It is a couple of minutes before the midnight on 31st of December 1999. A huge mob of people is standing on the Times Square in New York. Many of them are drunk, everyone is happy, everyone is singing and dancing. Dressed up, in good mood, the people are waiting for the year 2000. Then the last minute of the year shows up on the large clock. People start to countdown - 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... Suddenly, the electricity collapses. There's dark all around. People start to panic. Fear and chaos starts to spread all along the East coast. As the time goes on, disorder and confusion rules in the whole United States, in the whole World.

This was one of numerous apocalyptic visions of the New Year's day. As the idea of the Y2K problem first appeared, these visions were more common and more often to see in the newspapers, magazines and TV shows. The millenium bug was never officially discovered and described. It just showed up as a hypothetical thing. Then the tests begun. Almost nobody paid attention to it that time. First in the 90`s it has become a proclaimed threat. Big businesses, governments, armies, but also households and small shops has started to worry. T

Stone, M. (2000, February 11). Y2K Patent Owners Seek Bucks. [WWW Document]. URL [2000, February 14]

Microsoft. (no date). The Year 2000 Challenge : A Guide for Home Computers. [WWW Document] [2000, February 14]

Another problem that could occur is in the number of weeks. Almost every year has 53 weeks, in some of them 51 or 52 are 7-day weeks. With a 364-day years the number of weeks would be exactly 52. Unfortunately, as the years have 365 days, none of them has less than 53 weeks. This year has one week more. Such event appears every 28 year, so it means that the last 54-week year was 1972, long before the today software and hardware systems were developed. Allegro Consultants, Inc. , who has been working on the Y2K problems for many years, claimed that many programs have coded only 53-week years. According to this company, some programs restrict the user to enter a number of week no higher than 53. Another proposed problem is that range-checking programming languages like Pascal could abort or use incorrect information. This could lead to failures and even damages.

However the reason was good, the investments were well excessive. According to Robin Guenier ,the executive director of Taskforce 2000, the cost of all this might have exceeded 400 billion British pounds sterling. He claims that only the World War II could cost more and that this amount of money is enough to pay up a big part of the developing countries debt. He also says that commentators are doubting the necessity of these investments or even that all this was a hoax.(Guenier, B. 2000) A really serious attention was paid but the money spent were excessive.

Businesses smelled a great opportunity and a big campaign started. Y2K was a topic of TV debates, newspaper articles, shows and advertisements. All this started to make pressure especially on computer users. The yellow label showing that this software package or this new computer is Y2K ready has become a standard. A number of testing programs and survival guides for the new millenium appeared on the market and enjoyed a high customers interest. The Internet was bombed with information about what horrible can happen to an old computer or an old microwave. All this created a great opportunity for software and hardware producers.

The year 2000, as it is a leap year, may bring more of the problematic situations. Another problem is that in this year there is an additional date - 29th of February. According to John Koskien of the Y2K`s Council's Information Coordination Center the glitches would affect mostly software. He said that there are numerous ways to make clear what is a leap year, there is a chance of some programs lacking the code to calculate the last day of February. This could affect banks ,payrolls and

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Approximate Word count = 1863
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)