Talk:Year 2000 problem/Archive 1

message: Lol i remember when this happend "Items rented from Blockbuster prior to January 1st, 2000 and returned after January 1st were reportedly marked for astronomical late fees ($91250), as though the items were 100 years overdue." my dad was shocked on how much he owed.--EliteMike 02:17, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blockbuster 

message: Earlier than any USENET newsgroup chatter was the book "Computers in Crisis" by Jerome and Marilyn Murray (Petrocelli, 1984), later
reissued under a different title by McGrawHill in 1995.--4.252.171.51 20:46, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  First recorded mention 

message: 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."
The article event horizon seems to have no relevance (it refers to the physics meaning - the point beyond which no information can reach the observer).
: De-linking event horizon for this reason -- 201.50.249.78 16:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Event horizons" 

message: The article currently states:
The Y2K problem mainly affected countries that follow the western calendar (Saudi Arabia does not). (This is very misleading and needs to be restated.)
I think this remark belongs here, so I'm moving it here. Someone should probably fix it (I don't know what is meant, myself). -- Timwi 20:54, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misleading 

message: "There were a number of minor problems that occurred even before the beginning of 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 error in the computer systems running the cash register. The error caused the computer system 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 as well."
This sounds like an urban legend. If it is true, then we need to name which supermarket chain it was, what the date was that the incident began, and what city it started in. What date did the shutdown occur? Kingturtle 04:06, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I second this -- the lack of a specific brand name marks this as an urban legend. --Jfruh 02:41, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: Looks like an urban legend to me, too.  I live in the Midwest, and I didn't hear anything about this.  I'm removing it until some sources can be brought foreward. Mance 22:39, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  It sounds highly implausible to me.  I'm a cashier myself, and have, on several occassions, scanned a card that turned out to be expired.  All that happened was the computer didn't accept it, and said "invalid expiration date".  Surely the Y2K bug would simply cause a credit card with an expiration of, say, January 2000 to be read as expired (Interpreting 1/00 as January 1900).  Nik42 04:27, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  supermarket chain???? 

message: "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."
This can't have been more than a few weeks (or months if frozen) before 2000, because meat doesn't last that long, though the article implies it was in the mid-1990s. Ben Finn 18:15, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It was canned corned beef with along shelf life. None was destroyed, see below for the urban legend. It doesn't appear in the BBC archive so it is most likely another bit of misinformation and urban legend. Most of the stories reported here never appeared in CNN or BBC archives. And the story about Japan with an alarm sounding and a series of radiation monitors stopping working was reported here as: a power plant had to shut down.
--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 19:06, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meat 

message: I don't have time to do it myself, but methinks this article could do with a bit of a tidy-up to organize it into better chronological order. It goes over events before 2000, then after 2000, then before, then after, etc. unnecessarily. Ben Finn 18:30, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Miscellaneous 

message: significant disasters such as nuclear reactor meltdowns or plane crashes were avoided
This sounds too sensational to be accurate.  If I were to say "I avoided being trampled by a herd of elephants", this implies I was actually in danger of being trampled by a herd of elephants, and hides the fact that I live in Wisconsin where there is no danger of being trampled. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 17:19, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disasters avoided!!! 

message: Why is there a section in here of "factoids?"  Technically, a factoid means something that is spurious or almost certainly untrue; such things have no place in an encyclopedia.  If they are all confirmed true and are just useless trivia, then calling the statements factoids is incorrect. --Mance 22:48, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Look at the article on factoids -- the alternate (and in my experience, more usual) meaning is "A true but insignificant fact."  However, since the term is deprecatory, I agree that it is a poor choice for a section heading. 208.20.251.27 16:55, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Factoids" 

message: had some problems running certain programs right. we had windows 95, and when we tried to view the ammount of space left in our C drive it kept telling us that we had 100% free space, but showing us numbers indicating that our drive was 150% full. when we took it in to get fixed (in August of 00, it kept running alright till then) they told us it was Y2K problems. Now I dont expect a section called "Pellaken's Computer" but surley we can add something like "some personal computers encoutered minor problems on Y2K without actually crashing" or something, couldent we? Pellaken 11:24, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  My computer 

message: The original form stated: The public largely, but perhaps wrongly, felt y2k was a nonevent.
I then proceeded to look up nonevent, which stated, "
Jump to: navigation, search
A non-event is an anticipated or highly publicized event that either does not occur, or simply turns out to be very anticlimactic or boring. Non-events are disappointing, as they are often much hyped prior to their occurrence." and listed Y2k as a nonevent.
Including "perhaps wrongly" does not fit with this definition and creates a contradiction in this encyclopedia.
:I slightly disagree with you. The "perhaps wrongly" statement implies that there actually were problems, but the public regarded it as a nonevent. I believe that, at least in this case, the phrase "perhaps inaccurately" is better and more relevant. The original phrase, however, is still not a contradiction. --Zachary Murray 18:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nonevent 

