Y2K was averted as a disaster by a lot of diligent computer engineers, programmers, analysts, and users that began way before popular awareness of the issue was a thing. It is because of that work, coordinated globally, that Y2K “never materialized”.
My personal role in Y2K response was as the shift supervisor for my local Sheriff’s Department, which had gone to “maximum staffing levels” beginning on 12/29/99. It was the quietest NYE I worked in 28 years in uniform.
Apple's Macintosh computers were nonplussed with all the mental gymnastics performed with PC equipment. I know as I had mine ready to roll at our fire department. The turn of the century/millennium came and went without so much as a belch.
Hmmm. Not so sure. I was rural Italy. Italy, as a nation, was far behind most other countries and rural Italy deemed hopeless when it came to Y2K preps. I had run a Marathon on New Year's Eve 1999. Then I went down to mid-night service at a nearby Basilica in the valley.
The mass commenced sometime around 11:30 p.m.; rural Italy is not too anal about times. As the prune-faced muckety-muck from the Vatican spoke on-&-on in Italian, half the audience was dozing and the other half listening intently. Except for one of the faithless, a certain Yankee (i.e., me).
Yes, there I was cocking my head up and down, alternately looking at my watch and at the overhead light. When the magic minute arrived for the new year, the new decade, the new century, and the new millennium, all that happened was a flicker of that large over-head light.
After the service, I walked out of the basilica expecting the night to be impossibly black. The suspense built substantially. But, no, living room lights still dotted the adjacent hills and street lamps continued illumining the roads. The only item amiss was a railroad gate that had come down and still chimed away with no train in sight.
Yes but that didn't keep the big wigs at my famous hospital from freaking out to the point where all the heads of departments had a sleep over in cafeteria just in case of disaster.
Y2K was the best and worst thing that ever happened to IT. It was, the best because it created an incredible amount of work for almost every IT department, software company and hardware company. It also brought hundreds of thousands of programmers and engineers to the United States from India, Russia, China, the Philippines and many others. My company grew from 2 of us to over 150 consultants during the 1990's and we made the decision in 1991 to avoid doing any Y2K work.
But companies were desperate for Y2K help and when your clients ask you to handle their Y2K modifications, we did. The reason we didn't want to make Y2K changes was that once these projects were completed we would have to find other work for them. We only did Y2K work for about a dozen companies and kept the size of the projects teams to a minimum. The modifications were similar mostly involving expanding the dates from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd/yyyy. The testing was critical as well, but all of our Y2K projects were completed by the end of 1997.
The life insurance industry had evolved from offering very simple products to include several complicated projects like Universal Life and Interest Sensitive Whole Life Products. And then came the Variable Life products where insureds could invest in various mutual funds.
Congress passed several major tax law changes to insure people were paying capital gains when they surrendered their policies. These were the projects our clients needed us to help them with and Y2K was a distraction form complying with them.
Congress and the various insurance departments were getting a lot of pushback from the insurance industry to not tinker with regulations that would require large modifications to their systems.
So by the late 1990's and into the early 2000's their were relatively few new regulations and also few new life insurance products compared to the 1980's.
We went to the special Y2K NYE Celebration on the Mall in DC that year. All our friends thought we were crazy. They were convinced that all kinds of bad things would happen. We froze our butts off, saw Bono (in the way off distance) sing and enjoyed some fireworks.
We used it as an excuse to go visit friends in the west of Ireland, and see in the New Year on their farm out in the countryside, away from pretty much everything!
We knew nothing was going to happen, but it was bliss to relax and drink ourselves insensible, in front of roaring peat fires, feasting on locally raised food! :) It snowed, it was an idyllic New Year celebration.
But some people went nuts! One local guy, the husband of a prominent local physician, dug a fall-out shelter in his back yard, storehoused shelf stable foods, toilet paper, batteries, water, ammunition, gasoline, gas canisters and over a dozen generators. (He thought he could sell them at inflated prices afterwards.) I have often wondered how he felt afterward and what he did with all of it.
This is awesome. It’s also a reminder that there have always been those who fight any system change or adaptation of new scientific knowledge as ‘Against the laws of God.’
