It is a problem resulting from the common programming practice of using only two-digits to store the year in software. The practice dates back to the 1950's when computers began to be used for business purposes. Using two digits for dates is benign and causes no harm so long as the next year is a larger number than the current year. For example software applications that use dates have no problem with the sequence of 95,96,97,98 and 99. However, when the century ends, the year 2000 will be stored as 00. Calculations or decisions, based on dates or time periods, can go seriously wrong.

Inregard to personal and small business computers, the problem is three fold.

Firstly, the computer hardware must report the current date correctly. Many computers, especially early Pentiums, 486, 386 and 286 based machines, will on the 1st January 2000

Revert back to 1 April 1980 or some other date. Thus creating a potential problem until the correct date

Before I started testing, I looked on the Internet to see what Microsoft said about WinNT 4.0, Win95 and the y2k problem. On this site, there are links to all Microsoft Products. For WinNT 4.0, there were 4 problems Microsoft listed as known problems. They are as follows:

the year, instead of four digits.

4. When you define a custom property to include a date type in the Microsoft Office the year may not appear correctly. For example, in Word, if you click properties on the file menu, click the custom tab, click date in the type field, enter a value of 01/01/01, and then click add, the date appears as 01/01/1901 rather that 01/01/2001. Taken from document Q183125 from Microsoft tech support for Year 2000

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Approximate Word count = 1390
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)