Y2K LESSON NOT LEARNED

William Duncan

During the early morning hours of April ninth 2009 someone removed four 250 pound manhole covers in the San Jose, California area and diligently cut underground fiber optic cables which interrupted tens of thousands telephone, Internet, and cell phone customers. This interruption includes the 911 service in the area.

Just after New Year's Eve of 1999 turned over to New Year's Morning 2000 on the International Date Line the news media began reporting that there was no noticeable wide area effect of the dreaded Y2K danger. The reports continued to be given as each new time zone entered the year 2000. There were a few local glitches but there were not the widespread shutdowns feared and the World gave a sigh of relief.

The fear Y2K gave us should have taught us a lesson. We are so dependent on modern technology that if there was a major disruption of our electronics it could be life threatening for millions. We have almost no backup. Most people do not realize just how thin and delicate we have made our lifeline.

When the year 1799 turned into 1800 there was no telephone, telegraph, or radio. Communications from one point to the other over a distance was usually done by a letter carried by a person on horseback and if they were overseas the message had to be sent by boat. This was not a lot different than when 1699 turned into 1700.

When 1899 turned into 1900 things had changed a lot. Telephone and telegraph had made it possible to send a message even overseas at nearly the speed of light. Radio was still in its infancy but was rapidly coming up as a major carrier of communications. Telegraph service had their wires and the telephone company had a different set of wires while the railroads had yet again another complete separate system of communication wires. So cutting all communications off to wide area would have been difficult.

By 1950 radio had come into its own. Radio had the advantage of not having a physical circuit connecting one point to another but instead used invisible electromagnetic waves, called radio waves, to carry the information. In 1950 the vacuum tube was the king as a means of making long distance radio, telephone, and even telegraphs communications more effective.

While the vacuum tube was king of the amplifiers, a contender was starting to vie for the throne. That was the solid state device we know as the transistor. The popularity and efficiency grew very rapidly. In 1958 and 1959 Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation worked separately to develop a way to incorporate several transistors together with other electronic components in a single small package that was first marketed in 1961 as the Integrated Circuit (IC).

The IC greatly increased the efficiency and reliability of electronic circuits while it reduced the cost and physical size of the devices in which they were used. By 1970 solid state (transistors and IC's) had taken over the vacuum tube's throne in most areas except in high power applications.

All of this may seem like just dry information to many it is important to understand how we got to where we are today and how our life line became so thin and delicate.

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