Right? I wouldn’t put it past them to say we are going back to “God’s time” as a part of increasing government efficiency, when the opposite would be true. Another lie, more manufacturing of chaos to divide us even further, but their 50% would believe it and blame Dr. Fauci too!
I have been dragged to Greenwich by train at 6:30 am. It’s fascinating, The museum there has
the barge for which Handel wrote the Water Music and a glorious portrait of Lord Nelson’s mistress. Greenwich was my husband’s absolute must do before we left England. As it turned out I was glad to be there.
James - Whilst you’re there you must see Harrison’s timepieces and the truly amazing story behind them and how it contributed to the British Navy’s mastery of the seas. Also do read Dava Sobel’s Longitude.
I can trace my father's family back to the 1500's - because they were watermen on the Thames. Waterment had their own guild, and a seven year apprenticeship - mostly handed down father to son. Thanks to the apprenticeship records, it made it fairly easy to track the family back. That and the fact that they passed "Arthur" and "Edwin" down alternately to sons! We know that in the 1600's one of them was a waterman on the Royal Barge. It always makes me feel kind of weird that we are connected like that. The last one in the family died 1913 - he jumped in the Thames to save a kid that had fallen in, and got pneumonia. The Thames wasn't too healthy to swallow in those days. . .
In 1916, a 42 year old Henry Ellis Warren, changed time (keeping) in America and most of the world.
Warren invented the first self starting synchronous motor for clocks. Using the 60 cycle electric alternating current from Boston, his Ashland, MA small startup began electric clocks that were super accurate and reliable.
He built a master clock, using a pendulum clock and an electric clock that measured the difference in time between the two. This master clock he took to Boston Edison to show the generating company that there 60 cycles per second was varying from 58 to 61 hz.
He also had an earlier business making steam turbine and engine governorsnto regulate their speed.
He convinced all the different electric generation operators to use his master clocks. Across the land, 60hz was in sync and accurate. This 1895 EE MIT grad, which included the great Alfred P Sloan, introduced these firsts: alarm clock, 24 hour clock, lit clocks, digit clocks, electrochromed gold and silver clocks, the first major plastics, industrial design.
Hey all.. please please take a minute to add your senators, your US rep, and your local elected officials to your phone. Include Senate Majority Leader John Thune (202) 224-2321 and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (202) 225-2777
Then call them all the time to tell them what to do. You are the boss of them; never let them forget it. 🩵
A bit of trivia: I have cousins who owned a house in Michiana, MI. and the dividing line for the time zones between MI and IL ran through their house. Luckily, their kids were grown, so they didn't have to worry about different time zones for different schools, but things like which post office closed at which time or when, exactly, a movie was starting, could sometimes be confusing.
Really interesting Heather - thanks for this. As an ancient historian (retired) I used to need to explain the keeping of years, calendar months, weeks, and the hour of the day to students in a Greek or Roman context. What did the ancient Romans do, for example, with no AD/BC or BCE/CE? They dated "from the foundation of the city" (ab urbe condita), so 10 BCE would have been 743 AUC, or they used the names of the consuls (e.g., in the consulship of Cn. Pompeius and M. Crassus, i.e., 70 BCE) that was kept on a list by the pontificales or chief priests. As for the month, it was lunar, so 28 days with inter-calendar days added to keep up with the solar year. As for hours, that's quite confusing - the day began at sunrise and the Romans referred to "the x hour of the day", so in June that would be quite early in the morning since the first hour of the day was the first one after sunrise, in December, conversely, quite late. In Greece the situation is even more complicated, and I have a busy day . . . .
In our modern world we are governed by time: time to rise, time to eat, time to work or study, time for leisure, friends, and family. Schedules can be so rigid that we "make time" for extraordinary endeavors. Still, standard time does give us order in a world where mechanical devices can move us across vast distances in a matter of a few hours. Fun lesson. Thanks, Heather.
Museum in Besançon. There I learned that the clocks on French church towers were put there by Louis XIV so his subjects would know when to take their medicine. We are obsessed with time. Interesting and ancient.
