screw off if you didn’t have cash on you; credit cards were mostly used at malls and supermarkets, and retail workers from the 90′s to this day still have the question “Credit or debit?” burned into their souls. You needed coins as well as bills and credit cards. It was still common to pay for groceries with a paper check, because you carried a checkbook around with you everywhere as an adult. There was no RideShare service with anyone but a serial killer, because yeah, serial killers loved targeting stranded pedestrians back then and that’s why nobody hitchhikes anymore. Homicidal freaks like The Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway) and BTK (Dennis Rader) were still at large and unidentified. It was thanks to revolutions in tech and computers that they were caught at all; BTK having been busted thanks to metadata and TIME STAMPS on a floppy disk.

AOL was still one of the top ISPs and email services to the United States. You would receive installation CDs for AOL in children’s cereal boxes like prizes. Dial-up was still a normal part of life. Blockbuster was renting out Nintendo 64 games along with VHS movies. DVD players were revolutionary. Barnes & Noble and Borders were still competing. The FBI still warned you at the start of a movie that piracy was illegal while almost every VHS had a “record” setting you could use with impunity. Amazon was primarily an online bookstore. J.K. Rowling was just some closeted TERF that just published her first weird, popular British fairytale about some kid that went to a school for wizards where goblins were real but black people weren’t. You could get a copy at the Scholastic Book Faire if your school library didn’t have it. MySpace wasn’t a thing. YouTube didn’t exist. Cell phones were big and sturdy enough to be used as a lethal weapon. AskJeeves was one of the most popular search engines because, fuck it, Jeeves was a dapper butler and asking him questions was fun. A phone call could disconnect you from the internet unless you paid for multiple lines. DSL was seen as the newest, hottest, next-gen concept. The World Trade Center was still standing and present in the generic backdrops of nearly every daytime or New York-based news or talk show. Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye, and Bob Ross were amazing children on PBS between episodes of Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street while people were shell-shocked over Princess Diana’s death. Pluto was still classified as a planet. Wishbone was a Jack Russel Terrier that reenacted famous literary adventures.

Germany was being cajoled into reunifying after Mr. Gorbachev agreed to take the wall down. Namibia was a new country and no longer part of South Africa. We were losing our minds over photos from the brand new Hubble Space Telescope. Yugoslavia existed. Czechoslovakia was splitting. We were learning to call the USSR “Russia” again. Yemen was being unified. The Human Genome Project had just been announced. The Cold War was finally over!

Meanwhile, my mom worked as a project manager at Intel specifically tasked with replacing and/or reprogramming any and all Intel computer software with extended time stamps past 1999, for the entire technological world. You’re here, right now, reading this very post in part thanks to her and her team’s exhaustive years of work to change and update the entire world’s software. If it required anything from Intel to function or had to co-function with Intel, it was part of my mom’s job to beat the literal countdown to January 1st, 2000.

If she and her team failed, it was lights out. She was bouncing me on her knee while fielding calls from everywhere from Silicon Valley, California, to London, England, to Beirut, Lebanon, to Tokyo, Japan. My every day around her was nothing but tech-talk when it was actually in English. Those incredibly intelligent, clever, gifted men and women from around the world spared not a single second for themselves when it came to their singular, united focus on stopping Y2K from bringing the entire global economy and communications to their knees.

My mom didn’t take maternity leave with my baby brother in 1998; she telecommuted instead in order to keep working. When she would go on business trips almost every week, she would bring me back plush toys of dolls in clean-room Intel Bunny Suits instead of stuffed animals. Stopping Y2K was too important.

And you know what happened? Nothing. 2000 rolled around, and the first thing to start were conspiracy theories that Y2K had been made up, or that Y2K itself had been its own conspiracy theory to trick users into buying new computers and software. In fact, the people responsible for preventing Y2K turned an impending global disaster into what is now known as “the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met.“

And yet, to this very day, the real people responsible for fixing everything before it had a chance to break go unmentioned and unrecognized. They never received fanfare or thanks, but scrutiny and skepticism instead. Can you imagine doing a job so well and so efficiently that the entire modern world either ignored you, or even got pissed at you because things didn’t fall apart? Their children - me included - grew up steeped in the understanding and fear that if we tried to demand more attention from them, we were stopping them from saving the world as we knew it.