the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

BEWARE THE PROFITING PROPHET 197
Statue of Liberty, half buried in sand. But at the time, to very many peo-
ple, it seemed terrifyingly real.
And to more than a few, it also seemed like a sign from above. “The
Big Party is coming to an end,” millennium disaster prognosticator Don
Boys warned in his 1999 book Y2K. “Man has gotten too big for his
britches, and God is going to bring him down.” Steve Farrar, author of the
1999 book Spiritual Survival During the Y2K Crisis, wrote that the more
research he did on the impending technological disaster, “the more I saw
the fingerprints of God.”
Or rather, perhaps they were the fingerprints of economist Adam
Smith’s “invisible hand.” In the latter part of the 1990s, stirring up
such nightmares—and providing protection from the technological
bogeyman—became a growth industry, putting many millions of dollars
in the pockets of computer programmers, and spawning thousands of
books, videos, and other products, and even real estate developments.
“Terminal Screens, Dark as a Villain’s Heart”
Over the years, humans have imagined myriad potential causes for
the destruction of civilization, including divine retribution, a collision
with a comet, nuclear war, a viral epidemic, climate change, and annihilation
by space aliens. Compared to most of these exotic doomsday scenarios,
the Y2K software bug was utterly banal.
When computers became widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, they
used punch cards rather than magnetic hard drives to store programs and
data. To save space on the cards, programmers came up with an ingenious
solution. They wrote programs that had computers recognize years as
two-digit numbers, rather than as four-digit numbers. As early as 1960,
computer pioneer Bob Bemer, the father of the ASCII coding system for
text (and also the man responsible for the escape key) pointed out that the
two-digit date had a drawback. If dates had only two digits, when the 21st
century eventually rolled around, computers would mistake 01-01-00 for