Definitions:
Dilated Cardiomyopathy - Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a condition in which the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber, is enlarged (dilated). As the chamber gets bigger, its thick muscular wall stretches, becoming thinner and weaker.
Mensa International - is the largest and oldest High-IQ society in the world.
Y2K is an abbreviation for the Year 2000.
In the 1990s, it came to be used for a computer related “bug” many feared would crash most computer systems worldwide.
This related to how date information was stored in computer databases.
This disastrous “bug” would be triggered as 12/31/1999 became 12/31/2000.
Here’s why they thought this.
When the first computers “MainFrames” were placed in service, the storage for the related data was extremely expensive. Today, in the 2020s, we take cheap and unlimited digital storage for granted.
Because of the high cost of this digital data storage, programmers were told to conserve as much space as possible.
For example, they sometimes limited first names to 9 characters, so Christopher would be shown as Christoph. Some of you may have experienced that, like I do still on my Driver’s License.
This tells me that the original driver’s license systems are still in use from decades passed when digital storage was at a premium.
The other data field they truncated to save space were dates.
So instead of 02/26/1949, which took up 8 characters, they could save money on storage by using only a two year date like this, 02/26/49.
That 2 character saving in data storage cost back then was astronomical.
No one thought ahead to the problem this would cause in the future.
Because as 12/31/1999 was going to become 12/31/2000, the computer systems were going to see 12/31/00, or 12/31/1900, 100 years off!
Imagine all the older worldwide computer systems that could be impacted.
Banking, hospitals, our entire military, satellites, payroll records, educational records.. the list was endless.
The fear was that complete chaos would ensue as the world’s information systems all ground to a halt.
Many years prior to this most companies and governments made programming changes to try to avoid the problem.
Some realized their systems had this issue too late and faced disaster.
This leads us to our story today.
Timmy Jenkins had been called a genius since he was five and by the age of twenty, in 1994, he was beginning to believe it.
He graduated from both Harvard Medical School and M.I.T that year, which no one had ever done before.
It was the happiest day of his life up to that point.
That was five years ago and he thought about how much had happened since then.
He was the current president of MENSA.
He had been pushed by his parents from the moment they realized he was different from the other children.
This made him feel like a circus freak from his earliest memories.
He was a dancing monkey everywhere he went for as long as he could remember.
He always felt forced to over achieve. He always felt he wasn’t good enough.
He had over 500 patents, mostly for medical devices.
He thought: “How sick is that, 500 patents for one person?”
His most popular was the VentriPod. This treated the formerly untreatable Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM). It used the electrical current of the human body to power itself, never needing batteries to be replaced or charged.
It was a miracle.
It had a microprocessor with a hard coded program on the master chip. Timmy did the programming himself as he did not trust anyone else to do it.
This device took over the work of the damaged left ventricle and would allow people to live a normal life for decades, instead of facing certain death.
The most severe cases of DCM got the VentriPod first, as their deaths were certain in only a matter of weeks.
As of today, there are exactly 568,146 people worldwide whose lives were saved and unnaturally extended with the VentriPod.
12/31/1999, New Year’s Eve. 11:55pm.
Dr. Timmy Jenkins sits alone in his office at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan.
He is weeping, his head buried in his hands.
He couldn’t believe that this was happening.
When he awoke this morning, his programming error was there in front of his mind.
You see, the date and time fields were critical to the VentriPod’s operation.
Timmy’s program had a Y2K problem.
In his haste, he made his year field only two characters, instead of four.
He sat in front of his computer with the VentriPod simulator on the screen.
He set the time to 11:59:30 12/31/99 and started the simulation.
30 seconds later, when the time rolled over to 00:00:00 12/31/00, the simulated VentriPod completely shut down as it couldn't understand the date.
This meant that when midnight really strikes, 568,146 VentriPods installed in 568,146 human chests were all going to shut down.
Most of them would die within minutes.
There was nothing he could do about it.
He was helpless for the first time in his life.
He was failing for the first time in his life.
The real time clicked to 00:00:00 12/31/2000.
Every installed VentriPod worldwide stopped working at the same time.