message: Recently the section "The programming problem" was removed. I re-added it because I felt it's an important section. If anyone feels it should be removed, could you supply a reason here? – Mipadi 17:19, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The programming problem 

message: These need to be sourced:
"U.S. 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."
I found a source for the Japan reference.
--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 18:17, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sources, please 

message: "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 inaccurately, regarded the Y2K passage as a non-event."
This assumes that there were extensive errors after Y2K. DO you think it should be modified and restored?
--Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 19:21, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: It looks like all these stories are apocryphal but here they are:
*Windshear alert systems at five major and four smaller US airports produced error messages for about two hours, according to the New York Times.
*A US military spy satellite was blinded for at least two hours and operated at reduced capacity for a couple of days when its ground station went dark, according to the New York Times. (I found a reference to this but the DOD denied the event occured)
*The power went out at Diego Garcia, a super-secret island owned by Britain and leased by the US military, according to the New York Times.
*An unidentified field office of what was then called the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had an unspecified problem with its security system that required guards to be posted outside, according to the New York Times.
*An unnamed building in Omaha, Nebraska suffered a security system flaw that left all its doors open, according to the New York Times.
*Computers at four smaller US airports began displaying a date of 1900, with no apparent operational effect, according to the New York Times.
*A Swedish company's kidney dialysis machine failed to go through its automatic cleaning cycle, a flaw that was reportedly caught before it injured anyone, according to the New York Times.
*A large number of arraignments in Queens, New York courts were delayed because a computer system misdated police complaint forms, according to the New York Times.
*There were unspecified "glitches," reportedly none of them critical, at an unspecified number of nuclear power plants in six US states, according to the New York Times.
*A US video store computer charged a customer a late fee of more than $90,000 when its computer flipped to 1900, according to the New York Times. Another unnamed company had a computer system that began automatically inventing and processing phantom orders, a glitch that was caught before anything shipped, also according to the New York Times. 
*The full extent of problems will never be known, because many companies wanted to keep them secret for liability reasons. The New York Times reported that one consulting group that tackled Y2K problems for businesses received about 400 confidential reports of Y2K problems by Jan. 4, 2000.
*Wikipedia had lots of erroneous information posted since January 1, 2000.
:How do you attribute and problem to Y2K without weeks of investigation? At work we had some data that was introduced as year "00" and it took months to find where the error was coming from. It turned out to be barcode reader software embedded within another instrument.
::Has anyone else noticed like I had that the New York Times reported all of these events?--WaltCip 13:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anecdotal stories 

message: What about Y3K? Wouldn't the same "problem" happen in the year 3000?If so start prepping!(joke)Bon Scott 03:59, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd worry more about 2030.  A lot of software (including excel) was changed so that any 2 digit date of 30 or lower was assumed to be after the year 2000, and any greater than 30 was assumed to be 19nn.  The logic went that "it was OK because these systems won't be around by then..." - pretty much the same words people used about the possibility of a Y2K bug!
--Simongv 15:49, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, actually the next problem is in 2038 i.e. the year 2038 problem. So it would be a Y2K38. Voortle 14:39, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nope - there's definitely some 2030 problems because that was the development guideline where I was working, though you could be right about 2038 for Excel etc.  Y2K work was SO boring that I've tried hard to forget all about it! :-)  --Simongv 12:19, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I was talking last night to a former colleague. He was complaining that his new employers want him to go back to COBOL for the next year or so to help re-do their Y2K work properly. They had taken the approach of leaving the years as two digits and assuming that any year less than 10 has a "20" prefix, while any year of 10 or above has a "19" prefix. They had to go so low because their data has dates of birth as early as 1910. They had expected a replacement system to be in place before problems occurred. The replacement system hasn't happened for various reasons and will take years to develop. They're now getting problems because of the need to calculate future dates. The only real solution is to change to four-digit years. So it ain't over yet! Mr Barndoor 08:52, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Or they could just change to a native representation of the data. Scarily enough, the Norwegian tax code, it's legal specification, is a Cobol program. I wish people would start migrating these systems to something more maintainable. A time_t of 64 bits pushes this problem about 4 billion years into the future, at which point the only thing it can interfere with are our attempts to cope with the sun going red giant ;)   Zuiram 22:56, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've come across a bug in an application I use where dates of birth are now being assumed to be "19xx" if 50 or later, "20xx" if 49 or earlier. OK as long as no people on the database are over 56 years old... Yes, y2k problems are still with us and will be until 2050 at least (and will probably reappear in 2100). Many of the fixes put in were of the sticking-plaster variety, the old 2-character year field still lives on.
Exile 16:54, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y3K? 

