A very common quick fix for the Y2K problem is rippling into 2020 as the adjusted dates run out, affecting video games, parking meters, and more.

Outsiders have dismissed Y2K as a nothingburger because they don't understand how much work went into averting it.

The crisis programmers really fear is in 2038, when systems running C will run out of dates.

Twenty years after we thought we were in the clear, New Scientist reports that a desperate fix for the Y2K bug is leading to a new series of crashes in 2020. In a process called date windowing (as opposed to windowing as in Windows), programmers in 1999 shifted their systems so that dates up to ‘20 would transfer to be in the 2000s instead of the 1900s. Affected systems include New York City parking meters and the game WWE 2K20.

Back in the late ‘90s, date windowing was an extremely common response to the upcoming Y2K crisis—New Scientist includes a statistic that 80 percent of machines updated in ‘99 used date windowing—but the fix is not permanent at all. Twenty years sounds like an eternity in terms of daily life as a user of computers and now smartphones, tablets, the internet of things, and so on.

But you’d be surprised how many systems still run on old programming. These languages aren’t deprecated in the technical sense, but their unexpectedly long lives have created problems with things like dates. The COBOL language is over 60 years old, but had a new release in 2014 to go with the fact that it still powers the vast majority of both ATMs and business transactions.

The New Stack wrote in 2014 that COBOL was handling $3 trillion every day. Could the people designing the language in 1959 have predicted that they needed to build it for the next millennium? But these were the questions facing programmers in the late ‘90s. The scale of what they had to update in just a few years was astonishing. They chose to shim the 2020 fix into far more systems than they should have as a way to just keep the lights on.

Now, those systems believe we’re back in 1920. When the titular “date window” ends, the machine cycles back to the beginning, because numbers 20 through 70 are attached to the 1900s. So far, affected systems are being repaired pretty quickly, and some companies sent fixes before the new year. But the longer legacy systems exist, the fewer experts there are, and the more the general coding paradigm moves away from how these older languages worked to begin with.

Because of the hard work of programmers over several years, much of what the general public was told about the Y2K crisis didn’t come to pass. This has caused ill-informed hot takes, like Geoffrey James’s ironically itself fake news indictment of Y2K as “fake news,” which lit up programmer internet with outraged responses. One compared the faulty argument to suggesting that polio was never a problem long after a vaccine functionally eradicated polio.

She also mentioned Popular Mechanics’ own oral history of the leadup to Y2K, where programmers and computer scientists explain how the problem was introduced into languages because of strict limits on storage. Faraway dates like those on canned goods were one early sign that something was going to go wrong. A British IT professor shared an example from a grocery chain. “The goods inward software checked that it was in date, recognized 01/00 as January 1900, and rejected it as already over 80 years old,” he said.

Fixes for Y2K20 are already on the ground in many cases, but programmers are already flagging 2038 as the next potentially huge date-related problem. The year 2038 problem , as it’s known, affects the C programming language, which was first released in 1972 but forms the bulk of tons of things we all still use every day, including all mainstream desktop and mobile operating systems, many video games, and major database protocols like SQL.

The C language is set up so that its version of Y2K comes in 2038. Our best-case scenario is that a lot of programmers work really hard between now and then to mitigate what will otherwise be a disaster. Then, in 2039, some new Geoffrey James can say it was all a dream and a hoax, and we can read about it on our operating systems that, as a total coincidence, are still working.

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