Y2K - Is it a threat or a promise?


I have been looking around Suite101.com's "Year 2000" Site Map as I am currently working on Year 2000 compliance at my place of work. I thought I would write about the "Millennium Bug," what things are most likely to cause problems and what YOU can do to see if you are personally at risk.

The Hype

You have all doubtless seen all the doom and gloom stories about Y2K and there are countless sites on the Internet that go into the problem in detail so I won't go through all that again.

However, are you aware of the key areas of the Y2K problem? Here's a list.

· Computer Hardware

This means your PC and, most importantly its BIOS (Basic Input Output System), the part of the computer that controls things such as time stamps on files (when you created or amended a file). It also includes the "Date" that is stored on your computer.

· Computer Software

This means the programs you run and how they handle dates. In simple terms, "DD/MM/YY" is not sufficient. The computer needs to take the century into account. The best way is to make all dates "DD/MM/YYYY" in format but for some systems, this means additional storage. The extra 2 digits might not seem a lot but when you have a database containing hundreds of dates per record and a couple of million records then this is REAL disk space! Not only that, more data means more processing and that can slow machines down.

An answer to this is to store dates as "DD/MM/YY" but have a century digit so that the computer treats (say) the year's "00" to "45" as the year 2000 and the rest as 1900. (So "01/01/02" would be 1st January 2002 whilst "01/01/60" would be 1st January 1960).

Anyway - the long and short of software is to ensure that dates are handled correctly.

· Non Computer Hardware

What? How about all those devices such as video recorders, microwaves, calculators and so on that are not "computers" in the usual sense of the term but they contain a computer "chip."

These devices are also at risk from failure when the millennium begins. It is THIS area that is the hardest thing for us users to "test." After all, do YOU know how to change the date on your microwave?

So what about all the doom and gloom people? Is there justification in what they say? Yes and No. Yes, in theory, all computer devices COULD fail after 31st December 1999. They could but by and large this is most unlikely.

The copyright of the article Y2K - Is it a threat or a promise? in PC Support is owned by Chris Cruickshank. Permission to republish Y2K - Is it a threat or a promise? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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