message: § [This is a description that I wrote some
years ago.]
In the 70's banks first realized the problem
when 30 year loans had glitches. It wasn't
until 1995 and 1996 that the federal government
began to change their systems. 1997 and 1998
brought in the larger cities and universities.
In 1999 many businesses and government agencies
belatedly upgraded their systems only to find
that it takes at least 5 years to upgrade such
large systems. Through 1999 the problems began
to escalate. There was disinformation spread
that Y2K would hit like a hammer at the strike
of midnight in 2000. Most reasoned experts 
saw that the real problem would take years 
to develop. Dick Mills predicted rolling 
blackouts in the summer of 2000, as the 
increased use of electricity would tax an
already fragile system. When California had
it's blackouts, 30% of the utilities were
down. This had never happened before. 
___________________
From my archive:
Power engineer and Y2K analyst Dick Mills
makes the following predictions regarding the
availability in the United States of electrical
power in the year 2000:
Prepare for blackouts in the first days of January
2000, lasting up to 72 hours. 
Prepare for shortages of power in the warm summer
months of 2000.
Mills predicts that carefully regulated power
shortages eventually affecting most U.S electricity
customers is much more likely in the year 2000 than
uncontrolled localized power blackouts. The
odds of power shortages are particularly high during
the summer of 2000, especially if the summer is hot
in most areas of the United States. Power shortages
result when power generation "margins" dip below
0%. Margins of 15-30% are standard for the industry
in the United States, meaning that generation capacity
is usually 15-30% larger than demand.
_____________________
A small digression is needed here. An argument
is presented that says that there are always
software problems. The counter to this is
that all these agencies were forced to upgrade
at the same time thus concentrating the problems.
Consider this metaphor. A person is in a room
filled to their neck in [excretement]. A brick
is thrown at the person's head. The person
ducks, lifts his head and declares that the
brick never hit him. I say that his soiled face
was caused by the brick.
The economy began to dive in March of 2000, way
before the 2001 attack. Massive layoffs of tens
of thousands occurred every month. 2000 brought
the most bankruptcies here and around the world.
In 1998 insurance companies declared that Y2K
problems would not be covered. This is one of
the reasons that would inhibit disclosure. 
There was also concern about the Herstatt risk,
liquidity problems and the flight of capital.
Our economic system depends a great deal on
confidence.
The vast majority of problems were and are
financial. There are thousands of businesses
that cannot bill correctly and/or have no idea
what is their profit or loss. 
You can expect another 2 years of economic 
downturn as the final waves wash across
the battered beach.
71.34.249.93 14:20, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y2K Overview 

message: Does anyone else remember products like universal remotes, computer cables, and wristwatches(the kind without the date) having 2yk compliant stickers on them?
:I remember that. I saw a bunch of ridiculous Y2K compliant stickers on things that didn't even store dates. Of course, those stickers were nonsense, as nothing could possibly happen to them as they didn't even store the date. Voortle 14:37, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y2K Marketing 

message: The title of the article should reflect the popular term used; shouldn't it? I believe Y2K bug would be more appropriate as it's used more often; or something other than what's used now.
It was not a bug.  In the context of using 2 digit years in software systems, it was an intentionally accepted design decision.  The other stuff (end of the world, 2nd coming, etc.) was "just" out-of-control hype. DEddy 22:33, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title 

message: Not sure where this would fit in but it's an important distinction.  
The reason that most safety critical software (Air Traffic Control, Nuclear Reactor software, traffic lights, lifts etc) didn't experience problems is that they are based on real time software.  This means they don't care (or even know in most cases) what the current date is, they just know that in n seconds they need to take an action and track when n seconds has passed.
::Which is where the Y2038 problem and such come in; hopefully, we'll be able to convince people that it isn't just a rehash of the media hype around Y2K. Notably, though, some of this software uses sub-second timing intervals, and are designed to deal with wraparound. Zuiram 23:02, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Real Time vs Date/Time Systems 

message: ok... what qualifies for a "citation"... an image of the original email? DEddy 02:46, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Background/citation needed 

message: It would be interesting to get a cite on the two-digit artwork dates.  --Daniel C. Boyer 15:17, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Artwork 

message: It looks like someone hijacked and trolled the introduction to the article. I'll try fixing it, I guess. 72.225.142.168 22:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hijacking? 

message: Shouldn't this article be at "Y2K problem"? WP:COMMONNAME says yes. Seriously, does anybody actually think "Year 2000 problem" is the more commonly used name for this subject? 71.203.209.0 10:21, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y2K 

message: In the section talking about the 'oposing view' to whether the cost was justified, it says "By September 1, 1999 only 28 percent of US schools had achieved compliance for mission critical systems, and a government report predicted that "Y2K failures could very well plague the computers used by schools to manage payrolls, student records, online curricula, and building safety systems" and gives citation 28, which is a link to an eSchoolnews.com article.
However that article actually says, "Citing a Department of Education survey of more than 3,500 school districts and local education agencies, the report says only 28 percent indicated that their mission-critical systems are Y2K compliant. That number is expected to jump to 72 percent by Oct. 1 and 98 percent by Jan. 1. "
Surely this citation and reference is only valid if you can determine how many schools did achieve Y2K compliance by 1-Jan 2000? If the number did rise to 98% that might suggest this citation is being taken out of context?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.99.164.88 (talk) 02:40, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Was the cost justified/Opposing View and citation to eSchoolNews 

