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Y2K -- and why not. Bugged? You Don't Know the Half of It.By Rick Horowitz "Doom!" cry the doomsayers. (That's why they're doomsayers.) "Ha!" say I. "Disaster ahead!" they shout from every rooftop that will have them. "Relax!" I reply. "There's absolutely nothing to worry about." Nothing for me to worry about, that is. Let the rest of the semi-civilized world fret the arrival of the dreaded Y2K, that moment awesome and awful when the year 1999 becomes the year 2000 and computers everywhere rise up on their little putty legs and say, "Huh?" Planes won't fly. Power won't flow. Banks will lose interest. Life will lose meaning. Those are the predictions, anyway, and all because those high-powered little boxes -- twitchy backbones of society, pixelated networks of now -- won't be able to tell the difference between January 1, 2000, and January 1, 1900. Except, of course, for my computer. My computer thinks it's 1982. This is how old my computer is: The hip chip right this minute is the Pentium II. Before the Pentium II, there was the Pentium MMX, and before that, the original Pentium. Before the original Pentium, there was the 486 chip. Before the 486, there was the 386. And before the 386, pretty much back at the dawn of time, PC-wise, there was the 286. My chip is older than that. This has its advantages. My computer has been thinking it's 1982 since sometime in the mid-1990s -- it just decided one day that the current decade was too much for it, that it preferred an earlier, simpler time. It decided, and it reset its internal clock to make it happen. Truth be told, it had even toyed briefly with 1980 and 1981, but that didn't last. For my machine, 1982 was -- is -- the place to be. Was it looking ahead? Was it buying me time to beat back the millennium bug? It's only a laptop, but it's always been loyal. True, this little...quirk has its downside. I can't, for instance, ask my computer to copy all the letters I've written since, say, 1997. It doesn't realize that November's cheery note isn't ancient, that it was actually written a year after 1997. For that matter, it doesn't have a clue that there ever was a 1997. On the other hand, the archaeologists who go combing through my hard drive one day at the Horowitz Memorial Scrap Heap & Gift Shop will be simply amazed at my foresight. "He wrote about the president and the intern when?! But it hadn't even -- " They will call me "prophet." Among other things. My computer has seen to that. And more than that. Not only has my computer set things up so I can go gliding blithely into the 2000s, but just to ensure that it's still up and running when the time comes, it's recently started shutting down my hard drive at random moments to keep the thing from wearing out too soon. Totally true: I'll be zipping along at the keyboard, turning out the latest chapter of the Great American Novella or whatever, and suddenly -- nothing. What I haven't saved, I've lost. What I have saved, I can't get at until the machine finishes hibernating. Inconvenient? Occasionally -- but a pretty clever way to conserve energy for a new century, don't you think? And it's not just conserving energy, this electronic pal of mine; it's also been conserving memory. "Why waste valuable bytes on nothing?" it must be thinking, because lately it's stopped putting spaces between my words. That's right: My space bar is gone -- first a little at a time, and now just about completely; in fact, I'm writing this tale on someone else's machine. Of course, without a space bar, it's hard to produce coherent sentences. (No jokes, please.) Without a space bar, I can't give commands, can't make my computer do the things a computer is supposed to do. Inconvenient? Occasionally -- but I'm sure my computer has my best interests at heart, the same as always. I'm absolutely convinced that when the moment is right, when it decides that the moment is right, my computer will be open for business once again, and we'll move forward together, one man and one machine, ready to greet the future. 1983. Posted
12/29/98. Fresh stuff right here twice
weekly!
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