The end of the World...Not!

Well the world didn't end, aircraft didn't fall from the sky and apart from the occasional blip that was quickly resolved, and the Millennium passed quietly for the world's computers.

It is tempting to think that the Millennium bug has been beaten and we can all forget about it. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The real bug problems have yet to be discovered and they may have serious consequences if people are not vigilant.

For the real bug problems are those where a computer program runs and appears to work only to produce incorrect results. Date calculations can still go wrong. In my days as a programmer, I saw countless programmers place "19" in their code for the century. It is these programs that are at risk.

True, an army of IT staff have been working to resolve these issues and indeed, without doubt, most of these problems have been tracked and fixed. But who can say that EVERY SINGLE occurrence has been tracked and fixed?

It is these problems that have yet to surface and it is only by people keeping a watchful eye on output from computers that these final bugs can be killed.

It is interesting that the media is wondering if "Y2K" was just a computer scam and that we didn't need to spend so much time and money on the millennium bug. I wonder, just wonder if the fact that we had so few problems was because we HAD spent so much time and money to ensure that major problems didn't occur?

Ah, the critics say, what about those countries that didn't spend a great deal of time and money on Y2K - they didn't have problems either. The thing is here is that their societies have not had computers for so long as the western world and therefore don't have "ancient code" still running. Their societies are not so entrenched in computers either.

In the west, there is hardly an electrical item that doesn't have some form of chip in it. Most homes can boast a whole plethora of such devices. Can the same be said for less developed countries? Fewer computers and less of a dependence on them must mean that there is a lot less risk.

Y2K work WAS necessary as anyone who has a computer that failed to turn the century can testify. Try running calculations on it that require "today's date" and see what happens.

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