message: This section is not written much like a encyclopedia, i suggest a rewrite and change of headings to: Costs involved, opposition and support Kernel geek (talk) 18:36, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opposing/Support paragraphs 

message: Someone has placed the photo requested template above. What kind of picture would we use for an article on Y2K? A picture of a computer not knowing what the date is? Voortle 20:44, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A screenshot of an error message? 142.59.172.187 11:14, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There must something that could be added - a large article without a single picture isn't normally desirable. Richard001 04:26, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I put together a quick illustration. Intended for aesthetics only. — xDanielx T/C\R 11:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The picture of the gasping man, a hourglass, a computer and a bug? Why is it worthy of this article?116.15.90.76 (talk) 18:30, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The purpose was aesthetic, not explanatory. I figured there wasn't much need for an explanatory image, but if you can come up with one, feel free to replace the current image. — xDanielx T/C\R 03:39, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photograph requested 

message: In 1989 I was working on a computer system destined for use by the UK government.  My role was as an independent quality consultant.  The system represented dates internally in two-digit format (despite being programmed in C), and would fail if the system date was changed to anything after 2000.  I repeatedly raised this point, much to the annoyance of the project manager, who even threatened to have me removed from the project!  His argument?  The system was warranted for ten years, and the developing company would have no liability when it failed.
The system, as installed, did continue to work after the critical date, so evidently some of the investment in tracking down and fixing Y2K bugs bore some fruit!  I was no longer involved, and the company that had written the original software went bust in 1990. --King Hildebrand 16:58, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Complacency 

message: This article is waaaaay too technical. How are lay people unfamiliar with computer languages, etc expected to understand this.
I'll cut it down then. 76.27.163.35 17:10, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jargon 

message: "It caused widespread concern that critical industries (such as electricity or finance) and government functions would cease operating at exactly midnight, January 1, 2000,..."
What time zone was this supposed to happen?  --68.183.43.30 02:03, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  One Question 

message: I suspect this falls under "original research" or "personal recollection", but I've not seen much documentation of the actual US operational facilities. 
I was the external network architecture consultant to the Y2K Information Center, the operating agency under LTG (Ret) Peter Kind, which reported to John Koskinen in the Executive Office of the President. The Center's headquarters were at 1800 G St. NW, a few blocks from the White House, and had backup facilities in FEMA headquarters and a hardened site outside the immediate area. Online access by the public and most government agencies was hosted at two AT&T data centers, one in New York and the other in San Diego. Then under the Department of Justice, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Group was started in the Center offices. The facility was equipped to receive and disseminate reports at all security classification levels, although the great bulk of information was readily available. 
As a bit of trivia, we did have an informal motto on a fair number of bulletin boards, "The Dark Ages were caused by the Y1K Problem."  Hcberkowitz 03:00, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  US Government Y2K Information Center 

message: The article states "In the 2000 anime film, Digimon: Our War Game, the villainous Diaboromon is a personification of the Y2K bug. In an exaggeration of some expected events, he cuts off the phone networks and launches a nuclear missile at Tokyo." However, while the virus did indeed do this, I can't recall it being mentioned anywhere that the virus was related in any way to the Y2K, nor do we have any way of telling if it's the year 1999/2000 in the middle segment of the movie (which is divided in 3 segments across 3 different years). Should I remove it? Jaimeastorga2000 00:45, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Digimon in popular culture? 

message: says some guy in iowa was charged video overdue 100 years cause of computer and penn. kid was charged overdue book.. please validate. 130.13.47.58 04:31, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Typical examples of the kind of bug anticipated are the rare occasions when a someone in the 105-6 years' old bracket gets a primary school induction notice, because the computers handling the population register worked to the least significant 2 decimal places. Another intended objective was to review the general coding of older systems, which eliminated a number of other bugs from, typîcally, the kind of linear systems predating object modelling.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.241.227.84 (talk) 13:22, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wierd info 

message: The list of unsourced incidents is getting larger...¿does anyone feels it's time to remove all unsourced incidents? (like "In the Solomon Islands, a ferry ticket was rejected for being 100 years out of date.")Seba5618 (talk) 03:02, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  (un) Documented errors 

message: What does "It was also named the Millennium Bug because it was associated with the (popular, rather than literal) roll-over of the millennium." mean? What does a "popular millenium" and a "literal millenium" mean? --RaphaelBriand 16:57, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Properly, the new millennium started on January 1st 2001 - this would be what is meant by the "literal millennium". 2000 was the last year of the old millennium. But most people treated January 1st 2000 as the start of the new millennium, because the first digit of the year changed from "1" to "2" - hence this would be what is meant by the "popular millennium". Mr Barndoor 11:08, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks --RaphaelBriand 20:05, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

