It seemed a great solution and freed memory for more important tasks. These programmers knew their solution would not work when the year 2000 rolled over. Unfortunately, the programmers did not account for human nature. Instead of replacing code, users simply built onto code since it worked fine, eventually creating vast systems enveloping a doomed core of code. One caveat is that Y2K will arrive earlier than January 1, 2000.
Programmers use specific strings of numbers to indicate the stopping point and commands.
The year 2000 also is an atypical leap year. Leap years are evenly divisible by four or by 400, but not by 100. Since 1998 is a leap year, the next one isn't calculated to occur until 2002. If the Y2K problem had affected only mainframes, as many originally thought, programmers easily would have remedied the difficulty. Unfortunately, all PCs were affected, but not Macintoshes, which use four-digit years.