In 1976 a persuasive latter-day Nostradamus convinced many people that Adelaide would be hit by a major earthquake. He cited the precise date. Panic set in. Many people backed their belongings and streamed out of Adelaide.
That afternoon, the Adelaide News, the now defunct afternoon paper, ran with a banner headline and poster for the newsagencies which screamed: IT DIDN’T HAPPEN!
Well, obviously, the newspaper came out.
It didn’t happen on December 31, 1999, either. But this time one newspaper reported it did. That evening 26,000 copies of The Canberra Times were printed. At the bottom of Page 1 was a small item stating: “”Preparation of The Canberra Times was affected early this morning by Y2K problems. As a result, we are unable to bring you today a special wrap-around showing Canberra moving into the New Year and our special First Word magazine. These will be distributed in The Canberra Times tomorrow.”
As we now know, the full paper came out on January 1 with splendid wrap around and the magazine. And the 26,000 “”it happened” copies were taken to the recycling bin, minus a few souvenired by staff.
Since then the letters column has bubbled over with outrage at the waste of $12 billion in Australia in fixing Y2K problems. The money would have been better spent on hospitals, schools and roads, the argument ran.
Other letters have politely pointed out that we should be congratulating ourselves at foreseeing a problem, doing something about it early and successfully avoiding catastrophe. There would have been screams of outrage if things had gone wrong, if power had failed, water and sewerage cut etc.
The rejoinder to that was that other countries which apparently did nothing to fix Y2K were unaffected also, therefore our money was misspent.
Was Y2K like the Adelaide earthquake? A furphy.
No. Taking precautions against a soothsayer’s prediction of an earthquake even tot he extent of fleeing the city was utterly irrational. There was no evidence of even a likely catastrophe.
The Y2K bug, on the other hand, was a real prospect. We know that old computer codes allowed only two spaces in the date field. We know that computers might read that as 1900 and produce odd results, even shutting down. Tests on computers suggested they might shut down.
Faced with that prospect, prevention was better than cure.
It may be that the consequences of the bug were exaggerated. It may be that people in the computer industry stood to gain by exaggerating it. But that does not mean the $12 billion was wasted.
For a start, a lot of that money went to replacing hardware and software that would have to be replaced before long anyway. Some suppliers of computer equipment to The Canberra Times, for example, said they would not waste the money even finding out whether some equipment was Y2K compliant. The stuff was obsolete anyway. It was at a convenient end of its life.
Then there was the difficulty of compounding failures. If on New Year’s Eve several Y2K problems appeared at once, it would be difficult to fix them all in one night and get the paper out.
As part of a public company (Rural Press Ltd), The Canberra Times was under an obligation to report its state of Y2K compliance to the stock market. Essentially, we had to say whether we had tested all our equipment and we were confident that production would continue as usual through to 2000. Some major computer equipment was upgraded as a consequence. It would have had to be upgraded before long anyway.
A dozen suspect PCs of 120 on site were allowed to run. Of those two failed. They reverted to 1980 and would not run software properly. Tasks are being done manually or in other ways until we get new PCs and software.
There have been enough minor glitches to suggest the potential for a major one was there. But it was avoided through prudence.
The truth probably lies in the middle: the problem was real but exaggerated. Moreover, the costs of fixing it were exaggerated, too.
Roll on Y10K.