Year 2000

(Y2K, or "millennium bug") A common name for all

the difficulties the turn of the century may bring to computer

users.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s the turn of the century looked so

remote and memory/disk was so expensive that most programs

stored only the last two digits of the year. Those which will

still be in use will produce surprising results after 2000.

They may believe that 1 January 2000 is before 21 December

1999 (00<99), they may miscalculate the day of week, etc.

Some programs even used the year 99 as a special marker; there

are rumours that some car insurance policies were cancelled as

driving licence expiration year of 99 was used to mark a

deleted records.

Just how serious the "millennium meltdown" will be is difficult

to estimate. Although few programs written decades ago are in

use in their original form, blocks of code might have migrated

to newer software so tracking down all of them is next to

impossible. Even setting the computer's clock forward to

23:59 1999-12-31 and waiting to see what happens is only a

partial solution if that computer relies on other systems over

which you have no control such as customers' or suppliers'

computers.

And yes, the year 2000 is a leap year (multiples of 100 aren't

leap years unless they're also multiples of 400).

{PPR Corp Y2K FAQ

(http://www.pprcorp.com/y2k/y2kfaq_j97.html)}.

(1998-04-19)