Twenty-five years ago, millions of people were nervously looking ahead to New Year’s Eve.
When the clocks struck midnight, they wondered, would they lose power? Would planes fall from the sky? Would banks collapse and the world order crumble?
Such nightmarish fantasies were never truly based in reality, but the public genuinely feared that the computer systems society had become increasingly reliant on would fail at the stroke of midnight, ushering in a dark beginning to the year 2000.
For years, computer engineers and government officials had worked on what was then called the Year 2000 problem, also known as the Millennium Bug. Starting in the 1950s and ’60s, programmers stripped the first two digits of the year from code in order to save time and money. The assumption was that the code would be replaced long before the turn of the millennium.
But in the following decades, engineers began to sound the alarm that if computer…