Thank you Heather....for this wonderfully worded and fascinating story on the development of standardized time across the US....a beautiful break from the increasingly disheartening daily US political news. Just love your columns and enjoy each one from our home in Sheboygan WI. Linda and Rick Reiss
Great mini lesson! Kind of reminds me of the Y2K panic that never materialized! Thanks Dr. HCR!
Y2K was averted as a disaster by a lot of diligent computer engineers, programmers, analysts, and users that began way before popular awareness of the issue was a thing. It is because of that work, coordinated globally, that Y2K “never materialized”.
My personal role in Y2K response was as the shift supervisor for my local Sheriff’s Department, which had gone to “maximum staffing levels” beginning on 12/29/99. It was the quietest NYE I worked in 28 years in uniform.
Apple's Macintosh computers were nonplussed with all the mental gymnastics performed with PC equipment. I know as I had mine ready to roll at our fire department. The turn of the century/millennium came and went without so much as a belch.
speak for yourself te he
We still have several years to avert the next big computer time disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Fascinating!
Morning, Ally! Not surprised to know you were among those at the ready to lead us through a smooth transition!
Morning, Lynell!! That was a quiet night, thankfully.
Hmmm. Not so sure. I was rural Italy. Italy, as a nation, was far behind most other countries and rural Italy deemed hopeless when it came to Y2K preps. I had run a Marathon on New Year's Eve 1999. Then I went down to mid-night service at a nearby Basilica in the valley.
The mass commenced sometime around 11:30 p.m.; rural Italy is not too anal about times. As the prune-faced muckety-muck from the Vatican spoke on-&-on in Italian, half the audience was dozing and the other half listening intently. Except for one of the faithless, a certain Yankee (i.e., me).
Yes, there I was cocking my head up and down, alternately looking at my watch and at the overhead light. When the magic minute arrived for the new year, the new decade, the new century, and the new millennium, all that happened was a flicker of that large over-head light.
After the service, I walked out of the basilica expecting the night to be impossibly black. The suspense built substantially. But, no, living room lights still dotted the adjacent hills and street lamps continued illumining the roads. The only item amiss was a railroad gate that had come down and still chimed away with no train in sight.
(smile) You took us there, through time and space. Thanks!
Yes but that didn't keep the big wigs at my famous hospital from freaking out to the point where all the heads of departments had a sleep over in cafeteria just in case of disaster.
As the head of my hospital's Emergency Department, I was required to be present that night. When nothing happened, we were sent home at 2 am.
Thank you for your service Ally!
Y2K was the best and worst thing that ever happened to IT. It was, the best because it created an incredible amount of work for almost every IT department, software company and hardware company. It also brought hundreds of thousands of programmers and engineers to the United States from India, Russia, China, the Philippines and many others. My company grew from 2 of us to over 150 consultants during the 1990's and we made the decision in 1991 to avoid doing any Y2K work.
But companies were desperate for Y2K help and when your clients ask you to handle their Y2K modifications, we did. The reason we didn't want to make Y2K changes was that once these projects were completed we would have to find other work for them. We only did Y2K work for about a dozen companies and kept the size of the projects teams to a minimum. The modifications were similar mostly involving expanding the dates from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd/yyyy. The testing was critical as well, but all of our Y2K projects were completed by the end of 1997.
The life insurance industry had evolved from offering very simple products to include several complicated projects like Universal Life and Interest Sensitive Whole Life Products. And then came the Variable Life products where insureds could invest in various mutual funds.
Congress passed several major tax law changes to insure people were paying capital gains when they surrendered their policies. These were the projects our clients needed us to help them with and Y2K was a distraction form complying with them.
Congress and the various insurance departments were getting a lot of pushback from the insurance industry to not tinker with regulations that would require large modifications to their systems.
So by the late 1990's and into the early 2000's their were relatively few new regulations and also few new life insurance products compared to the 1980's.
Me too! Y2K wasn’t even a blip of a problem.
We went to the special Y2K NYE Celebration on the Mall in DC that year. All our friends thought we were crazy. They were convinced that all kinds of bad things would happen. We froze our butts off, saw Bono (in the way off distance) sing and enjoyed some fireworks.
