The Y2K Bug, Part 2

Malicious Life

Technology

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the waning years of the 20th century, amid growing anxieties about the turn of the millennium, one man, Robert Bemer, observed the unfolding drama from his remote home on King Possum Lake. A revered figure in computing, Bemer had early on flagged a significant, looming issue known as the Y2K bug, which threatened to disrupt global systems as calendars rolled over to the year 2000. This episode delves into Bemer's life during this critical period, exploring his predictions, the ensuing global frenzy to avert disaster, and the disparate views on whether the billions spent in prevention were justified or merely a response to a misunderstood threat.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.
0:01.0	Welcome to Cyber reasons's malicious life. My God, he thought, looking at his newspaper. They didn't take my advice.
0:36.0	Robert Beamer, legendary computer engineer, father of Askey, the escape key,
0:41.0	backslashes, curly brackets, and Kubul, the common business-oriented language, read newspapers from his beautiful cliff-top home in rural Texas
0:51.0	along the Whiting King Possum Lake.
0:54.0	We mentioned this place in our last episode.
0:56.7	We didn't necessarily focus, though, on its darker side.
1:00.4	The reason he moved to such a remote area, the reason he kept its location a secret for years.
1:07.0	In the early summer of 1999, he did give his address to reporters from the Washington Post who took the long journey out to visit.
1:22.0	By this point, interviewing Bob was a bona fide cliche in their industry.
1:27.0	He was in every paper because everybody was talking about Y2K and he was the guy who knew about it first.
1:34.8	Not to mention, he designed the language,
1:37.0	running many of these systems.
1:38.8	People were worried would fail.
1:41.1	So everyone wanted to know. this older statesman, this oracle, as worried
1:46.7	about Y2K as Daywell. They would not be comforted by his answer.
1:53.0	They finally arrived and met the man, now 79 years old with grey mustache and receded hair,
2:00.1	skin wrinkled and freckled. Before they even got an interview, the reporters wanted to know about the house.
2:07.2	Quote, our first question is why the heck he recently moved from a big city all the way out to East Bumbleflop, USA.
2:16.0	It's a good place to be next New Year's Eve, he says.
2:20.0	From a kitchen drawer he extracts
2:22.5	two glass cylinders about the size of pneumatic tube capsules
	...

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