The year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem and the millennium bug) was a flaw in computer program design that caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000. It turned into a major fear that critical industries (electricity, financial, etc.) and government functions would stop working at 12:00 AM, January 1, 2000, and at other critical dates which were billed as "event horizons". This fear was fueled by huge amounts of press coverage and speculation, as well as copious official corporate and government reports. All over the world companies and organizations checked and upgraded their computer systems. The preparation for Y2K had a significant effect on the computer industry. A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... Event Horizon is a 1997 science fiction and horror film. ...

In the end, significant disasters such as nuclear reactor meltdowns or plane crashes did not occur, but the number of non-critical Y2K errors encountered on January 1, 2000 was extensive. Due to the lack of disasters and the faulty "end of the world" expectations, the public largely, but perhaps wrongly, regarded the Y2K passage as a non-event. A non-event is an event that is anticlimactic to the point at which it becomes easy to argue that it barely happened at all. ...

Background

Y2K (or Y2k) was the common slang for the year 2000 problem. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for "year", and K for the Greek prefix kilo meaning 1000; hence, 2K means 2000. It also went by millennium bug, although there is a popular debate on whether or not the year 2000 was actually the start of the new millennium. It is also said that the bug is technically a glitch. Kilo (symbol: k) is a prefix in the SI system denoting 103 or 1,000. ... A millennium is a period of time, literally equal to one thousand years. ... Glitch City, a Pokémon programming error that creates a jumble of pixels. ...

The term was coined on June 12, 1995 in an e-mail sent by a 52-year old Massachusetts programmer named David Eddy. He later said, "People were calling it CDC (Century Date Change) and Faddle (Faulty Date logic). There were other contenders. It just came off my fingertips." California Department of Corrections Canadian Dairy Commission Career Development Course Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Child Development Center Citizens Development Corps Climate Diagnostics Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce Control Data Corporation Council for Disabled Children Connected Device Configuration...

It was thought computer programs could stop working or produce erroneous results because they stored years with only two digits and that the year 2000 would be represented by 00 and would be interpreted by software as the year 1900. This would cause date comparisons to produce incorrect results. It was also thought that embedded systems, making use of similar date logic, might fail and cause utilities and other crucial infrastructure to fail. 1900 is a common year starting on Monday. ... An embedded system is a special-purpose computer system, which is completely encapsulated by the device it controls. ...

In the years prior to 2000, some corporations and governments, when they did testing to determine the extent of the potential impact, reported that some of their critical systems really would need significant repairs or risk serious breakdowns. Throughout 1997 and 1998, there were news reports about major corporations and industries that had made uncertain estimates as to their preparedness. The vagueness of these reports, and the apparent uncertainty regarding what sort of breakdowns were possible—and the fact that literally hundreds of billions of dollars were reportedly spent in remediation efforts—were a major part of the reason for the public fear. 1997 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ...

Special committees were set up by governments to monitor remedial work and contingency planning, particularly by crucial infrastructures such as telecommunications, utilities and the like, to ensure that the most critical services had fixed their own problems and were prepared for problems with others. In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of facts that are not logically necessary. ...

By early- to mid-1999, when the same corporations, industry organizations, and governments were claiming to be largely prepared, the public relations damage had been done.

It was only the safe passing of the main "event horizon" itself, January 1, 2000, that fully quelled public fears.

