Cobol Humor and Y2K

 

Thank you LinkedIn.

I was still in tech journalism during the Y2K panic. One of the major sources of the panic was hundreds of millions of lines of Cobol code with two-digit year codes, meaning they would interpret Jan. 1, 2000 as Jan. 1, 1900.

No planes dropped out of the sky at the start of the new millennium, no ATMs stopped dispensing, no traffic control systems set all the lights green. Of course, none of those systems were based on Cobol, but tech journalists have never let facts stand in the way of a good panic that boosts circulation.

Many have called Y2K “fake news.” Nope. The panic, AKA “The Cobol Programmers Full Employment Act of 1999,” caused every firm with two dimes to rub together to deploy armies of the Cobol-savvy to comb through 30-year old software, looking for dates to fix. And, for the most part, they did it. And all that code became 31 years old, with no other changes.