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.