In North America the actions taken to remedy the possible problems did have unexpected benefits. Many businesses installed computer backup systems for critical files. The September 11th attacks destroyed hundreds of offices in the World Trade Center, potentially crippling vast segments of the economy. Fortunately most of the offices had purchased backup servers in New Jersey and elsewhere, limiting the devastation of the attacks. The Y2K preparations further had impact on August 14, 2003 during the 2003 North America blackout. The previous activities had included the installation of new electrical generation equipment and systems which allowed for a relatively rapid restoration of power in some areas. World map showing location of North America A satellite composite image of North America North America is a continent in the northern hemisphere, bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west... September 11 is the 254th day of the year (255th in leap years). ... The twin towers, photographed from the west The World Trade Center in New York City was a complex of seven buildings leased by Larry Silverstein from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey around a central plaza, near the south end of Manhattan in the downtown financial district. ... State nickname: The Garden State Other U.S. States Capital Trenton Largest city Newark Governor Richard Codey (D)Acting Official languages None defined Area 22,608 km² (47th)  - Land 19,231 km²  - Water 3,378 km² (14. ... August 14 is the 226th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (227th in leap years), with 139 days remaining. ... 2003 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A massive power outage produced a blackout in parts of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada on Thursday, August 14, 2003. ...

The programming problem

The underlying programming problem was quite real. In the 1960s, computer memory and storage were scarce and expensive, and most data processing was done on punch cards which represented text data in 80-column records. Programming languages of the time, such as COBOL and RPG, processed numbers in their ASCII or EBCDIC representations. They occasionally used an extra bit called a "zone punch" to save one character for a minus sign on a negative number, or compressed two digits into one byte in a form called binary-coded decimal, but otherwise processed numbers as straight text. Over time the punch cards were converted to magnetic tape and then disk files and later to simple databases like ISAM, but the structure of the programs usually changed very little. Popular software like dBase continued the practice of storing dates as text well into the 1980s and 1990s. The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ... The terms storage (U.K.) or memory (U.S.) refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state (data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. ... The punch card (or Hollerith card) is a recording medium for holding information for use by automated data processing machines. ... COBOL is a third-generation programming language. ... RPG or RPG IV is a native programming language for IBMs iSeries (aka AS/400) minicomputer system. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) is an 8-bit character encoding (code page) used on IBM mainframe operating systems, like z/OS, s/390, AS/400 and i5/OS. It is also employed on various non-IBM platforms such as Fujitsu-Siemens BS2000/OSD and HP MPE/iX... Binary-coded decimal (BCD) is, after character encodings, the most common way of encoding decimal digits in computing and in electronic systems. ... ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) is a file management system developed at IBM that allows records to be accessed either sequentially (in the order they were entered) or randomly (with an index). ... dBASE was the first widely used database management system or DBMS for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II, Apple Macintosh and IBM PC under DOS where it became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. ... // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but otherwise retaining the same mindset. ...

Saving two characters for every date field was significant in the 1960s. Since programs at that time were mostly short-lived affairs programmed to solve a specific problem, or control a specific hardware-setup, most programmers of that time did not expect their programs to remain in use for many decades. The realisation that databases were a new type of program with different characteristics had not yet come, and hence most did not consider fixing two digits of the year a significant problem. There were exceptions, of course; the first person known to publicly address the problem was Bob Bemer who had noticed it in 1958, as a result of work on genealogical software. He spent the next twenty years trying to make programmers, IBM, the US government and the ISO care about the problem, with little result. This included the recommendation that the COBOL PICTURE clause should be used to specify four digit years for dates. This could have been done by programmers at any time from the initial release of the first COBOL compiler in 1961 onwards. However lack of foresight, the desire to save storage space, and overall complacency prevented this advice from being followed. Despite magazine articles on the subject from 1970 onwards, the majority of programmers only started recognizing Y2K as a looming problem in the mid-1990s, but even then, inertia and complacency caused it to be mostly ignored until the last few years of the decade. The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ... Bob Bemer (Robert William Bemer February 8, 1920-June 22, 2004) was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s. ... 1958 was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Genealogy is the study and tracing of family pedigrees. ... 1961 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1970 was a common year starting on Thursday. ...