text: In the Western calendar system, we assume a starting year of 1, not 0. The Millennium article gives a clear explanation of the popular versus literal millennium. Mr Barndoor 11:27, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The majority popular approach was to treat the end of 1999 as the end of a millennium, and to hold millennium celebrations at midnight through December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, as per viewpoint 2. The cultural and psychological significance of the events listed above combined to cause celebrations to be observed one year earlier than the formal Gregorian date. This does not, of course, establish that insistence on the formal Gregorian date is "incorrect", though some view it as pedantic (as in the comment of Douglas Adams mentioned below). Uh, yeah. It mentions the popular one but it currently omits the literal one, or at least by name. What it does do is point out that a millennium is a millennium no matter which day you begin measuring from. 125.236.211.165 (talk) 00:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusion - Literal vs. Popular Millenium 

message: We have a solid pool of 26 inline citations (not counting duplicates), mostly from very reputable sources. I think general references (by that I mean, references without inline citations) are better than nothing in that they add to the credibility of the article and provide a starting point for further research, but with a strong assortment of inline citations I don't think the general refs really have much use. Would anyone object to nuking them? — xDanielx T/C\R 08:04, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Guess I'll be bold and go ahead with it. Open to post-action review if anyone disagrees, of course. :) — xDanielx T/C\R 08:59, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Okay to scrap general references? 

message: I find that the inclusion of "War of the worlds" is of poor relevance, and may formulate an opinion (comparing the Y2K reaction to the hysteria following this show's broadcasting?). The only link seems to be that an english or us tv catastrophe show about the y2k bug was showed with a disclaimer to avoid a "war of the worlds" effect (see war of the worlds article).
Anyway if none objects i'd delete it.82.224.109.80 (talk) 21:51, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  War of the worlds 

message: I believe this statement is incorrect:
::The popular spreadsheet Microsoft Excel stores a date as a number of day 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).
Current versions (and certainly version since Excel 97 i.e. predating Y2K) use a (32 bit) floating point number to repesent a date, whereby the integer part of the number represents the number of days since an arbitary start date which is actually the zeroth of January 1900. Using the floating point format naturally allows the system to accomodate time as the fraction of a day resolved down to the accuracy of the floating point representation of the number. It also allows date difference to be obtained simply using the subtraction operator and simplifies date comparison.Fizzackerly (talk) 13:52, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Microsoft Excel Date/Time Storage 

message: Why is there nothing about this movie on here?  I find it a bit strange, given the warning that were put at the start of this film so not to panic people. Katana Geldar 11:38, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y2K The Movie 

message: I've worked on financial systems in Britain & Australia using COBOL as a programmer with over 25 years experience.
COBOL was used extensively in big business and many millions of programs had been written in this language dealing with various aspects of billing. 99 years would have been generated from date calculations using 2000 - 1999 because the result was stored in an unsigned field (no minus sign) thus 00 - 99 = -99, which in an unsigned field becomes 99. Therefore, billions of customers would've been billed for 99 years!
I fail to see how anyone in computing would think 9/9/99 would relate to 9999. I've never heard of this; so it must have been some stupid rumour. Dates were usually stored in yymmdd format and converted to the required format. Thus, 9/9/99 was actually stored as 990909; a far cry from 9999.
Malcolm Hill
:The article presents the 9/9/99 problem as a theoretical concern, not as an actual occurrence or as a focus of remedial work. I think it's fair enough to let it stand as an example of the thinking that was going on around Y2K and other potentially problematic dates. Mr Barndoor (talk) 11:02, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The editsemiprotected request doesn't have a clearly and agreed-upon change to make.  Please provide or describe a specific change to make.  —EncMstr (talk) 00:24, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This is my first time in attempting to make a change, so please allow for my lack of protocol knowledge. I've made a few changes to the above. The article doesn't spell out that COBOL was used extensively in big business and that if the problem wasn't fixed, the business world would've collapsed under the weight of customer complaints. As I've never heard of the so called 9999 problem, I was trying to show that if anyone had heard of this, it was totally erroneous. I'm trying to set the record straight for future posterity as even today, people think it just a money making exercise. Malcolm Hill Molbrum (talk) 09:07, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There were programs that used "99/99/99" or "9/9/99" and other values as a special magical dates that meant things like "never expires" or "not known". In fact, there still are such programs.  In general, the impact of accidentally treating a date as magical would not matter much.  Regards, Ben Aveling 06:50, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  99 years & 9/9/99 

message: ZimZalaBim... thank you for stepping up & deleting that irrelevant noise.  DEddy (talk) 20:21, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arbitrary Trivia 

message: There are stories that Microsoft's 30GB Zune MP3 player has been bitten by a leap year bug.  Shades of Y2K. 
I predict there will be additional leap year bug stories.  DEddy (talk) 15:52, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Microsoft Zune 30GB Bitten by Leap Year Bug 

