“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”
Charles Dickens
As I sit at home during this time of unprecedented quarantine, It’s hard not to think about Dickens’ famous lines, in what has to be, the strangest time that I’ve ever lived in. And no, it’s not just the fact that we’re fighting over toilet paper or blow-drying our sinus.
The last time the world was so taken in by a ‘bug’ was 1999. Computers no longer belonged to the realm of science fiction. They had taken over business, banking, finance, power, and were quickly entering households across the world.
And with this boom, came the Doomsday panic of the Y2K bug, which threatened to have far-reaching implications on the global economy.
For those unfamiliar with the bug, here’s a short history lesson. The term Y2K had become shorthand for a problem stemming from the clash of the upcoming Year 2000 and the two-digit year format utilized by early coders to minimize the use of computer memory, then an expensive commodity. If computers interpreted the “00” in 2000 as 1900, this could mean headaches ranging from wildly erroneous mortgage calculations to, some speculated, large-scale blackouts and infrastructure damage.
The imminent threat to global banking, housing, infrastructure, and digital systems hurled the world into a state of panic.
The similarities between the Y2K crisis and COVID 19 don’t end there.
Then US President, Bill Clinton had appointed a ‘czar’ to overlook his Y2K council. There was constant talk about the stock markets crashing. Countries came together to fix the problem. Even then, people stocked up on food, water, and guns in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse. Ominous news reports warned of possible chaos if critical systems failed.
The whole world watched with bated breath as the clocked moved closer to midnight. Everyone was glued to the television and then – nothing happened.
The new year brought with it a new news cycle called Y2K, a big hoax.
But for the thousands of programmers who worked around the clock, it wasn’t a big hoax. You see, Y2K came into the public spotlight only in 1998, but for programmers and businesses, it was an inevitability that was worked on for close to five years.
The global effort to fix the Y2K bug cost the world an estimated 925 billion to fix. The International Y2K Cooperation Center that was set up to coordinate and manage the crisis consisted of 170 countries. The legion of programmers rewrote upwards of a billion lines of code.
More interestingly, the effort to fix the bug created jobs as managers realized the value of the professionals working in the industry. Computing was here to stay.
So as the world fights over toilet paper, I see something similar happen in the age of COVID-19 as businesses rush to adapt to the new normal. Apps and services that provide blended and e-learning services are booming. Schools and universities are pivoting to have greater online mobility. The demand for proficient professional writers is real, and with things shaping up the way they are, this demand is only going to increase. Individual consumption of content has increased due to the global lockdown. So while the world might be fighting over toilet paper outside, it would seem like there’s never been a better time to be a writer.