the new millineum?

Question

What was the whole scare all about when the year 2000 came?

Answer 1

Back in the old old days of computers (ie the 1960s!) memory was VERY expensive. Because of this programmers stored dates in an encrypted form with only 2 digits for the year code with the assumption that a 19 went in front. Hence when 2000 rolled around a lot of computer systems would think that it was actually 1900 rather than 2000. So if you retired in 1995 at 65, come 2000 the computer paying your social security would stop because it thought you were -30 rather than being 70.

Airplanes would fall out of the sky, tall buildings would spontaneously collapse and the world would crash into the sun. All because somewhere the was a computer involved.

Most of the programmers knew about this and had put memos in saying that this needed to change before 2000 rolled around, but this was always low priority and nobody actually allocated time and resources until the last minute. At which point all the programmers did what they needed to do and fixed everything on the all important systems and absolutely nothing happened.

The big misconception over the Y2K issue was that the programmers in the 50s and 60s were stupid for using a 2 digit date. They were not, they knew exactly what they were doing and why. And they also knew and anticipated the consequences at the time.

Answer 2

they say year 2000 has a potential bug to computers,, since computers understands the year with a 2 digit number.. example 1999 = 99, since 2000 = 00., they thought it would do some conflicts or bug to computer. because the counting restarted to 00. And because many countries have relied to computers controlling their missiles, rockets and other weapons of mass destruction which are pointed/directed to other countries, they thought it will be the end the world when the year 2000 bug happened. =)

Answer 3

lol, everyone thought computers were going to stop working... nothing happened though..