Now, though, on the cusp of the first computerized millennium, it may well be that the opposite is the likelier apocalypse. Rather than being done in by our computers, we could all too easily be done in if anything happened to them. Not one resembling anything like the world that supports six billion plus of us today. We've always been a hardy species, but we've made ourselves into a technologically vulnerable one. There are tens of millions of computers worldwide now.
Crucial systems are redundant and then some.
The Millennium Bug . This is not so much a bug as a design flaw built into generations of early computers, many of them still running in the crucial areas mentioned above. Whether the millennial shift proves a data processing plague or just a slight computer cold, it reminds us of how fragile our information infrastructure can be, a fact more than a few antisociety types have realized. Computers are crucial, computers are ubiquitous, and computers are vulnerable. They make attractive, and attractively easy, targets for terrorists.