People talk about the Millennium Bug, but few actually know what it is and how big an effect is could have. Virtually everything is our society is vulnerable, from water and electricity to our phone bills and savings accounts. The Millennium Bug is a design fault dating back to the early days of computers and the way they store time and date. When you turn on your computer it knows the time and date thanks to a built in clock which memorises the date in the form of month/day/year. The problem is that when we go from 99 to 00 many computers won't know whether this means the year 1900, 2000 or the year that the computer was created. This may cause havoc on society, especially now we are so reliant on computers in our everyday lives. As a result the Millennium Bug may cause major concerns in health, unemployment, our finance system and personal safety.

Life and death situations could arise as hospital systems such as, life support and machines used to monitor a patients vital signs a

Another major issue is the disasters the bug may cause. Catastrophes could occur in the air if air traffic control systems fail. KLM Royal Dutch airlines has said it will not fly to certain destinations during the change over period. Both QANTAS and Ansett have established teams to look at all programs operated by their computers. Neither expects their services to be disrupted. Airlines such as British airways are so confident that the bug will have no effect on their systems, they are all going to fly in one of their planes during the change over period. On the ground computer sequenced traffic lights could have traffic in turmoil causing accidents and disruptions.

re among the systems at risk. Australian hospitals believe that as many as 60% of their machines may not work properly when the date rolls over. Local testing has identified the ultrasound machines and central monitors which have exhibited year 2000 failures. There could be significant threats to personal safety, for example if an ultrasound wrongly calculated the size of

Some common words found in the essay are:
Millennium Bug, Airlines British, Telstra AMP, Bill Gates, QANTAS Ansett, Stock Exchange, Royal Dutch, millennium bug, Society People, change period, millions dollars, personal safety, bug cause,
Approximate Word count = 703
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)