Storage of a combined date and time within a fixed binary field is often considered a solution, but the possibility for software to misinterpret dates remains, because such date and time representations must be relative to a defined origin. Roll-over of such systems is still a problem but can happen at varying dates and can fail in various ways. For example:

• The typical Unix timestamp stores a date and time as a 32-bit signed integer number representing, roughly speaking, the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, and will roll over in 2038 and cause the year 2038 problem.
• The popular spreadsheet Microsoft Excel stores a date as a number of days since an origin (often erroneously called a Julian date). A Julian date stored in a 16-bit integer will overflow after 65,536 days (approximately 179 years). Unfortunately, some releases of the program start at 1900, others at 1904.
• In the C programming language, the standard library function to get the current year originally did have the problem that it returned only the year number within the 20th century, and for compatibility's sake still returns the year as year minus 1900. Many programmers in C, and in Perl and JavaScript, two programming languages widely used in Web development that use the C functions, incorrectly treated this value as the last two digits of the year. On the Web this was a mostly harmless bug, but it did cause many dynamically generated webpages to display January 1, 2000, as "1/1/19100", "1/1/100", or variations of that depending on the format.

Even before January 1, 2000 arrived, there were also some worries about September 9, 1999 (albeit lesser compared to those generated by Y2K). This date could also be written in the numeric format, 9/9/99, which is somewhat similar to the end-of-file code, 9999, in old programming languages. It was feared that some programs might unexpectedly terminate on that date. This is actually an urban legend, because computers do not store dates in that manner. In this case, the date would be stored 090999 or 9/9/99, to prevent confusion of the month-day boundary. Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing points in time. ... January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... 1970 was a common year starting on Thursday. ... Centuries: 20th century - 21st century - 22nd century Decades: 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s - 2030s - 2040s 2050s 2060s 2070s 2080s Years: 2033 2034 2035 2036 2037 - 2038 - 2039 2040 2041 2042 2043 Events January 5 - Annular solar eclipse. ... In computing, the year 2038 problem may cause some computer software to fail in or about the year 2038. ... A spreadsheet is a rectangular table (or grid) of information, often financial information. ... Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and for Apple Macintosh computers. ... The Julian day or Julian day number (JDN) is the number of SI days that have elapsed since 12 noon Greenwich Mean Time (UT or TT) on Monday, January 1, 4713 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar 1. ... 1900 is a common year starting on Monday. ... 1904 is a leap year starting on a Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... Programming Republic of Perl logo Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is a programming language released by Larry Wall on December 18, 1987 that borrows features from C, sed, awk, shell scripting (sh), and (to a lesser extent) from many other programming languages. ... JavaScript, in its modern form, is an object-based scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. ... Urban legends are a kind of folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them (see rumor). ...

Another related problem for the year 2000 was that it was a leap year even though years ending in "00" are normally not leap years. (A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4 unless it is both divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400.) Fortunately, like Y2K, most programs were fixed in time. A leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing an extra day or month in order to keep the calendar year in sync with an astronomical or seasonal year. ...

Public reaction to the problem

Some industries started experiencing related problems early in the 1990s as software began to process future dates past 1999. For example, in 1993, some people with financial loans that were due in 2000 received (incorrect) notices that they were 93 years past due. As the decade progressed, more and more companies experienced problems and lost money due to erroneous date data. As another example, meat-processing companies incorrectly destroyed large amounts of good meat because the computerized inventory system identified the meat as expired. There were, in fact, many such minor "horror stories" like these, which received much play in the press as 2000 approached.

As the decade progressed, identifying and correcting or replacing affected computer systems or computerized devices became the major focus of information technology departments in most large companies and organizations. Millions of lines of programming code were reviewed and fixed during this period. Many corporations replaced major software systems with completely new ones that did not have the date processing problems. It was frequently reported that corporations had already experienced at least minor Y2K problems, and some major problems as well, due to date look-ahead functions in code and embedded systems, but it was and still is not clear what the full cost and seriousness of these problems were.