message: I think the term bug is confused with virus, and should be defined in the first sentence. Also, maybe the word should be plural because the problem was in more than one program. I read the article to see if the text message term Y2K was invented to wonder why Dec 25 wasn’t January 1 and why it got associated with the feared virus Coast to Coast AM was talking about in in the late '90s. From clicking the link to "computer bug" I was reminded bug does not mean virus. So, I think the first sentence should define bug, maybe in parentheses. --Chuck (talk) 03:35, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Replies: (a) The very fact there is a wikilink to computer bug in the opening sentence, providing you the definition you seek, solves your concern. That is the very purpose of the link. (b) It should remain singular since the "problem" itself is a singular phenomenon (albeit with multiple components). --ZimZalaBim talk 20:13, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The first sentence 

message: Jeff Furman, along with his team of Change Management Support Specialists at a leading brokerage house in New York City in the early 90’s, published several early articles 
in 1994, 1995, and 1996 proving the existence of the Y2K Bug by citing date-handling errors they found in advance in mainframe vendor software products. 
They found the bugs by using Date Simulation software products to advance the date on their company’s mainframes to key Y2K test dates such as 12/31/1999, 01/01/2000, 02/29/2000, 
03/01/2000, and 12/31/2000.  
The 2 Date Simulation products they used to capture bugs in advance were:
1) “TicToc” from Isogon Inc., and
2) “HourGlass 2000” from Mainware Software Inc. 
The 2 main articles where he cited his team’s Y2K findings were: 
1) “Year 2000 Denial,” COMPUTERWORLD, October 24, 1994,
   (co-authored by Jeff Furman and Albert Marotta) and
2) "Y2K: Not Just An Applications Issue," Technical Support Magazine, July 1995,
     by Jeff Furman. 
On Dec. 20, 2006, at the request of the Project Management Institute (PMI's New York City Chapter) Jeff Furman gave a seminar and led a Q&A on the topic “Y2K Lessons Learned.” 
JFNYC
JFNYC (talk) 02:20, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Published Articles citing Y2K Bugs caught in advance 

message: I think this article misses the mark in conveying the hysteria surrounding Y2K.  The media reported all kinds of craziness -- planes would be falling out of the sky, banks not working, etc.  Clearly none of that happened, and I think the article well explains the differing arguments of Why.  But it misses the real panic of the time, by Dec 1999 it had mostly dispersed, but earlier when the first repors of this starting being disseminated it was all hell break loose. Vegaswiki (talk) 17:17, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There are two conflicting threads in this Y2K wiki description: (1) Y2K was a very real software challenge, and (2) the media is driven by the old mantra of "if it bleeds, it leads."  People have been gleefully predicting & selling "the end is nigh" for a looooong time.  Y2K had absolutely NOTHING to do with the End Times, the end of the world, elevators in Jerusalem, or whatever whacko madness floats your boat. DEddy (talk) 17:54, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical Context 

message: The Y2K problem is based on the idea that computer time (dates) are maintained internally in decimal and are compared on the last two digits; hence, the angst that year 00 (2000) would be seen as before year 99 (1999).
Internally, microcomputer operating systems use a binary clock based on 32-bit or 64-bit counts of seconds, with different systems starting their second zero at midnight 1 Jan 1915 (Mac) or 1970 (Unix) or 1980 (IBM/Microsoft); so, their internal binary date/time comparisons did not matter over the 1999--2000 decimal year transition. The real problem will be when those binary second counts wrap from the max count all 1's back to zero. The year 2107 will be the crucial point for MSDOS. Naaman Brown (talk) 14:03, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I beg to differ.  Regardless of how the operating system handles date/time, an APPLICATION has the ability to step in & do something different & potentially dangerous. DEddy (talk) 15:37, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  decimal v binary 

message: I've added more information, tried to clear things up and added two refrences. I do however remember it like the original text said that JavaScript was changed from always returning the years from 1900 to this complex solution where the return values number of digits depends on which century it is. I can't however find any sources for my claim. Anyone willing, and able, is welcome to do so. A reference on Javascript 1.0 would probably be a good start but I can't find one. 83.253.140.185 (talk) 16:42, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  JavaScript 

message: "helped along"?  How so?  This/today is the first time I've seen/heard of Y2G. Supporting evidence please.  DEddy (talk) 20:32, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y2G? 

