| | | | Slang for Year 2000, generally used to refer to the "Year 2000 Problem" also incorrectly known as the "Millenium Bug". The issues foreseen, long before the turn of the last century, arising from the fact that legacy computer devices stored dates in a two-digit format which meant effectively that computers were unable to recognise the start of a new century correctly. This was done to save on data storage on the earliest computer records, when saving the extra 2 bytes required to store a date as "1950" for example rather than "50" was important! Computer memory was so expensive at the time as to strictly limit it's use so that most early data storage and processing was via punch cards that stored data in text format in 80 columns. With the new millenium a long way off and storage capacities tight, abbreviating the date seemed a sensible trade-off at the time. At the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve 1999 it was feared that when 31.12.99 rolled over to 01.01.00 systems would interpret that date as the 1st of January 1900. The concern was that this mininterpretation would have catastrophic effects in the worlds of finance, government and perhaps most worryingly, defence. Systems that had been in operation for many years - some still using data transferred from the original card-punch systems dating back many decades onto magnetic media, without correction of the date format (as software/hardware manufacturers had not generally allowed for it) - were facing failure with unknown consequences. Countless consultancies and hardware manufacturers offered Y2K-compliance services, fixes and new hardware and software, all designed to cope with the issue and designated "Y2K-compliant". In the end, with hundreds of billions of pounds having been spent across the globe to avert the predicted disasters, there were actually very few serious problems experienced. There is still a great deal of conjecture as to whether that was down to good forward planning or to an over-estimation of the seriousness of the problem. | | | |
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