First Signs Of Y2K Bug May Appear Tomorrow

April 8, 1999

Tomorrow will be April 9. It happens to be the 99th day of this year, and in computers that use the Julian calendar system which does not take months into account, April 9, 1999 is assigned the number "9999", just as the last day of this millennium will read as "36599". The number "9999" happens to also be a commonly-used termination code in computer programs (this is gleaned from what I've read on the subject). This means that this particular number tells a computer that it has reached the end of its assigned task, and instructs it to stop processing data. The ramifications of this are very similar to the Y2K bug; unintended and unexpected shutdowns of systems, deletions of files, loss of data, and the list goes on.

Fortunately, not many computer systems today use the Julian calendar. Instead, the overwhelming majority of them adopt the Gregorian calendar system which we are all more familiar with. But that only means that these systems have another "trigger date" to worry about: Sept 9, 1999 (again, interpreted numerically as "9999", the termination code sequence). For more information about Y2K-related trigger dates, read this ABCNews article.

While we're on the topic, Information Week estimated that the cost of fixing the Y2K problem for software alone would hover around US$600 billion, while others have predicted it would even exceed $1 trillion. This recent article by The Mac Observer adds to that an interesting observation:

"For $600 billion, you could buy an iMac for every man, woman, and child in the US, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, Greece and Guatemala with another 3,000,000 or so left over."

While we get lots of rhetoric by politicians, bureaucrats, and the like about the efforts to fight the Y2K bug, no one to my knowledge has so far offered any iron-clad guarantee that the Y2K bug will be eradicated at the global level in time. So (1)we don't know for sure if their efforts will bear fruit, and (2)we don't know if all this money will eventually have been spent on the biggest hoax/conspiracy/urban legend of all time. But we do know that either way, an indecent amount of money will have been spent trying to solve a crisis that could have been nipped in the bud, but wasn't. So spending all that money instead on iMacs isn't as crazy as it sounds.

Call it serendipity if you like, but every single Macintosh ever produced is immune to the Y2K bug. Your iMac (should you keep it that long) will tell time correctly until the year 29,940(!). Sometimes, I think the people at Apple Computer are a little crazy for doing things like that. I hope they stay that way.

FYI: Did you know that the Y2K bug was first publicly reported way back on Feb 13, 1984? (Barely a month after the first Mac was built.) That someone in South Africa realised the danger it posed back in 1986 but was warned to keep silent under the threat of a lawsuit? And that the problem only regained worldwide attention through this 1993 article published by Peter de Jager? Well, now you know.

Want to know more about Y2K? Then visit Gary North's Y2K website.

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