The prophet of Y2K

JUST BEFORE NOON ON JANUARY 18, 1985, IN PORTLAND, OREGON A computer fanatic named Spencer Bolles turned on his Commodore 64 computer, a light plastic block of a keyboard attached to a monochrome screen in his bedroom.

Bolles was 17 and had been preoccupied by a fear that he could not shake. He wanted to seek reassurance and solidarity. He listened to his modem dial up, then navigated to a messageboard called Usenet, a friendly early precursor of the internet, where other programmers gathered to share information. He found the forum on bugs — little quirks of programming that caused computer errors — and began to type a title: Computer bugs in the year 2000.

A decade later his post, spun to absurd scale, would shake the world and spark the first mass hysteria of the digital era. The phenomenon swept not just America, not just the West, but the world, and cost half a trillion dollars in modern money.

Programmers would work overtime. Cults would prepare for the rapture or the apocalypse. Preachers would gather billions from terrified flocks attempting to buy their salvation. Survivalists would sit among their canned goods and bullets, smug in their superior choices. Careers would be made and broken, billions lost and gained, in one moment. World leaders would shelter in bunkers, and hospitals would stockpile intensive care backup equipment.

“I have a friend,” Bolles wrote, “that raised an interesting question that I immediately tried to prove wrong. He is a programmer and has this notion that when we reach the year 2000, computers will not accept the new date.”

Most computers had been programmed with only two-digit dates in their systems, not four. Instead of 1999 computers would see the date as 99. When it flipped to 2000, they'd be left with 00. Would that be seen as 1900, causing cascades of errors based on the dates? Would it confuse them in other ways?

"I violently opposed this because it seemed so meaningless," Bolles wrote. "Computers have entered into existence during this century, and has software, specifically accounting software, been prepared for this turnover? If this really comes to pass and my friend is correct, what will happen? Is it anything to be concerned about?"

"I haven't given it much thought, but this programmer has. I thought he was joking but he has even lost sleep over this. When I say 'friend,' I'm NOT referring to myself, if it seemed that way. I've never really written anything like that before."

It marked the moment we first saw computers, the beige boxes and whirring plastic racks that had come to run so much of our lives, as unknowable, vengeful Gods. The beginning of the millennium bug hysteria.

This is a free preview of the third story in Bungalow’s first series, Myths and Legends. If you like it, subscribe here for more.

The millennium bug is one of the strangest things that we do not see as strange. It may lack the exotic specificity of Pizzagate or the absurdity of Phlogiston. But it makes up for that in sheer scale.

Much of the late 90s was devoted, in total earnestness, to the idea that even if frantic and expensive efforts were undertaken, every computer on earth might fail at exactly midnight on December 31, 1999, unleashing waves of chaos and confusion and imperiling the existence of life as we knew it. There were fears that planes could drop from the sky, and banks and hospitals could cease to function. That military computers would spin out of control.

What actually happened was mostly nothing. A few minor computer faults. The prophets of doom say all the preparation saved us. The sceptics point out that very little went wrong even in places that did no preparation. To me, it is more culturally than technologically significant.

It marked the end of one more peaceful, more prosperous, mostly analogue era (glossy television and magazines, disaffected but commercial guitar bands, peace on earth, the end of history, Von Dutch and “The Rachel” haircut) and the beginning of another, less peaceful, less prosperous, mostly digital, era (Columbine, the bitterly contested American election of 2000, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, the rise of Russia as a sinister force, the commercialisation of fentanyl, not inconsiderable misogyny, the birth of reality TV).

And it gave us a dark model for society. In 2025 every matter of public debate has the fever-dream religious fervency of the millennium bug. Groups on both the left and right emerge to preach plausible but hard-to-assess fears — immigration will destroy the nation, vaccines cause autism — and angrily defy others to disagree. Because it feels safer to accept a fear than deny it, and to prepare because you just never know, those fearful voices grow in prominence. When they’re wrong, they shrug it off and start predicting the next cataclysm.

I wondered where it all began. Was there a Satoshi Nakamoto — one person who might be called the original prophet of the idea?

I decided to start the search with the earliest known artifact: Bolles’ post on Usenet. So I called him to ask who the ‘friend’ he had described was. I figured I could call that friend, then find out who they heard from, and call that person, and trace it back until I found the imagination that, like HG Wells or Stephen King, had terrified and shaped the world.

Bolles still works with computers, and is still on the west coast. But he was a junior in high school, and enrolled in a course in UNIX at Reed College at the time he first posted about Y2K.

I asked him whether the ‘friend’ he posted about was really a friend, or just a euphemism. He said it was a real person. He said he was slightly older, 18 or 19 at the time, an Eagle Scout and a software prodigy, who had been hired to work on a special project at a local technology company, Tektronix. It was there that this friend had heard about the millennium issue, and mentioned it to Bolles not long afterward.

He did not feel comfortable sharing that person's name with me. So I looked for alternative ways to work backwards to the true prophet. I wondered whether Usenet, which predated the world wide web by a decade, already had posts or groups on the topic.

After all, it hosted a disproportionate quantity of the world's computer programmers. The Terminator had come out the year before, in 1984, with a different notion of out-of-control computers destroying humanity. Prince had released 1999 in 1982. But Bolles told me that when he had searched Usenet before posting there was nothing.

The next big moment for the Y2K panic was in 1993, when Computerworld magazine ran a story entitled Doomsday 2000. That seemed too distant from the origin — by then, there was a vocal community of programmers focused on the issue, and the source was further diffused.

It felt like the trail had gone cold. But then Bolles emailed out of the blue with the name of “the friend from church who worked at Tektronix on nascent Y2K problems”. He had found him on Facebook and LinkedIn, and provided a link which showed a middle-aged man with wavy brown hair and bushy eyebrows.

I tracked the friend down, in Portland, and spoke briefly to him on the phone. He was baffled, but willing to answer questions. He confirmed that he'd worked at Tektronix, and had been an Eagle Scout. But he said he did not recall any preoccupation with Y2K or any conversations with Bolles about it.

I asked him when he himself had first heard about the Y2K issue. He said as far as he was aware, it had existed in computing textbooks for decades, buried amid dry passages that never caused any kind of worldwide hysteria. He had certainly not lost sleep over it. He did not consider himself any kind of prophet, and he did not want to be named in this story.

That left only the obvious answers, both banal and fascinating. The panic had two sources. Firstly, the mysterious power of an already-known idea to captivate a crowd at a certain moment. Secondly, and more specifically, Bolles’ post.

He was not responsible for the entire phenomenon. That, it seemed to me, was fueled by money, and by the human urge to pin our fear of change to something that seemed rational, among many other factors.

But in his evocative writing — the awed and fearful curiosity, the attempt to question or diminish his own feelings, the insistence that these were the profound worries of a mysterious friend — he had landed on just the right tone for the internet, and suffused a dry programming issue with the potent, primal emotion necessary for a story to spread.

He told me that soon after his post many other programmers became deeply engaged, and began posting on Usenet themselves. "There was suddenly an outpouring of people who knew something about it," he said. It would be at least a decade before we had the language to describe what had happened. But Bolles had gone viral. ⸭

This is a free preview of the third story in Bungalow’s first series, Myths and Legends. If you liked it, subscribe here for more.