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The scientists predicted that IT systems. ranging from meteorological devices and hospital equipment to data systemsin governments, banks and airports, would fail. It was though embedded systems, which also made useof data logic, such as utilities and other crucial infrastructure, would collapse too.
Planes falling out of the sky. Computers somehow growing legs and attacking people. Blenders grabbing babies and- I’ll stop there. No, this isn’t the plot of a old anti-automation movie. It’s what happened when the clocks switched to the year 2000. At least, that’s what the media exploded the whole mess into. The media detonated a simple design oversight into a giant scare that caused people to spend millions of dollars on supplies they didn’t need. What sparked the controversy? Well, the original problem was simple, and would have never caused any difficulty. The problem was the way programs interpret date input. Everything will go fine, as long as you entered the century portion of the date, as in March 22nd, 2006. But, (in older computers) If you entered in in mm-dd-yy format, the computer would assume 19 for the century part. (Essentially, the simple solution would be to simply enter the century portion). Of course, the media added all sorts of it’s own effects to this simple problem. For example, planes would fall out of the sky. Supposedly, the schedules would roll-over to 1900, and apparently the plane would notice the date change, and since the flight wasn’t scheduled, the planes computer would force it the crash. Whoever thought of this deserves some kind of medal for being the stupidest human being on the entire planet. First off, if this were the case, we wouldn’t need airplane pilots, since the plane obviously knows how to fly itself. Secondly, the plane’s on-board computer probably doesn’t even keep track of the date at all. The simple statement of a simple “bug” (to be frank, it isn’t a problem at all. In fact, it’s simply a limitation of representing dates using 2-digit years. If computers where designed to overcome this limitation, (by tacking a 20 on the front instead) we would face the same difficulty, except it would be when attempting to enter a 20th century date. Of course, the moment the media got a hold of anything that could happen when the clocks rolled over, they bloated the entire thing out of proportion. Although this was probably the result of a few passes through people- word of mouth. People would add stuff onto it. For example: assume “Computers may have difficulty dealing with dates using two-digit centuries.After the year 2000” Was the original quote. A reporter takes this in, and send it to their editor (changing it) as “Computers may have problems handling dates after the year 2000”. The editor gets a hold of this sentence, and publishes it in the paper as “Year 2000 poses problem for computers”. Since the actual detail from the original quote has all but disappeared, readers are forced to fill in the blanks. The only people that fill it out correctly are programmers or hardware designers who are already aware of the problem, and understand how very insignificant it is. Others however, fill it in with the worst thing they can think of. Computer users- people who use computers, but don’t program them, and thus don’t understand exactly how they represent dates - make assumptions, and assume that the computer doesn’t even store the century part of date- that the mm-dd-yy format is the native format that the computer uses for dates, and that it simply places “19” in front of the year and converts the month to a string. They end up with the effect that computers will wrap around to 1900. The whole situation was more of a testament to how many people are less computer-literate than they think than it is a huge controversy that will kill millions when computers rise up, devouring human flesh while displaying prompts such as “please cut off your ear and place it in your floppy disk drive. Press any key to continue...”. Who was blamed for this crisis? Of course, the only people who actually understood all the fodder the media had been pumping out. The result? Their 100% accurate solution of “just enter the century portion of the date” was not only instantly attributed to their desire to leave the spotlight, but also scoffed upon by “experts” (these experts are the people who originally made the assumption that computers store year information using 2-digits). The experts were heroes. They pointed out to the media that programmers and hardware designers were setting the world up for disaster, and made them out to be a group of evil supervillians. Of course, the public ate this up. If January 1st 2000 wasn’t going to be “judgement day” by golly, then people had better die. These are the very same people who believe that people in positions of power where not only chosen by certain supernatural entities but that they actually have a IQ larger than a third their weight. The entire fiasco was simply a statement that a large number of people are still as scared of computers as they where in the 60’s and 70’s. In the computing industry, all was calm, until the people from the other side came in and founded several companies completely dedicated to look for “Y2K compliance” in applications and hardware, and declared “Standards” that must be met to me Y2K compliant. Of course, the empty-headed people in charge of government where in the same league (mostly) as those who founded those companies (who really have zero liability. What purpose could they serve after the year 2000 and what kind of ethics could they show it their very purpose is extinguished after the year 2000? This is like a company that sells vehicles simply going out of business once they reached a certain productive peak, leaving tens of thousands of people with 30000 dollar lemons. This is the similiar situation with aforementioned Y2K compliance institutions. These companies were a scam from the beginning- unlike a normal scam, however, this one was backed by the government.
Yay! Homework!
