A friend offered Walter Johnson, FOX ‘57 a job in 1998 that sounded too good to be true. Two years before the new millennium, a global panic was building around the supposedly impending Y2K crisis, a hypothetical failure of technology rooted in how early computers with limited memory managed dates. If the crisis proved real, the fear was that it could trigger catastrophic disruptions: hospitals, banks and airports all grinding to a halt. Walter’s friend had discovered a program Walter had written 25 years earlier that entirely sidestepped the central problem of Y2K and was prepared to pay Walter an extraordinary amount of money over the coming year and a half to help his company do the same.

Of course, Walter hadn’t written the code in 1973 because he anticipated a millennium-related crisis. He had written it that way because he was very good at his job, and because he understood that the standard approach of representing a calendar year with two digits (1998 as “98,” for example) would eventually cause problems. When the year rolled over to 2000, systems using that format would be unable to distinguish it from 1900. Walter did a bit of extra work, programming his code to internally store four digits for the year. When his friend encountered the program 25 years later, it was still running uninterrupted with a simulated date of 2001, having quietly avoided a problem that would later consume an entire industry.

“Theoretically, that program could run until the year 9999,” Walter explains. “I wrote the code to make sure that if it went past 2000 it would still work. It was a game for me. I never expected the program to last that long, but because I could, I wrote it so that it would run forever, theoretically.” He is quick to dismiss the idea that this reflected any special foresight. “I did it because I hated maintenance,” he says jokingly. “Once I wrote a program and it was done, I didn’t want to touch it again.”

Walter turned down the job offer almost immediately. He had been retired from IBM for six years and didn’t believe the work would be worth the stress, regardless of how much money his friend offered. In fact, he wouldn’t even let him name a higher offer. “With the stress, I could have had a stroke, and I wouldn’t be here,” Walter says. “When you’re writing code that somebody’s livelihood may depend on, there’s a lot of pressure.”

As gifted a programmer as Walter became, his path to the field was not straightforward. Born and raised in West Philadelphia, he had no idea that programming would lay in his future when he enrolled at Temple University. In fact, computer programming was not a course of study until much later. He studied accounting at the School of Business (later to become Fox) because he believed it offered his best chance of finding a job after graduation. (“There were lots of jobs for accountants in the newspaper,” he remembers.) Money had always been tight for Walter’s family. His parents were able to provide tuition for a semester and a half; after that, he paid his own way through school, delivering newspapers on both morning and evening routes until his final semester.

Walter can still name both of his routes down to the exact intersections where they began and ended, how many papers he delivered each shift and precisely how much the routes paid: between $35 and $40 a week. The work could be dangerous — his younger brother was hit by a car and suffered four compound fractures. Walter, however, made it through relatively unscathed.

On the academic front, his heart was not in his studies. Within a year and a half at Temple, Walter realized he didn’t enjoy accounting. When his grandmother accused him of not being smart enough for his classes, he felt compelled to prove her wrong. “I was not a great student,” Walter says. It didn’t help that he felt like a kid compared to most of his classmates who were Korean War veterans attending university in their thirties.