Y2K Came and Went

To the disappointment of survivalists, millenialists, and journalists everywhere, the much-hyped Y2K bug failed to bring about the end of civilization. At the very least, weren’t all those third-world markets still running on old TRS-80s supposed to drag our shiny new mainframes down with them? Apparently not. Having barricaded ourselves in our bunkers with nothing but a pile of gold krugerrands and a mating pair of hamsters, we now find ourselves asking, didn’t any computers, anywhere, crash on the morning of January 1, 2000?

Of course they did. In Japan, for example, computers in the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Number 2 nuclear plant, located north of Tokyo, spontaneously reset their dates to February 2036. The date problem caused some important information on the position of the plant’s control rods not to be displayed. The glitch is now fixed. It has tentatively been tagged as Y2K-related. MORE >>