How to Prepare for the End of the World
Robb Brunansky Those of us old enough to remember will never forget the mass hysteria that gripped the globe in 1999. The world stood on the edge of a new millennium, the year 2000. Not many people, historically, live to see the turn of a millennium, so the excitement was palpable. But the anticipation of seeing not one, not two, not three, but FOUR digits in the year column of the calendar change overnight was overshadowed by the fear that a computer bug known as “Y2K” might bring the world to a screeching halt. Computers went mainstream in the late 20th century, but unlike today, storage in computer systems was massively expensive. Because of the exorbitant price tag, computer programmers tried everything they could to save space. One strategy they used was to minimize the amount of data required to store dates; so instead of storing the full four-digit year, they only stored the last two digits of the year, cutting the storage space used in half. They realized that ...