The Y2K Bug Was (And Is) a Real Problem

The Week in Tech is now a roundtable! Every Friday, Oz and three of the best writers covering Silicon Valley will discuss the latest news, decode emerging trends and debate what actually matters for the future of technology and for us. This week, guests Reed Albergotti (Semafor), ...  Show more

Iran's Shahed drone costs $30,000 to build. The US missile sent to destroy it? Up to $4 million. Pulitzer Prize-winning conflict journalist Ben C. Solomon wants you to do the math. Oz sits down with Ben to break down the economics driving the conflict with Iran, why the Pentagon ...  Show more

Y2K was a special time when we all thought nothing bad would really happen at the stroke of midnight, but secretly worried the world would end. Turns out the mitigation efforts worked and we hardly noticed. 

Millennials - how well, if at all, do you remember the Y2K bug hype? Back in the 1990s, everyone was freaking out about computers crashing when the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2000.  That was because when computers were first built back in the mid-20th century, they sto ...  Show more

In the waning years of the 20th century, amid growing anxieties about the turn of the millennium, one man, Robert Bemer, observed the unfolding drama from his remote home on King Possum Lake. A revered figure in computing, Bemer had early on flagged a significant, looming issue k ...  Show more

In the 1950s and 60s - even leading into the 1990s - the cost of storage was so high, that using a 2-digit field for dates in a software instead of 4-digits could save an organization between $1.2-$2 Million dollars per GB of data. From this perspective, programming computers in ...  Show more