management to discover itself so dependent on inefficient and obsolescent equipment, and many are now moving rapidly to rectify this condition. other nations, who began to automate more recently, never amassed the vast inventory of these older systems that required so much remedial work in our country. the newer systems, which many put in place over the last few years, were more standard and better documented, thus easier to check out and fix. in many cases, after a few operations checked out such a system and discovered it was either all right or could be easily fixed and how to do it, the word got around, and many others with the same installation were saved a lot of trouble. then, in other places, only very new off - the - shelf software was being used. these were generally first efforts at automation in emerging areas. most software vendors developed simple fixes for their products and put them up on their web sites for anyone to employ. you may have seen the report from jamaica, where a very small group of knowledgeable technicians apparently fixed virtually every public and large private computer system in the entire nation in just a few months by simply following instructions available on the internet. it was, of course, overwhelmingly us companies that provided that free know - how. finally, there are shockingly many nations that had little to do because there simply are very few computers there. as we sat in the fed control room on 31 december and watched time zone after time zone roll through the millennium problem free, we got increasingly nervous. we better not have a problem here after all the very visible work and all the international preaching we had been doing for so long! that would be a major embarrassment! but all went well. what implications may this experience have for us? we are still much too close to the event to have adequately identified all that happened, let alone comprehensively assess its impact on the future. but let me offer a few speculations. first, in the short term. many foreigners are discreetly, but audibly, crowing about how we in the united states were so obsessed and spent so much money on y2k while they had equally good results and were much more relaxed about it. i am convinced that we will have the last laugh. as a result of that so - called obsession, i believe we have strengthened the underpinnings of our already impressive level of productivity improvement. among larger companies and public institutions, there is a new awareness in

senior management of the possibilities for improving their operations through more effective technology and systems management. an example would be those old, inefficient legacy systems we just had to rework. i would not expect to see them proliferate again, once they disappear. among the millions of smaller businesses and not - for - profit organizations, there is a new awareness and appreciation for what computers can do and a new sense of confidence in their ability to capture these improvements. this new sensitivity should lead to a far more rapid assimilation of the information technology revolution than has been the case in similar technical breakthroughs in the past. for example, the development of steam power, and later the wide availability of electrical power, took many decades to work through into comprehensive utilization by the economies of their day. computers, of course, were invented a half - century ago, but it is only quite recently that they have evolved into broadly useful tools. it is even more recently that they have begun to have a major impact on the everyday operation of our economy. at the end of the 1950s, there were about 2, 000 computers up and running in the world. forty years later, there are approximately 200 million, and they are, of course, vastly more powerful and far less expensive. this should now expand much more quickly as a result of the rapid and wide exposure information technology achieved through the run - up to the y2k event. there has been a great deal of concern in our society over the past several years about an emerging “ digital divide ” between the more and the less advantaged elements of our society. computer literacy, some fear, will further widen the already broad gulf between the earning power of rich and poor. i would hope that y2k ’ s wide public awareness and involvement could provide us an opportunity to shrink that gap rather than see it open even more. certainly, everyone now knows there is a strong demand for computer skills in the workplace today and that it will only enlarge. therein lies a huge employment opportunity, offering good wages and working conditions, for qualified applicants. to be sure, as is the case in so many other opportunities for societal improvement, an improvement in the education system will be required for us to seize this chance to move a step closer to greater income parity. but computers are now very much on the minds of leaders in education reform. on the other hand, y2k, by exposing the vast differences in computer sophistication among nations,