In 2000, computers will think itÕs 1900. What if theyÕre right?

by Jack Neely

In just 22 months, computers' two-digit codes will hit 00. Buckshot. Double-naught. Being the dumb machines they are, they'll assume they're subtracting 99 years instead of adding one. As far as computers are concerned, the year 2000 is the year 1900, and any nit-picking about what century it is irrelevant human nonsense. Convinced the anachronism will cause mass hysteria of catastrophic proportions, insurance companies are now offering expensive policies to cover the losses.

To me, there's a concern about this that goes beyond computers merely malfunctioning. You know as well as I do that America has a long tradition of doing whatever technology tells us to do. As soon as any new technology appears on the scene, we change our lives to make it feel welcome. When the automobile arrived, we rearranged our whole landscape, architecture, atmosphere, and lifestyles to suit it. In the last decade alone, Americans have spent trillions in car payments, insurance, gasoline, repairs—and endured foreign-policy embarrassments. Back in the '80s, we humans may have had our doubts about Saddam Hussein, but our cars liked him very, very much. They whispered that we should send him millions of dollars and our best military intelligence. So we did.

Americans follow technology's lead, even when technology's advice is irrational. For that reason, I don't doubt that if computers tell us it's really 1900, well, it will indeed be 1900. Computers will make it so.

It'll be an adjustment for most of us, so it's urgently important to ready ourselves for the likelihood that in less than two years we'll be living in the late Victorian era, the McKinley Administration, the Gilded Age.

So as a public service, here's a quick primer to life in 1900:

* You'll find it fairly easy to get the hang of reading the front page of the Journal & Tribune. Little of the world news will seem unfamiliar: violence in South Africa, unrest in Bosnia and the Philippines. However, you might be surprised that socialist and even communist aren't bad words, even in Knoxville where socialists often give well-attended speeches. Nihilists and anarchists—those are the bad guys. By the way, if you meet a guy named Leon Czolgosz, speak softly and give him a wide berth.

* You'd better drop by the barber shop. Mustaches, popular for 40 years, are, like, skidoo. Beards you see mostly on elderly judges, professors, and Civil War veterans. Long hair for men is considered old-fashioned; if you're a man with long hair, it's most likely long gray hair.

* Then go by the haberdasher's and get you some real clothes. If you show up in 1900 dressed as you are now, they'll take you for an uneducated wage slave and send you into the mines. But you can get a pretty good three-piece suit for a sawbuck. Ask the clerk's help and select your wardrobe carefully.

* Popular music's a combination of sentimental piano ballads, ragtime, Sousa marches, and minstrel-show blues. Here in Knoxville, it's mostly rich people who have record players. But if they have a few nickels in their pockets, they've got dancehalls and saloons and Vaudeville music and comedy at Staub's. You've never seen a radio. Motion pictures are a novelty you might occasionally see at the vaudeville houses. There aren't any permanent movie theaters in Knoxville, but there will be soon.

* A very few have automobiles—some of them homemade. In Knoxville, bicycles outnumber them about 1000 to one. Even some people who aren't rich ride bicycles, both the big-wheel variety and the more practical twin-wheel style.

* Electric streetcars will take you where you want to go. Most city streets are paved, but out of town you hit dirt. Pretty much the only way you'll travel between cities is by passenger train. A few paddlewheel steamboats churn up and down the river, taking out excursion parties and so forth, but they're already considered old-fashioned and romantic. Airplanes are purely fictional.

* Say you're one of the rich folks who have a telephone. If you want to be able to call everybody else in town who has a phone, you'll need to get two telephones with two lines and two phone numbers. There are two rival phone companies in Knoxville, and they'll have nothing to do with each other.

* Stay open-minded about food. Don't be startled if you're served creamed mammal glands, soufflé of brain, sliced tongue, or pig's foot cheese. Quail's sometimes served with feathered bird parts intact. If you're served squab—baby passenger pigeons—don't say, "Hey, I thought this thing was extinct!" You're not supposed to know about that.

* Well-dressed ladies wearing big hats and white ribbons will likely ask you about how you stand on the saloon issue, so you might want to think carefully about your answer. Knoxville has scores of saloons downtown alone, and they generate so much business that Mayor Heiskell is all for keeping them intact. We've also got our own corn-whiskey distillery and our own brewery, a huge factory churning out tens of thousands of barrels of beer each year. But the ladies wearing the ribbons blame poverty, homelessness, divorce, and the high murder rate on the fact that alcohol is legal; looking at their statistics about saloon violence, it's hard to argue with them.

* Knoxville's technically much smaller than it is now, but don't be surprised if it actually seems bigger and livelier. With tall smokestacks ringing the city and new "skyscrapers" going up all the time, crowded streets full of people asking for money, many of them selling stuff off their backs, some of them playing guitar or fiddle for change, it may seem more like Manhattan than Knoxville. The city supports two daily newspapers and four significant weeklies, including the Industrial Messenger and the Knoxville Independent, "The Only Labor Paper in East Tennessee." Knoxville has two roller-skating rinks, several baseball teams, and an endearingly erratic college football club. There are about 60 saloons downtown alone, many of them run by Irish immigrants, several clustered around Irish Town, a part of town far too new to call it the Old City.

* You'll need to exchange your currency. People in 1900 would be startled to see a real person depicted on an American coin; they'd probably take it for cheap coal-mine scrip. Pennies have Indian heads on them; everything else has a plump lady's profile. Drop by an antique store now, and on December 31, 1999, be sure your pockets are full of pre-1900 silver dollars.

* Those huge bowls suspending from thick cloth-bound wires are electric lights. Knoxville's proud of how brightly lit the city is at night.

* Women can't vote; don't even try. If you're a woman, you've already voted in your last presidential election for 20 years or so.

* In 1900, don't use any euphemisms at all. You'll just embarrass yourself. Repeat after me: Lakeshore Mental Health Institute is the Hospital for the Insane. A retirement community is officially called the Old Ladies Home. And be sure to make some good friends in 1900, or you'll wind up in the Knoxville Home for the Friendless.

* The surest way to prevent friendlessness is to join one of the dozens of secret fraternal orders. Most Knoxville men, black and white, belong to at least one: the Knights of the Ancient Essenic Order, the Phoenix Lodge of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, the German immigrants' Turn Verein, the Knights of Pythias, the Oddfellows, the Haymakers—who meet every Wednesday in Henson's hayloft. If you don't miss a meeting, in time, you might even be elected Keeper of Straws.

* If you're over 55, you're probably a Civil War veteran who attends meetings and campouts of either the Grand Army of the Republic or United Confederate Veterans. They seem to get along very well now. But the GAR's raising money for a Union monument they hope will be slightly taller than the Confederate one.

* If you go to church in Knoxville in 1900, you're much more likely to be a Presbyterian than any other denomination, even Baptist. You also drink more than you do now.

* Here are some people it might profit you to be nice to. Future opera star Grace Moore is a baby living with her family near the red-light district. Future author and critic Joseph Krutch is a 6-year-old boy living near UT. Future Hollywood Director Clarence Brown is 11, about the age of the kid in The Yearling. Catherine Wiley is 21, an aspiring impressionist.

The great paradox is that the turn of the century that our computers are anticipating is a time when they don't exist. On Jan. 1, 2000/1900, your computer may start to behave something like an adding machine or an Olivetti typewriter. Or, perhaps, a stereopticon. Or one of those things on the front step that you can scrape your boots on. Of course, we can't be certain about that yet.