Y2K: Out of the Big Blue Sky

Lyrics © 1997 Stephen Savitzky. CC-by-nc-sa.\ To the tune of Out of the Clear Blue Sky by Dr. J. Robinson

Lyrics [pdf]

	Am	G
	Once in a darkened	office cube

	F	E
A	hacker peered int	o his tube

	Am	G
And	saw a vision	of despair

	F	G
Of	bugs and	crashes everywhere

	C	G
F	ollowed by cha	os and woe

	F	E	Am
F	rom arithmetic	overfl	ow.

	Am	C
The h	acker put a message on the N	et

	Dm	E
That s	aid ``you folks had better not	forget:

That soon''

Am

The century is ending at last

Am

And when it does your systems will crash

G

When date f ields overflow it will be long ago

Am

No way to be a hero

G Em E7 Am

And only printed paper will surv ive Y ear Z ero

The CIO of one large bank

Said ``customers have me to thank

For noticing that EBCDIC

In two-byte fields has 16 bits.

We'll update all our files in place

And not use up a bit more space.''

The hacker said ``I'm not completely sold--

I think I'll take my balance out in gold.

Because...''

A unix wizard said, ``You know

We solved that problem long ago

Our date and time are binary

Seconds since 1970,

We'll recompile in time enough

Don't bother me with mainframe stuff.''

The hacker said ``I don't think you should wait--

You only have till 2038.

Meanwhile...''

A tycoon with huge market share

Said ``Trust me, I control software

And I can say just what all fields

Contain and what a function yields;

So you can just sit back and wait--

It's fixed in Windows 98.''

The hacker said ``I'm sure you'll have it done

In time for Christmas in 2001.''

At last the year changed, on the dot

From 99 to double-ought.

Just as the hacker had expected

For clocks cannot be write-protected.

On New Years' morning people woke to groan,

``Oh dreadful day--if only we had known

But now

The century has ended at last

And when it did our systems all crashed

Our date fields overflow; now our programs won't go.

No way to be a hero

And only printed paper has survived Year Zero.''

\spoken{Yes calendars on paper have survived... the programmers and hackers have survived... VMS and Unix have survived... the beta release of Windows Zero is expected on January $1^{\rm st}$, 1970... }

Those fortunate people who have not encountered the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code will want to know that ``EBCDIC'' is pronounced ``{\sc ebb}-suh-dick.''