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Some programs, when facing two-digit years, could not distinguish between 20. As space on disc and tape was also expensive, these also saved money by reducing the size of stored data files and databases. Also used was the shorter "YYDDD" where DDD was the day number within the year. Since programs could simply prefix "19" to the year of a date, most programs internally used, or stored on disc or tape, data files where the date format was six digits, in the form DDMMYY, DD as two digits for the day, MM as two digits for the month, and YY as two digits for the year. It was therefore very important for programmers to minimize usage. The problem started because on both mainframe computers and later personal computers, storage was expensive, from as low as $10 per kilobyte, to in many cases as much as or even more than US$100 per kilobyte. He later said, "People were calling it CDC (Century Date Change), FADL (Faulty Date Logic). The acronym Y2K has been attributed to Massachusetts programmer David Eddy in an e-mail sent on 12 June 1995. The first recorded mention of the Year 2000 Problem on a Usenet newsgroup occurred on 18 January 1985 by poster Spencer Bolles. The Year 2000 problem was the subject of the early book Computers in Crisis by Jerome and Marilyn Murray (Petrocelli, 1984 reissued by McGraw-Hill under the title The Year 2000 Computing Crisis in 1996). It was also named the "Millennium Bug" because it was associated with the popular (rather than literal) rollover of the millennium, even though most of the problems could have occurred at the end of any century.Ĭomputerworld 's 1993 three-page "Doomsday 2000" article by Peter de Jager was called "the information-age equivalent of the midnight ride of Paul Revere" by The New York Times. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for "year", the number 2 and a capitalized version of k for the SI unit prefix kilo meaning 1000 hence, 2K signifies 2000.
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Y2K is a numeronym and was the common abbreviation for the year 2000 software problem.
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In the years leading up to the turn of the century, the public gradually became aware of the "Y2K scare", and individual companies predicted the global damage caused by the bug would require anything between $400 million and $600 billion to rectify. Computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for industries ranging from banking to air travel. Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, Millennium bug, Y2K bug, Y2K glitch or Y2K error, refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after the year 2000. An electronic sign at École centrale de Nantes incorrectly displaying the year 1900 on 3 January 2000
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