When the clock struck: revisiting Y2K
On 1 January 2000, ITWeb readers woke up to the reassuring headline: "No Y2K glitch reports in SA".
There had been, said ITWeb, no date-rollover issues at hospitals, the Post Office, in water or in agriculture. It was safe to go back to bed.
Throughout the night of 31 December 1999, a crack team of ITWeb journalists (myself and my colleague Iwan Pienaar) followed the line of a millennial midnight as it skimmed the globe, and updated the site at every significant point. Social media, live updates and rolling blogs hadn’t been invented yet, but we published dozens of separate articles that documented nothing much happening all over the world.
There were reports from New Zealand (all well), Australia (a bit of telecoms congestion), a transcript of a press conference in Japan (reports of trouble at nuclear plants were wrong), Hong Kong (all well), Malaysia (all well) and so on and on and on.
The lack of action was no surprise. From 1998, ITWeb had reported extensively on the often-heroic efforts of the IT community to prepare for Y2K – also known as the ‘Millenium Bug’. We knew, better than most, that all would be well. But the office had a fat leased line internet connection and the kind of high-spec computers and multiple big-screen TVs no young journalist could afford at home – plus some huge UPS batteries, because you never know. For me, there was no better place to see in the Year 2000.
A personal history
I joined ITWeb in late 1998 as part of a big expansion (two new reporters), fresh from a live-coverage experiment so cutting edge it was featured in Wired.
The Mail & Guardian had been online for a bit, and in 1997 Moneyweb joined in, but that was about it – including in the technology space, where B2B coverage was very much a paper affair.
But things were moving fast. Even as VC money poured into this "internet" thing, South Africa was finally seeing payment on its post-Apartheid peace dividend. Big vendors locked out through sanctions were established, early internet pioneers were professionalising and scaling up fast across both consumer and enterprise ISPs, and the future was nothing but bright.
We shall not speak of how that optimism ended.
But the late ‘90s were not all online madness and Y2K prep, as the ITWeb archives show. The enterprise side also bloomed, as advances such as blistering workstation CPU speeds (600 MHz!) and super-fast leased lines (64 kbps!) opened up possibilities.
We had Sappi buying almost the whole SAP R/3 system, for the massive price of R70 million. We saw Clientele Life abandoning a DOS-based system for a database running on a dual Intel Pentium Pro server, while the fresh new Outsurance thought about going mainframe, but realised it could have Windows NT workstations talking to a Unix server instead.
Strange as all of that seems, you can also find ample proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same. My favourite example is Shoprite Checkers realising, in 1999, that it wasn't unique enough to require a customised warehouse management system, a story that will resonate with every SAP clean core advocate.
But yes, it was also about the buildup to the dot com crash, foreshadowed by events such as Woolworths buying a big chunk of an ISP as part of its ecommerce (EC) strategy – not to be confused with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which was a much less woolly concept.
The late 1990s gave us the promise of internet access funded entirely through advertising, and saw Nokia become the most valuable company in Europe (on the back of oh-wow products such as a phone with predictive text ).
In fairness to all of us who didn't see the writing on the wall, there was revenue; Kalahari.net hit R1.2 million in monthly turnover, and we saw the launch of ever-profitable "world first" online gambling.
In fairness to those of us who don't see any parallel between those days and today, there wasn't a vast amount of money in the system, though, just a belief that better tools would lead to greater productivity that would, through some magic, make for a sustainable return on vast investments.
Nope, definitely nothing to learn from there.