| Stands for the
year 2000. Because of the way some computer programs were written,
some people think that computers all over the world will turn their
clocks back to the year 0 or 1900 at this time. Some people even
think this will cause mass chaos all over the world. People are
working on making computers "Y2K compliant" so this doesn't happen.
The year 2000 (also known as
"Y2K") raised questions for anyone who depended on a program in
which the year was represented by a two-digit number, such as "97"
for 1997. Many programs written years ago (when storage limitations
encouraged such information economies) are still being used. The
problem was that when the two-digit space allocated for "99" rolled
over to 2000, the next number was "00." Frequently, program logic
assumes that the year number gets larger, not smaller - so "00" was
anticipated to wreak havoc in a program that hadn't been modified to
account for the millennium. |