message: Hello all,
The Straight Dope has recently published a column on the after effects of Y2K. See it here. In the column, Cecil Adams makes reference to a February 2000 report by a US Senate Y2K panel on the effects of the bug. The Wayback folks have archived the report here as well (warning: PDF); these could be interesting ref materals. Hope this helps. - Thanks, Hoshie 09:33, 20 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Basically an opinion piece, I'd say. It makes reference to other material, but there's a good argument for saying that the Senate report is also an opinion piece. Mr Barndoor (talk) 14:28, 20 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Straight Dope and US Senate on Y2K - possible ref materal 

message: "Many banks have responded to the Y2K problem by forcing full 4-digit year entries on cheque forms, which helps to prevent the error from occurring in accounting environments."  What does printing a 4 digit year on a check/form have to do with how SYSTEMS process dates?  Have we learned nothing?  DEddy (talk) 19:51, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  4 Digit Years on Forms 

message: I listened to Professor Anderson's interview on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mz53r ).  Unfortunately the analysis he offered (minimal problems found at his university & no problems in Korea) is at such a high level as to be meaningless.  There were plenty of reasons why there were no likely Y2K issues in an organization... someONE was smart enough to glance at the practice of using 2 digit years, instantly see it would be a nasty problem in 20 years & be in the position to decree the the use of 4 digit years.  Perhaps Korea was in the social practice of using 4 digit years. 
His suggested solution of "turn it off & turn it back on again..." sounds like he's only looking at hardware.  It's not possible to just turn the information systems of a large organization off/on, since typically there are 100s/1000s of such applications & no one understands how data flows between them.
The potential damage done here is that it reinforces the widespread belief that Y2K was a hoax because there was not widespread chaos. 
There are several comments to Anderson's interview that explain that Y2K issues were very real. DEddy (talk) 17:24, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Professor Anderson 

message: Someone should include the viewpoint that the y2k scare fueled consumer consumption and many companies made significant profits. For example bunker manufacturers made a lot of profits, as they did during the nuclear atomic arms scare of the 1950s between US & Russia.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.80.121.28 (talk) 05:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Y2K Scam? 

message: What's the objection to the following two statements which were removed without comment? 
::Since there has been a minor flurry of interest in the year 2000 issue on its 10 year anniversary, it is duly noted that to a noticeable extent reporting on the issue still tends to emphasize either the problem was not real or it was over dramatized to generate unneeded spending.
 	
::One facet seems to be accepted, that the "inventories" of systems were quickly discarded or allowed to become outdated, and organizations quickly returned to a state of blissful ignorance as to the extent and interconnectedness of their software portfolios.
DEddy (talk) 02:53, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Is either of them sourced? Or are they simply observations you've made? If you have citations of people making these assertions then we can present them as something people have noticed. If you are making the observations yourself then they would be considered OR and wouldn't be allowed in the article. Padillah (talk) 12:56, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  What is a "source" or "observation" or "citation" in the context of what you're asking?  I have "experienced" this personally, in conversations/interviews with journalists, and reading in online "magazines."  DEddy (talk) 18:24, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

text:  This commentary is what comes to hand first... http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/y2k-10-years-later-459?page=0,0   Would it be considered an acceptable source/observation/citation?  DEddy (talk) 18:49, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: What I mean by sourced is, any thing represented by Wikipedia has to be frank statements. "COBOL is a computer-based language", stuff like that. Those can be defended, they can be sourced to the original work that made the statement. I can show you a book that has the above statement in it. It is verifiable and correct. We can add anything we want to an article but it has to be neutral and verifiable. The one thing we can't do is post our personal experience, because it should be obvious that each of us cannot experience the entirety of any given subject thus we cannot be the sole owner of information regarding a subject. Rules have been put in place to discourage posting original research to an article since it can't be defended (other than syaing "Did, too" like a 6 year-old). So, that is what I mean by "sourced" vs. "observation". If you have a source that plainly says "Reporting on the Y2K bug still emphasizes ..." than we can add it and attribute the statement to a source. If it's just something you've noticed than it would be considered OR and removed. As for the article you provided, it's a Reliable Source but it doesn't support what you are asking for. It's an example of yet another report about Y2K being overblown or not real, but it doesn't make that statement. That is a situation called WP:SYN|synthesizing information]], when you come to a conclusion based on sources rather than supported by sources. Padillah (talk) 20:29, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lessons NOT learned 

message: For the bullet point that states "The lack of Y2K-related problems in countries such as Italy ... None of these countries experienced any Y2K problems regarded as worth reporting:"
The citation on the sentence "none of these countries experienced any Y2K problems" cites an article published in 1999. So that citation is misleading on that sentence. Is there any relevant citation for this claim?
--Steve3003 (talk) 14:29, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opposing Views Section - misleading citation 

