Y2K: A real scare

It’s little over two decades since the world battled and won, perhaps the first ever ‘electronic war’. Almost straight out of a sci-fi horror movie, when the world expected imminent doom in the form of Y2K, or the Year 2000.

Some say it was a hoax and others term it an over-hyped problem, but many think that that was a perfect example of how a tech threat could be defeated if acted on time.

“There might be hype. But that doesn’t mean that there was no problem. It was a very complex problem,” said Kishore Yellamanchili, who played an important role in SEEC during Y2K days. SEEC, set up by first generation techies, made a big name in the industry for its Y2K-resolving solutions. The company raised $30 million on Nasdaq in 1997 and was acquired by Polaris in 2007 where Kishore now leads the insurance products delivery vertical.

He says the industries across all verticals started worrying about the Y2K problem right from 1995 and as D-Day approached, billions of codes were sieved to avoid a disaster. Those who woke up to the problem early on had slowly deployed newer languages, while those failed to visualise the issue stayed glued to the older technologies that put them on the edge.

An era of change

The episode had several takeaways for the world, but for India, it was much more. It proved beyond any doubt the ability of India to understand a problem, find tools, quickly train people in those tools and execute the task.

As the world had scored its win over the monster called Y2K, Indian companies found the opportunity to impose itself on the world of information technology.

Computer experts in 1980s had visualised that the world of computers and the one that’s built on them would crash in the year 2000. The premise was simple. The computer clocks world over were then built on the ‘ddmmyy’ mode unlike the present day system of eight digits ‘ddmmyyyy’. The six digit format (15-8-47 to denote the Independence Day) was the norm in computers. As the years progress, it suddenly occurred to computer gurus that the clock would show two zeros after the year (19)99.

What could be possible complications? The computer systems in the banks and insurance companies would have miscalculated your age. Say, if you are born in (19)90, the computer would calculate your age in ’99 as 9 after deducting 99 from 90. The following year, it would have assumed that your age as minus 9, which as you know would be ridiculous. That would have been disastrous for banks, satellite systems, scientific institutions, aviation industry and what not.

It was like the SkyLab scare that created havoc in the 1970s. People across the world lost sleep over the reports on the likely collapse of the rogue satellite that went crazy after severing connections with NASA.

Using tools, millions of lines of code were scanned by young techies to locate and change the ‘year slot’ in electronic content to four digits. It was not an easy thing to do. Any mistake would have caused more damage than the original problem of Y2K.

What it led to

Hundreds of companies, small and big, sprouted in those days, offering solutions to resolve the problem. Thousands of training institutes mushroomed in the fledgling IT hubs to train people.

“A few months of training would have made a fresh graduate saleable. A fresher could suddenly dream of his first foreign junket. The scarcity of human resources was so severe that managers would not know whether a particular employee would turn up the next morning,” says A S Murthy, Chief Technology Officer of Tech Mahindra.

“There would have been no offshoring (Western companies outsourcing certain IT-related tasks to India) as we see today, if there was no Y2K,” adds Murthy.

Murthy had just joined Satyam Computer Services (which was later acquired and absorbed by Tech Mahindra) when the Y2K scare began to spread.

Several Y2K clients were converted into regular clients of IT firms for other outsourcing jobs such as maintenance.

JA Chowdhary, former Managing Director of NVDIA and the first Director of STPI in Andhra Pradesh, says that Y2K was no hoax. “It was a real problem but perhaps the impact magnified. It helped the Indian IT industry to emerge out of wilderness. They had seen our capabilities. The US Government had begun to issue more visas to us,” he said.

The Y2K problem had brought another dimension. It allowed people with non-IT backgrounds to test waters and shine. BK Mishra, who now heads the Energy and Utilities vertical at Tech Mahindra, is one such example. An electrical engineer by education, Mishra had been roped in by Satyam to fix a peculiar problem the Y2K had indirectly created. With the young techies shifting jobs like crazy, the industry suddenly found huge shortage of team leaders and team managers.

“They had come up with this innovative idea of hiring managers with no IIT or IIM backgrounds, train them in basics of IT and put them in leadership positions. This had paid off as it reduced attrition in this bracket. Those who joined then went on to become vertical and practice heads,” Mishra said.

Athelestan B Koilpallai, General Manager (Strategic Accounts) of Kumaran Systems, says Y2K was a real danger but its impact was hyped so much as if it was going to be apocalyptical – that planes will crash, that traffic lights will go cranky or lifts collapse. When these things did not happen many started calling it a hoax.

“At least I haven’t heard of any report where a firm lost heavily because of the flaw in computer clocks. Perhaps, the world has successfully responded and tackled the problem deftly,” says AS Murthy, who was among scores of tech mangers that weathered the storm.

> kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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