How a batch of tinned meat fostered fears of the millennium bug
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Computer system errors led to huge costs for countries as they prepared for disaster that never materialised. On New Year’s Eve 25 years ago, sane people worried that the modern world was about to melt down. The millennium bug seemed to be threatening to crash the world’s computer systems, as technology struggled to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000. The public, faced with daily predictions of potentially terrible outcomes, braced themselves nervously.
Dark jokes prevailed about avoiding being on “a life-support system at midnight on 31 December 1999”. In China, Zhao Be, then the head of the country’s millennium bug coordination efforts, commanded airline executives to be on a flight on 1 January 2000 to demonstrate any problems had been sorted.
Yet, in the end, nobody appeared to perish. The same might be said of one of the earliest events to reveal the existence of the bug, which was also known as Y2K. In 1987 Marks & Spencer received a batch of tinned meat that was rejected because the company’s computers thought it was almost 90 years past its January 2000 use-by date. Five years later, a Minnesota kindergarten invited one Mary Bandar to join its classes. She was 104 at the time.
These quirky errors were the result of early computer scientists solving a practical problem. To save space and speed up processing, computer dates were abbreviated. So January 1900 was 01/00 and December 1999 was 12/99. Trailblazing computer scientists had assumed that none of the computers would be in use by 1999. Only, it turned out there were so many legacy systems in operation that catastrophic results appeared a certainty to some.
