The Big Nothing

Many times we are all prepared and hyped up for a disaster that we hear is coming and then it doesn’t happen. We are relieved but also feel vaguely like we were mislead or may even feel anger. So what happened to the disaster?

One possible answer is that we received bad information. This can take many forms. Listening to a rumor, perhaps on social media rather that reliable sources. A pure mistake or bad data by professionals such as meteorologists or economic advisors. Maybe a bit of both rumor and ‘mistake’ from politicians, you know…politicians…

Misinformation happens and we live with it for the most part. Maybe change our sources. Maybe modify our expectations.

This is not the type of build up to nothing I wish to address here. I want to discuss the type of build up to nothing where the nothing is because someone did something to prevent the bad thing from happening.

Y2K, the year 2000 computer crisis, is one example in which I was personally involved in the mitigation efforts. Those efforts made Y2K a non event for most of the developed world.

In 1998 – 99, I was working as an IBM employee outsourced to Comdata, a payment card vendor for the trucking industry. I was assigned to a team that was going through all the computer code (millions of lines) that the company was running on its various computing systems. We were looking to fix problems that would happen when the turn of the millennium happened.

We did fix it and the computer systems ran on without incident on New Years day 2000. This was true for almost every computer system in the developed world. This non-event was the result of billions of dollars spent and the labor of thousands, maybe millions, of programmers world wide. Old coders were even enticed from retirement to help fix older systems. It was all hands on deck!

People had been bracing for economic crash, the end of the world and so on caused by Y2K. This expectation grew through media hype, movies, rumor, exaggeration and simple lack of understanding of how computer systems work and what was required to fix the problem.

When the world woke up to a world operating just like it had on January 1 2000 there were mixed reactions. Anger at having been mislead was one, chagrin was another, especially for those who had spent a fortune hoarding for the worst outcome. Some were even disappointed, like a kid waiting for a firecracker to go off and it fizzles.

I heard people say afterward that it was all a big hoax. It wasn’t a hoax we in the computer industry fixed the problem (I’ll articulate what we fixed at the end of the post for anyone interested).

So my point is simple. Many times nothing happens because we humans actually are good at our jobs. We many times see an issue coming and do something about it. Not always for sure but we do it when the effort is warranted and there is actually something to be done.

We should appreciate the efforts so many professionals make too foresee issues and who work to solve them and make our lives better. Usually for a paycheck obviously but still it amounts to a better and more comfortable life for millions.

There are many day to day examples of this kind of activity. For example whether reporting, safe flights, safe cars, safe homes, safe medical procedures and medicines. Most of the logistics and engineering are hidden to the average person.

If you sit down and do the math, many of these innovations are the result of millions of human effort years. Millions of years? Sounds like a ridiculous number right? Here is an example. There are currently around 24 million software developers world wide. So their efforts add up to 24 million years of effort each year. Imagine now the number of architects and engineers who have refined building techniques over the last 4 thousand years or the number of engineers improving trains over the last 200 years or planes in the last 100+ years.

We all get annoyed when our flight is delayed or our internet goes out. It’s human nature. Hopefully it is also our nature to sit back and appreciate these miracles we take for granted every day now and then.

What was Y2K all about? Pretty simple really.

In the early days of computers the machines had very little memory. To save space in that precious memory coders would use 2 digits for the year rather than a full year. So 1970 was recorded in the computer as just 70.

So the whole effort was to go into millions of programs and add the century to the dates or if that wasn’t possible then add code to correctly handle the 2 digit dates.

Why was this necessary? Mostly for sorting purposes. If you are sorting a person’s checks in an account by date in descending order to get the most recent one then if you go from the year 99 to 00 the newest checks would fall to the bottom in the sort. It might not sound like much of a problem but sorting by date is one of the main things computers do for us.