The Y2K Bug Was (And Is) a Real Problem

TechStuff presents Two Percent with Michael Easter, a twice-weekly deep dive into the science of living better by doing things the hard way. In this episode of the podcast, Taylor Lorenz of the Substack User Mag and host of podcast Power User joins Michael to discuss whether soci ...  Show more

Many contemporary talking heads take a pessimistic view of the future, but our guest today hopes to change this. Oz interviews Zachary Karabell, host of the podcast What Could Go Right? and founder of the Progress Network, about being an ‘edgy optimist’ and what that means for th ...  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