Y2K was a big media story in 1999. In some countries public apprehension was tremendous, reaching, in some quarters, enormous proportions. Some individuals stockpiled canned or dried food in anticipation of food shortages. A few commentators predicted a full-scale apocalypse, among them computer consultant Edward Yourdon, religious commentator Gary North, and economist Edward Yardeni. Look up Apocalypse on Wiktionary, the free dictionary Apocalypse is a Greek word and is formed by the combination of apo (away) with calypse (disclose). ... Edward Nash Yourdon is a computer consultant, author, and lecturer and a recognised pioneer in a software engineering methodology - structured programming. ... Gary North is one of the major writers and publishers of the Christian Reconstructionism movement. ...

As midnight approached on 31 December, a team of US and Russian military personnel was in place in case because of the significant danger that uncorrected Y2K faults in Russian military computers might set off warning systems or even cause missile launches, thus possibly risking nuclear war.

What actually happened

Before the year 2000

Even before the beginning of the year 2000, there were a number of minor problems that occurred. This article is about the year 2000. ...

One such example was a supermarket chain in the midwestern United States. When a cash register encountered a credit card that had an expiration date that was after the year 2000, it created a serious glitch within the computer systems running the cash register. The glitch caused the computer network to shut down all the cash registers throughout the entire supermarket chain. This was used by experts to illustrate the need for businesses to study whether or not a Y2K bug could cripple them also. Credit cards A credit card system is a type of retail transaction settlement and credit system, named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. ... A cash register or till (British English) is a mechanical or electronic device for calculating and recording sales transactions, and an attached cash drawer for storing currency. ... Categories: Business | Academic disciplines | School subjects ...

In 1996, a Marks & Spencer can of corned beef was rejected by the cash register. The register thought it to be ninety-six years past its expiration date, because the label read "12-1-00" and the register misinterpreted this as 12-1-1900. Marks and Spencer plc (known also as M&S and sometimes colloquially as Marks and Sparks) is a British retailer. ... Corned beef is beef that is first pickled in brine and then cooked by boiling. ...

During the year

When January 1, 2000, finally came, there were few major problems reported, contrary to many expectations. They mostly occurred in countries with less experience with computers, and/or less money to address the problem. A few made the news, such as a nuclear power plant in Japan that shut down for a short while due to a problem in an auxiliary system, US spy satellites that were blinded briefly, or the national high-speed and airport rail systems of Norway that briefly shut down on December 31, 2000, a date that was not tested for. But in most cases, the problems encountered were minor and were fixed by programmers without difficulty. These problems remained largely isolated from one another, preventing cascading failures, which had been the focus of so much interoperability and end-to-end testing in the period leading up to January 1, 2000. January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about: United States Wikinews has news related to this article: United States United States government CIA World Factbook Entry for United States House. ... KH-4B Corona satellite Lacrosse radar spy satellite under construction A spy satellite (officially referred to as a reconnaissance satellite or recon sat) is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications. ... December 31 is the 365th day of the year (366th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... A cascading failure is failure in a system of interconnected parts, where the service provided depends on the operation of a preceding part, and the failure of a preceding part can trigger the failure of successive parts. ... Interoperability can be defined in a technical way or in a broad way, taking into account social, political and organizational factors. ...

Ironically, many people were upset that there appeared to be so much hype over nothing, because the vast majority of problems had been fixed correctly. Some critics have suggested that much preventive effort was unnecessary. Their argument is it would have been cheaper not to spend as much examining non-critical systems for flaws and simply fix the few that would have failed after the event. The argument of their opponents is that, had it not been for such efforts, the problem would have been much worse and widespread.

For those not involved in the preventive effort, the conclusion that all the efforts have been a waste was easy to draw, as they had no knowledge of the countless systems that had been corrected, but had only witnessed the problems that had not been fixed in time. Also, few of them realized that fixing the problems afterwards would have been much harder as active millennium problems would have complicated matters. But in any case, for many systems the checking procedure involved replacement with new, improved functionality and thus in many cases the expenditure proved useful regardless. Preparing for Y2K resulted in many more computer programming and testing jobs than would have otherwise existed. Programs were reviewed and tested that otherwise would have been considered "done".