We used it as an excuse to go visit friends in the west of Ireland, and see in the New Year on their farm out in the countryside, away from pretty much everything!
We knew nothing was going to happen, but it was bliss to relax and drink ourselves insensible, in front of roaring peat fires, feasting on locally raised food! :) It snowed, it was an idyllic New Year celebration.
But some people went nuts! One local guy, the husband of a prominent local physician, dug a fall-out shelter in his back yard, storehoused shelf stable foods, toilet paper, batteries, water, ammunition, gasoline, gas canisters and over a dozen generators. (He thought he could sell them at inflated prices afterwards.) I have often wondered how he felt afterward and what he did with all of it.
“Kind of reminds me of the Y2K panic that never materialized!”
I had the same thought.
Now, if we could just get rid of this daylight saving time nonsense; not that it matters much to us retired folk.
I was thinking this same thing.
Me too!
That was my thought as well 👍🏻.
This is awesome. It’s also a reminder that there have always been those who fight any system change or adaptation of new scientific knowledge as ‘Against the laws of God.’
Religion holding back Science, since the beginning of time!
With fear and damnation preached from the pulpits.
Not true. Science and religion were married for centuries. Only in recent times, science filed a divorce and is now sh*t-talking her ex.
Ain’t that the truth?!?
Not sure those on the right should be reminded of this particular piece of history as it may cause a "time hoax!"
Right? I wouldn’t put it past them to say we are going back to “God’s time” as a part of increasing government efficiency, when the opposite would be true. Another lie, more manufacturing of chaos to divide us even further, but their 50% would believe it and blame Dr. Fauci too!
I’ve been noticing that a number of comments are being cut off early. I wonder what gives?
I have that problem too. I can't read the last lines on my iPAD. Now that I am using my laptop I can see entire comment.
Sir Stanford Fleming took standardized time zones international. He divided the world into 24 zones 15 degrees apart and set Greenwich England as zero. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-of-standard-time-feature#:~:text=Sir%20Sandford%20Fleming%20was%20Canada's,NAC%2FC%2D14128).
So that’s how Greenwich became zero — I never knew. Thanks!
I have been dragged to Greenwich by train at 6:30 am. It’s fascinating, The museum there has
the barge for which Handel wrote the Water Music and a glorious portrait of Lord Nelson’s mistress. Greenwich was my husband’s absolute must do before we left England. As it turned out I was glad to be there.
James - Whilst you’re there you must see Harrison’s timepieces and the truly amazing story behind them and how it contributed to the British Navy’s mastery of the seas. Also do read Dava Sobel’s Longitude.
There was a good movie, too. Longitude
Virginia Ioved Christopher Wren’s observatory in Greenwich. After watching A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS,I was thrilled to see a royal barge.
I can trace my father's family back to the 1500's - because they were watermen on the Thames. Waterment had their own guild, and a seven year apprenticeship - mostly handed down father to son. Thanks to the apprenticeship records, it made it fairly easy to track the family back. That and the fact that they passed "Arthur" and "Edwin" down alternately to sons! We know that in the 1600's one of them was a waterman on the Royal Barge. It always makes me feel kind of weird that we are connected like that. The last one in the family died 1913 - he jumped in the Thames to save a kid that had fallen in, and got pneumonia. The Thames wasn't too healthy to swallow in those days. . .
I've been to England several times but never to Greenwich. You've just given me two reasons to go there.
Works pretty well into you get out in the mid Pacific, and the International Dateline makes its zigs and zags. "What day is it again?"
In 1916, a 42 year old Henry Ellis Warren, changed time (keeping) in America and most of the world.
Warren invented the first self starting synchronous motor for clocks. Using the 60 cycle electric alternating current from Boston, his Ashland, MA small startup began electric clocks that were super accurate and reliable.
He built a master clock, using a pendulum clock and an electric clock that measured the difference in time between the two. This master clock he took to Boston Edison to show the generating company that there 60 cycles per second was varying from 58 to 61 hz.
He also had an earlier business making steam turbine and engine governorsnto regulate their speed.
