The host of Missing Richard Simmons talks about his new podcast which examines the millennium bug and the people who took Y2K seriously
When Dan Taberski began putting together Surviving Y2K, his new podcast about the millennium bug, he ran into a problem. “I was trying to get some of the bigger players to talk to me, to do due diligence,” he explains over the phone. “People who worked for years and years on the Y2K bug, heads of committees and so on. Those people are really reluctant to talk, because they feel really burned. They feel like they spent years of their lives to try to solve a problem that everybody said after it was over: ‘Oh you just made it up.’ It’s a thing that people think is kind of a joke now: the disaster that never happened.”
While it might seem a source of embarrassment 18 years later, at the time the millennium bug was an emergency that consumed the globe. A minor glitch relating to the way microchips processed dates ending in the digits “00”, it was predicted by some experts to cause a cataclysm, bringing down financial markets, power grids and critical national and international infrastructure. Governmental committees were formed and enormous expenditure was raised to tackle the crisis. And, what’s more, this potential doom coincided with the millennium, a date fraught with symbolism and portents. “That confluence that really scared the bejesus out of people,” says Taberski. “And made them do things that they wouldn’t have normally done.”
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