Y2K trivia

Factoids

• The United States established the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, which limited the liability of businesses who had properly disclosed their Y2K readiness.
• Insurance companies sold insurance policies covering failure of businesses due to Y2K problems.
• Attorneys organized and mobilized for Y2K class action lawsuits (which were not pursued).
• No major failures of infrastructure were reported in the United States or even in many places where they had been widely expected, such as Russia.
• The Y2K problem mainly affected countries that follow the western calendar (Saudi Arabia, for example, does not).
• One theory has it that the Federal Reserve increased the money supply in 1999 to compensate for anticipated hoarding by a frightened populace. The populace, however, was not frightened, and the flood of new money fueled a stock market high tide that went out on January 14, 2000 when the Dow Jones Industrials fell from the all-time peak.
• Many organizations finally realised the critical importance of their IT infrastructure to their business, and put in place plans to keep it running and restore capability in case of disaster. Such planning may well have helped the relatively speedy return to functioning of New York's critical financial IT systems after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
• Speculatively, the Y2K spending on information infrastructure caused a slowdown in information technology spending in the year 2000 and 2001 and may eventually lead to higher productivity in future years.
• The Long Now Foundation, which (in their words) "seeks to promote 'slower/better' thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years", has a policy of anticipating the Year 10,000 problem by writing all years with five digits. For example, they list "01996" as their year of founding.
• One of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, Danny Hillis, was one of the few commentators who publicly predicted that Y2K bugs would cause no significant problems (see "Why Do We Buy the Myth of Y2K?", Newsweek, May 31, 1999).
• Univision news reported that on the evening of December 31, 1999, a couple in Peru had committed suicide, for fears of what Y2K would bring.
• A few (but not many) computer systems did actually fail on January 1st, although some of those did so on a yearly basis. An almost amusing postscript to the Y2K problem was the fact that a number of computers not set up for leap years actually failed the following February 29th.

The Federal Reserve System is headquartered in the Eccles Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. The Federal Reserve System (also the Federal Reserve; informally The Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. ... Money supply (monetary aggregates, money stock), a macroeconomic concept, is the quantity of money available within the economy to purchase goods, services, and securities. ... The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of coordinated attacks carried out against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. ... The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996. ... The year 10,000 problem is the collective name for all potential software bugs that will emerge as the need to express years with five digits arises. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Newsweek logo Newsweek is a weekly news magazine published in New York City and distributed throughout the United States and internationally. ... Univisión is one of the largest Spanish language television channels in the United States. ... The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, 1787 Suicide (from Latin sui caedere, to kill oneself) is the act of willfully ending ones own life; it is sometimes a noun for one who has committed or attempted the act. ... A leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing an extra day or month in order to keep the calendar year in sync with an astronomical or seasonal year. ... February 29 is the 60th day of a leap year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 306 days remaining. ...

Quotes

• "We may not have got everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end."

Parodic science fiction author Douglas Adams, in an advertisement for Apple Macintosh personal computers.

• "Computing consultants laughing all the way to the bank."

Popular catchphrase used by the Australian media on the First of January 2000.

Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001), also known (to fans) as Bop Ad or Bob (after his illegible signature) or by his initials DNA (it is notable that Watson and Cricks famous discovery was announced in Cambridge, nine months after Douglas Adams was born there). ... The box for Mac OS X v10. ...