message: Is no one here who believes that this article is extremely poorly written? 
* First off all: what is so hard in pointing out that "if (80 < 10) then  ..." yields false while "if (1980 < 2010) then ..." yields true? So every programmer and non programmer understands the implications instead of writing 3 or 4 screens which in fact don't explain what the problem is?
* Second: in typical program (e.g. in COBOL ) that is not using 4 digits for years per 1 million lines of code you have roughly 500 to 2000 line of code with a "faulty" comparison like noted above. The estimation ow server this problem is, is left up for the reader.
* Third: what is the problem with a leap year? Easy explained: if your year is e.g. 2003, which is not a leap year, 1st of February will be the same weekday like 1st of March (because February has 28 days). Now in a leap year like e.g. 2000 (1900 was not a leap year!!!) February has an extra day. So  now in the leap year the weekdays from March on are one day off. That means systems that would shut down on sundays and on saturday (e.g. access control systems for secure areas in a chemical factory or something, or a simple elevator control) now shut down on fridays and saturdays (because they believe the friday is a saturday and the sunday is a monday). A system using 2 digits will obviously in year 2000 assume this is not a leap year because it will believe it is 1900.
* Fourth: no, no, no, the problem did not come from the desire to save memory space or storing space. Perhaps there was a desire to save space on disk in a database but that is doubtable. A typical program written in COBOL will just do some simple thing: e.g. lets calculate which "employee" has his birthday today and will retire, and will be shifted from employee to pension receiver. That might be just 100 lines in COBOL walking over 1 table in a data base and copying new retired people from the working population to the one receiving pensions. Such a program might read from a table that only has 2 digits for years but could always have had expanded them to 4 digits during loading of that record into memory. In Memory you always had only one record, which might be 2000 bytes big, 2 bytes more would not have been a problem. But programmers did not do that. The real reason for using 2 digits instead of 4 is very simple: programmers are people like you and me. In real live they only use 2 digits. So why should they consider to use 4 in programming? The argument it came from "space saving" is a newspaper argument and should not be in Wikipedia as a main argument, it is simply false.
** Saving space and time were absolutely factors in using 2 digits rather than 4.  Aside from the forms that used 2 digits (much faster to write 2 digits), "databases" were boxes of punch cards.  Keypunching was both slow and expensive, so saving 2 digits was closely watched.  There was no single reason to use 2 rather than 4 digits, but there were multiple factors... speed, space, habit, existing paper forms, etc. DEddy (talk) 00:51, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes indeed, someone messed up the quote on the 13th of March 2010. I've now corrected it. Mr Barndoor (talk) 13:41, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extremely poorly written article 

message: Why do people always seem to overlook the fact that one byte can hold a value up to 255? The bug should be triggered, then, in 2156, not 2000. Am I missing something? 142.59.172.187 11:16, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In some systems this might be the case, but it is not so common I think. There are several dates in the future that can cause software problems, like 2038, 2100, 2156 etc. The world will not end. -- BIL 14:51, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

text: The date problems will be those involving not storing 4 digit years at all [Y2K], incorrect interpreation of a user entered 2 digit years [potenitally always], simplified leap year calculations [Y1900 due to bug in Excell, but numerious programs will have it in 2100 if they are still in use], and overflow [Y2038] . Someone has also added a Y2007 problem to the see also, but that is unrelated [only dealing with times being off by an hour due to change in US daylight savings time start & end dates]. I'm not aware of any special significance to 2156. Jon 21:06, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I strongly doubt they'll be any significant problems for 2156. The smallest number fields I've ever seen anyone actually use in DB2, Oracle, or M$ Access was a 16 bit small int even when it's known the data won't prossibly exceed 10. Jon 20:26, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The worst affected programs were in Cobol, where the practice is to store pretty much everything in strings.  So dates were typically a 6 character field, or three 2 character fields, one for day, one for month, one for year.  That is, 1980 was stored as the character 8 and the character 0, not the numbers 8 and 0, nor the number 80.  If someone did store the year as a single byte, there could still be issues, depending on whether that number was added to 1900, or appended.  I've seen personally seen a program display the current year as "19100".  You also need to consider signed integers, which don't have the same range as unsigned integers.  For example, a signed char would typically go from -128 to +127.  But I doubt there are many such programs, or that they will still be much of importance in 2018.  Regards, Ben Aveling 06:29, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I was a COBOL programmer for about 15 years beginning in the 1970 in financial services firms.  One must ALWAYS prefix statements of "this was how it was done" with "it depends"... I don't remember ever seeing dates stored as character strings.  What I remember seeing was lots of dates defined as 999999 (ddmmyy) DIGITS.  It's been way too long now, but "storing pretty much everything as strings" is highly dubious.  COBOL was not designed/intended to be a string processing language.  It was field oriented... numeric & character fields.  DEddy (talk) 03:15, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

text: The problem occours when the 8 bits are used to store two, 4 bit unsigned integers, which will hold 0-15 each. You can then use 4 bits for each part of the year mod 100 (i.e. for 1982 you would have 82 and store 8 in one 4 bit integer and 2 in the other). This seems like a fantastic waste to me. Having the simpler 8 bit signed integer and add a constant to it (i.e. for 1982 you would store 82 in the integer and add 1900) seems to me to be the better thing to do (in at least by far most cases). It wastes less storage compared to what it does and allows for a longer period of time before it breaks (meaning it is more likely that it will be replaced or fixed before it becomes a problem).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.167.145.223 (talk) 23:14, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  World ends in 2156!