About four years ago, a new "pop" headline came hot of the press rumoring something about home computers having problems when the year 2000 hit. "The year 2000, that's six years away," people thought. Many believed in six years it would be fixed. Thus, the headline got thrown into the archives along with egg yolks being high in cholesterol and the FBI and the CIA being against each other. Well, today the computer problem has resurrected itself. The downside is that, the second round of "hype," as some have called it, is being looked upon less seriously than before.

What is the problem anyway, what's the big deal? Many have asked this question without a definite answer, weakening any bit of concern. Here it is put simply. All computers contain small processors that contain a current date. This processor comes in millions of different types and has been for close to 30 years. These processors are responsible for simple and complex operations and in some cases, for recording data. All of these functions require dates to perform. Well, the problem hits

Today, every single utility and good we buy at the store will be affected if something isn't done. Every piece is so inter-connected that even minor failures could lead to big failures. This was just proven in San Francisco. Close to 1,000,000 people lost power when a construction crew tripped a breaker 40 miles from the bay area. According to the North American Electric Reliability Council, all of North America is powered by more than a thousand powerplants. These are all joined together at 4 main grid stations to prevent brownouts if one plant goes down. However, if something should happen to a few power plants, or even worse one of the grids, up to 200 million people could be without power. In fact, they would be left without any utility for that matter since gas, water and telephone companies require that same power.

Many believe that the public isn't being revealed the facts intentionally. They feel that the government is keeping it quite to prevent widespread panic. If fear spread that business could collapse worldwide due to Y2K, there might be a preemptive collapse due to a crash of stock markets and banks. It's a "lose: lose" situation. Even if 20% of investors pulled their money out of the U.S. stock markets, there would still be a complete collapse. This report has been made several times by different market analysists. Another worst-cased scenario would be if everyone wanted to pull cash out of banks. Currently there is only 4% of the actual secured amount is out in currency. This leaves every America

Some common words found in the essay are:
FBI CIA, Technology August, North America, Social Security, Argument Mankind, President Clinton, Y2K IBM, PC's Mainly, Francisco Close, amount currency, stock markets, processors contain,
Approximate Word count = 1028
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)