Y2K in pop culture

• In the 1999 movie Office Space, Peter Gibbons's job is to rewrite bank software to use dates with 4-digit years instead of 2.
• The Halloween episode of The Simpsons for the 1999–2000 season, Treehouse of Horror X, contained a sketch fittingly entitled "Life's A Glitch, Then You Die". Homer's failure to check Y2K preparedness at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant results in a global technology-related catastrophe.
• The Family Guy episode "Da Boom" (aired December 26, 1999) featured the Griffin family surviving the end of civilization, caused by the Y2K bug. At the end of the episode, it is revealed in a Dallas parody, that the episode was all just a dream.
• The Newsradio episode "Meet the Max Louis" had a subplot in which the station's electrician Joe Garelli dealt with the effects of him programming the computer system to Jesus' "actual" birth-date. The episode was filmed in 1998, so they were experiencing the year 2000 problem two years early.
• In an episode of "Dilbert," Wally is given command to fix the company computer systems for Y2K. He fixes them, only finding out that the millennium starts on January 1, 2001
• Several different movies with the title "Y2K" were made: "Y2K" (1999) (IMDb entry) and "Y2K: The Movie" (1999) (TV) (IMDb entry).

1999 is a common year starting on Friday Anno Domini (or the Current Era), and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... Office Space is a 1999 comedy film written and directed by Mike Judge, loosely based on his 1991 animated short film of the same name. ... Peter Gibbons is a fictional character in the 1999 movie Office Space. ... A jack-o-lantern Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31, usually by children dressing in costumes and going door-to-door collecting candy. ... The Simpsons is a long-running animated television series, with 17 seasons and 356 episodes since it debuted on December 17, 1989 on FOX, and is a spinoff of The Tracey Ullman Show. ... Treehouse of Horror X is the fourth episode of The Simpsons eleventh season, as well as the tenth Halloween episode. ... Homer Simpson Homer Jay Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) is one of the main characters in the animated television series The Simpsons. ... In the television cartoon series The Simpsons, the city of Springfields electricity is generated from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. ... Family Guy is an animated television series originally created by Seth MacFarlane for FOX in 1999. ... This is a list and description of the episodes from the animated television series Family Guy. ... December 26 is the 360th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, 361st in leap years. ... Dallas title card used during the shows first season. ... For the Australian radio station, see ABC NewsRadio NewsRadio was an American sitcom, originally broadcast from 1995 to 1999 by NBC. The series is set in a New York City news radio station, WNYX, and starts with the arrival of a new news director, Dave Nelson (played by Dave Foley). ... A subplot is a series of connected actions within a work of narrative that function separately from the main plot. ... // Jesus, or Jesus of Nazareth, also known as Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, is Christianitys central figure, both as Messiah and as God incarnate. ... Dilbert is a popular American comic strip. ... January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ...

See also

• Year 2038 problem
• Year 10,000 problem

In computing, the year 2038 problem may cause some computer software to fail in or about the year 2038. ... The year 10,000 problem is the collective name for all potential software bugs that will emerge as the need to express years with five digits arises. ...

References

• DeJesus, Edmund X. (1998). "Year 2000 Survival Guide". BYTE, July 1998, vol. 23, no. 7 (the final issue of BYTE).
• Keogh, Jim (1998). "Working to Solve the Year 2000 Problem". Ch. 12 (pp. 307–329) of COBOL Programmer's Notebook. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR. ISBN 0-13-977414-9.

BYTE magazine was probably the most influentual microcomputer magazine in the late 1970s and the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. ...

External links

• A Day in the Hype of America – Y2K documentary by Global Griot Productions, filmed entirely 31 December 1999
• "Y2K bug may never bite" – by John Quiggin (published in the "Australian Financial Review", 2 September 1999 – Article predicting no serious trouble based on experience in 2000, blaming fear of litigation for over-reaction to Y2K
• "A New Year's Embarassment for Y2K doomsters" – By Wynn Quon, Mitel Corp. (published in the National Post, 5 October 1999) – An article looking into the absence of serious Y2K-related trouble during the first nine months of 1999, its author predicting a minimal amount of trouble happening at the turn of the millennium three months away.
• The Surprising Legacy Of Y2K – Radio documentary by American Public Media, on the history and legacy of the millennium bug five years on.