He convinced all the different electric generation operators to use his master clocks. Across the land, 60hz was in sync and accurate. This 1895 EE MIT grad, which included the great Alfred P Sloan, introduced these firsts: alarm clock, 24 hour clock, lit clocks, digit clocks, electrochromed gold and silver clocks, the first major plastics, industrial design.
His brand was Telechron.
Time at a Distance
Another nugget of history I never knew. Thank you!
Wow
Very cool.
Thank you for elaborating on Dr. Heather's post! fascinating.
Thanks, Doug! I know Ashland well. They have preserved the history of Warren and his invention. The school team is called the Clockers 😁⏰
I love these nuggets of history. Thank you!
Can I just say how much I adore Heather Cox Richardson??? Too late! I said it!!! Thank you for always being so wonderful!
Not just you, Marji!
Thanks! I needed that. A distraction and a fascinating and important bit of history.
Your newsletter tonight is a well appreciated tonic.
Here's an 1865 poster that tried to sort out the time zone mess and a magazine cover satirizing the 1883 time reset. "Time Before Time Zones" https://forgottenfiles.substack.com/p/time-before-time-zones-1865
Gorgeous map. Thanks for the link.
You're welcome. If you like old maps - here's just my map posts https://forgottenfiles.substack.com/t/maps
wow Peter, how did you get such good quality scans of all those maps!
.... And thank you yet again.
These are fantastic!! 🤩
Thank you for sharing.
I wonder how many Americans wouldn't be able to read the Roman numerals. No matter. AI is here to read and translate everything for us now /s
Thanks Peter !
This is so going to make it into my 8th grade American History classes this week! My thanks to HCR.
What fun!
Hey all.. please please take a minute to add your senators, your US rep, and your local elected officials to your phone. Include Senate Majority Leader John Thune (202) 224-2321 and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (202) 225-2777
Then call them all the time to tell them what to do. You are the boss of them; never let them forget it. 🩵
Good reminder, Erin!
And contact your electeds often!
https://open.substack.com/pub/ariellaelm/p/how-to-contact-your-electeds?r=apy04&utm_medium=ios
A bit of trivia: I have cousins who owned a house in Michiana, MI. and the dividing line for the time zones between MI and IL ran through their house. Luckily, their kids were grown, so they didn't have to worry about different time zones for different schools, but things like which post office closed at which time or when, exactly, a movie was starting, could sometimes be confusing.
WOW! Right through their house! That’s another fascinating story.
Exactly!
Did the occupant children have different bed times?!?
Depended where their bedrooms were no doubt!
Really interesting Heather - thanks for this. As an ancient historian (retired) I used to need to explain the keeping of years, calendar months, weeks, and the hour of the day to students in a Greek or Roman context. What did the ancient Romans do, for example, with no AD/BC or BCE/CE? They dated "from the foundation of the city" (ab urbe condita), so 10 BCE would have been 743 AUC, or they used the names of the consuls (e.g., in the consulship of Cn. Pompeius and M. Crassus, i.e., 70 BCE) that was kept on a list by the pontificales or chief priests. As for the month, it was lunar, so 28 days with inter-calendar days added to keep up with the solar year. As for hours, that's quite confusing - the day began at sunrise and the Romans referred to "the x hour of the day", so in June that would be quite early in the morning since the first hour of the day was the first one after sunrise, in December, conversely, quite late. In Greece the situation is even more complicated, and I have a busy day . . . .
Another chapter in American history that I didn’t know — and a treat for the imagination, picturing the moment such a change went into effect.
In our modern world we are governed by time: time to rise, time to eat, time to work or study, time for leisure, friends, and family. Schedules can be so rigid that we "make time" for extraordinary endeavors. Still, standard time does give us order in a world where mechanical devices can move us across vast distances in a matter of a few hours. Fun lesson. Thanks, Heather.
This is a place to tell about the Time
Museum in Besançon. There I learned that the clocks on French church towers were put there by Louis XIV so his subjects would know when to take their medicine. We are obsessed with time. Interesting and ancient.
Thank you Heather....for this wonderfully worded and fascinating story on the development of standardized time across the US....a beautiful break from the increasingly disheartening daily US political news. Just love your columns and enjoy each one from our home in Sheboygan WI. Linda and Rick Reiss