Time Bomb Y2K, review: the millennium bug wasn't the end of the world – it was a warning

Jasper Rees
Sun, 31 December 2023 a

Tony Blair at the Barbican Centre, speaking to the Tackling the Millennium Bug conference in 1998 - Paul Grover

In 1977 a young operator at IBM called Peter de Jager spotted that their computer systems referred to the year with two digits. When the clock ticked round to 01/01/00, he calculated, every computer system in the world would think it was 1900. “Don’t worry,” chortled the short-termists in management, “it isn’t going to happen for another 23 years.”

That the meltdown didn’t happen is partly down to the constant warnings of de Jager, who by the late 1990s was touring the globe like an Old Testament prophet. Comparing the storage-sparing use of two digits as an original sin, he foretold doom, catastrophe and meltdown while wearing a cartoon Armageddon tie. “If you can’t laugh at this,” he reasoned, “we may as well all slash our wrists.”

If you are so minded, there was much to snigger at in Time Bomb Y2K (Sky Documentaries), which in the style of Adam Curtis knitted together archive footage to relive the story of millennial panic in America. The computers look clunky, the haircuts dorky and the Backstreet Boys are asked for a quote about imminent Armageddon. Hey, the past is a foreign country – they do things hilariously there.

But this was a warning from history whose portents feel all too grimly accurate. Yes, as in The Day of the Jackal, you already know how it ends. The boffins averted disaster at midnight, so all those people learning Stone Age whittling skills or going back to the land could join the 21st century after all. But other fears for the future were merited. Computers really do know everything about us and really have spawned de-socialised screen addicts and free-speech maniacs. Meanwhile the religious wingnuts and government-hating militias who spied an opportunity in the threat of Y2K have only got louder and scarier.

The state-of-the-nation snapshot ends with a series of wise children sharing their hopes at the turn of the millennium. “This hasn’t been a great century,” squeaks a kid in orthodontic braces. “Fix the world, don’t screw it up.” The next day, Putin became president of Russia. The bug turned out to assume human form.