The 2000 Year problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium Bug or the Y2K Bug was a problem for both digital (computer related) and non documentation and date storage situations.
The (French) sign reads 3 January 1900 instead of 3 January 2000
’Millennium Bug‘’ this is the name given to the problem caused by hardware and software which use only the last two digits of the year rather than all four. Essential computer systems could be vulnerable when they tick over from ‘’99’’ to ‘’00’’ – making some of them interpret the year as 1900.
Estimates of the damage that could be caused rang from global meltdown to minor irritation. Some people have gone as far as to take measures to prepare themselves for the collapse of civilisation.
The Millennium Bug was specifically a programming problem. It was the result of a combination of a space issue as well as a lack of forward thinking on the part of the programmers back in the 1960s and 1970s. During the beginning stages of the computer programming, memory and other storage space were scarce and expensive, so saving characters were priority.
Programmers were writing business application code using COBOL (common business oriented language) and RPG (report programming generator) to run on mainframes.
Programmers stored dates in the form of DD/MM/YY which involved a total of six characters, automatically sorting in an ascending order. Each one of those characters equals