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PITFALLS OF TECHNOLOGY
Whatever Happened to Y2K?
Why did the dreaded Millennium Bug slip into the memory hole of history?
Technology evolves at such a pace as to suck the air from our lungs and make our eyeballs bleed. Or ‘devolves’, some might say. Concepts, devices and the terms that define and describe them can slip into obsolescence almost before they gain a foothold in our consciousness.
MP3 players sit superfluous and neglected on the scrapheap of invention, alongside fax machines. Rummage just a little lower and your inquisitive fingers might unearth the wheel of a spinning jenny, the beads of an abacus.
Novelty is the fickle mother of innovation, constantly discarding its own brood.
But there are, as AI has recently reminded us, certain technological events that achieve ubiquitous recognition, become the news story itself. And those of us who are old and memorious enough to cast our minds back a quarter of a century to 1999 will inevitably recall the Y2K phenomenon as one such milestone.
The inability of global computer systems programmed with just two digits designating each year to distinguish between (19)00 and (20)00 at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1999. Planes would fall from the sky as air traffic control…