when the calendar clicks from '99 to '00, we will experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on January 1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions of computerized systems, we will begin to experience our computer-dependent world in an entirely new way. We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millennium heralds the greatest challenge to modern society that we have yet to face as a planetary community.

7). See dates (08-10-99) (06-30-98)... (09.05.99), 11:09 p.m.

Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have vendors, suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of course, managed by computerized data bases.) For Y2K, these highly networked ways of doing business creates a terrifying scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect itself from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal systems. General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary focus and diligence to bring their manufacturing plants up to Year 2000 compliance, (based on their assessment that they were facing catastrophe,) has 100,000 suppliers worldwide. Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly impossible, but what then do they do, with all those vendors who supply parts? GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key supplier goes on strike. What is the potential number of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000 suppliers? (7)

GAO report finds Medicare systems 'severely behind'

And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name of efficiency. This leanness also makes the system highly vulnerable. In May of this year, 90% of all pagers in the U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the failure of one satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email to the appropriate addresses because bad information from there one and only central source corrupted their servers. (6)

Monday, Jan. 1, 2001 Century rollover. First day of 21st century.

For the last thirty years thousands of programmers have been writing billions of lines of software code for the computers on which the world's economy and society now depend. Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes "old, undocumented code written in over 2500 different computer languages and executed on thousands of different hardware platforms being controlled by hundreds of different operating systems . . . [that generate] further complexity in the form of billions of six character date fields stored in millions of databases that are used in calculations.(1) The Gartner Group, a computer-industry research group, estimates that globally, 180 billion lines of software code will have to be screened.(3) Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for a company to have more than

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3149
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)