No event since the destruction of the city of Pompeii by a volcanic eruption has had this kind of potential to affect the globe. With less than 2 months until the year 2000, two small digits may turn January 1, 2000 from one big celebration into a worldwide technological nightmare. On the edge of the new millennium, a common defect in the world's computer systems has spawned a fear that has governmental and industrial powerhouses trembling. The year 2000 computer problem, labeled the "Y2K bug", is unlike any other problem in modern history for several reasons. It will occur at the same time worldwide, time zones withstanding, and it affects all languages and platforms, hardware and software. The world is going to come to a "virtual" halt.

The year 2000 is not really a "bug" or "Virus", but is more a computer industry mistake. Computers are programmed to store the date in the following format: dd/mm/yy. This only allows 2 digits for the year. January 1, 2000 would be stored as 01/01/00, but the computer will interpret this as January 1, 1900 - not 2000. This two-digit date affects information manipulation, mostly subtractions and comparisons. For example: I was born in 1983. If I ask th

This is an interesting quote from an article I read: "the modern world has come to depend on information as much as it has on electricity and running water, In the 1970's, oil was the energy that ran our world's economy. Today it runs on the energy of information, to cripple the technological flow of information throughout the world is to bring it to a standstill." Peter de Jager, Y2k Expert.

The most straightforward approach to solving the "Y2K bug", I think is simply to change the 2-digit date fields to 4-digit ones. This would be the only complete solution to the problem giving everybody another 8 millenniums before they have to worry about it again. The only problem with this approach is the cost. I have heard that the estimated cost per line of code to be between $1.50 and $2.00. It is not uncommon for a single company to have 100,000,000 lines of code. That is ridiculous. There has to be another way. People actually think that there is a program that you can start running on Friday Night... everybody goes home, and Monday morning the problem has been fixed. The Silver Bullet is the term used to represent the creation of an automatic fix for the y2k problem. To quote Peter de Jager, "Such a tool, would be wonderful. Such a tool, would be worth billions of dollars. Such a tool, is a na ve pipe dream. Could someone come close? Not very... Could something reduce the problem by 90%? I don't believe so. Could it reduce the problem by 50%? Possibly... but I still don't believe so. Could it reduce the workload by 30%? Quite likely."

However, the year 2000 problem is not only limited to what happens with computers between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000. There are other important dates that are a factor. September 9, 1999 (09/09/99) has bee

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Approximate Word count = 1194
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)