A Time of Magic

In the run up to the Year 2000, panic was in the air as to what would happen if the computers around the world went AWOL at the stroke of midnight on December 31st 1999, yet nothing really happened, so what was all the panic about?

The panic really started in the mid-1990s as some computer systems needed to refer to dates in the 21st century and people discovered that they couldn’t as the dates were all held with only two digits. The net effect of holding the year as two digits was that, for the most part, the computer treated dates that should have been in the 21st century as though they were instead in the 20th century so 01 was 1901 and not 2001 for instance. Naturally, as 2000 approached more and more computer systems were hit with this problem and, eventually, this reached the attention of “the authorities” who duly hit the panic button.

Interestingly though 2000 is a special year as it is a leap year because it’s divisible by 400. In fact, the first problem with computers hit in 1900 because the guys writing Lotus 123 assumed that 1900 was a leapyear therefore you can have the 29th of February 1900 in Lotus spreadsheets (and indeed many others as for compatibility that mistake needed to be replicated). Since 2000 was a leapyear, things like video recorders were fine with two digit years as were most consumer electronic devices.

However, 2100 will be quite a different matter. On the offchance, that you are still using your somewhat obsolete 20th century video recorder at that point, it’ll let you have a February 29th when it shouldn’t. You might think that 2100 is a very long time from now but actually the first problem crops up in 2038 when Unix has a problem with dates and seeing as Unix is pretty prevalent you can probably look forward to a similar Y2K panic around then.

But why was 2000 something of a non-event? Simple really: thousands of programmers all around the world were working on fixing the problems with all the software in the run-up to it. Things did happen though: if you had your eye on the ATMs you may have noticed that a lot of them were rebooted a few minutes before midnight for example.

You’d think that Microsoft would consider compatibility of their products but it seems that they don’t.

Try running Outlook 2003 under Vista for instance and you’ll soon find that you can’t because it freezes constantly and is basically unworkable.

I can understand that they can’t check 100% of compatibility issues but Outlook is one of the more popular programs and it simply doesn’t work. Small compatibility issues I could understand, but not such a major one as this. It implies to me that Microsoft has over-reached itself if it hasn’t realised that this particular problem existed.

How come most other software is OK though? Essentially, that’s because other people write to the standards and don’t use undocumented features. My guess is that Outlook 2003 uses some undocumented feature in Windows XP that isn’t supported in Vista and uses it in a way that’s critical to the operation of Outlook thus making a patch more difficult to produce.

On the other hand, you could also look at this as a devious way to force people into upgrading to Office 2007.

In reality, I suspect that it’s a bit of both ie too difficult to fix and brings in more money.

In the Seven Days series, the time travel technology came with the limitation that they could only go back at most seven days which, of course, knocked out all the normal time travel tricks that various pundits have came up with.

However, if you think about it, chances are that if/when someone does build a time travel machine then it almost certainly would have limitations along those lines. More than likely the first experimental use will involve travel back/forward just a matter of seconds or minutes rather than centuries. My guess is that it will have limitations for quite a while as the technology is worked on. After all, the first plane didn’t go terribly far and the top speed of the first car was a fairly sedate 10 miles per hour.

Chances are too that, regardless of who develops the technology, that it will be grabbed by some government organisation because, let’s face it, time travel would be a pretty serious weapon in the hands of the “wrong people” (whichever way you define that).

Anyway, let’s suppose that we do have such a technology and that we can’t go back more than seven days (in the absence of any logical way of deciding what the real limit might be initially). Would it be any use?

Perhaps the best example of how you might use it would be to prevent 9/11. After all, that was an event that could have been stopped had the relevant information been available as little as a day ahead of time. Or could it? Were the planes used the only ones with terrorists onboard? How do we know that there weren’t more people who would have boarded other planes for a similar attack later the same day but couldn’t as everything was grounded? We could go on for ages with such assumptions, but let’s assume that those were the only planes that would ever have been involved.

Had the technology been available then, would it have been used? Your first reaction is probably “yes, of course”. Think about the implications if it had been used though. Yes, thousands of people would have been saved that day, but that single event changed a number of significant events afterwards. Wars were started based on the premise that they had to be to prevent further 9/11s, security in airports around the world was tightened up presumably preventing various attacks, more significantly perhaps the public attitude towards terrorism in America changed dramatically making it quite dangerous to be labelled a terrorist (hence the likes of the IRA downing tools for example).

In fact, what you’d really need would be the capability to analyse the full impact of removing 9/11 from history before you said “let’s erase that event”.

If you were a conspiracy theorist, you might wonder how come there don’t appear to be any events in the recent past where a Seven Days style time travel device could have been used (for that matter, how come the series was cancelled just as it seemed to be getting closer to reality). All we’ve had of late have been ongoing events that look rather difficult to resolve and certainly going back seven days wouldn’t fix any of them. Interesting, eh?

Anyway, forget about jumbo jet time travel capability and think more Wright brothers and you’ll get closer to what the very first time travel machine will be able to do.