© Conrad Weisert, Information Disciplines, Inc.
September 11, 1999
NOTE: This document may be circulated or quoted from freely, as long as the copyright credit is included.
Just when we thought the torrent of hysterical misinformation about Y2K had peaked, we encountered a sillier issue: the "9/9/99" crisis. The magic date September 9 was going to cause havoc.
Unlike the Y2K crisis, which is real even if outrageously unnecessary, "9/9/99" was a pure hoax with no basis in reality. We don't know where it originated, but we do know, to our amazement, that it managed to fool nearly every major news organization. On NBC's Today program, Katie Couric solemnly warned that some "older computers" interpret a string of 9's as in "9/9/99" as "a command to shut down"! That evening the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer echoed her assertion, as did most other media. The following day, the same news organizations informed us that we had luckily gotten through the danger period with no reported computer failures. The country could breathe a collective sigh of relief.
No kidding.
Presumably, every one of those broadcasting networks and major newspapers has on its own payroll computing professionals who could have instantly informed their colleagues that this was a non-story. Was September 9 such a slow news day that otherwise responsible journalists felt justified in making a crisis out of an unsubstantiated rumor?
I and a number of respected colleagues are very familiar with many of what Ms. Couric called "older computers". To the best of our considerable knowledge not a single one of those computers interpreted a string of 9s in a data field as a "command" to shut down or to do anything else. We know of some application programs that used a string of 9s as an end-of-file flag, but certainly never in a date field. Furthermore, I know of no date-representation convention in which September 9, 1999, was represented as a string of consecutive 9s.
You didn't have to be a computer expert to have recognized the absurdity of the 9/9/99 story. You just needed enough curiosity and common sense to ask a couple of probing questions. Isn't that what journalists are supposed to do?
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