The Problem with 6 Digits Dating

What started of as a noble act of saving some memory space turned out to be a quake, capable of trembling the world to its core. When maiden inventors set the year with two digits instead of four, little did they realize that by 1st January 2000 it would cause arithmetic delinquencies and confuses the entire system. For example, a bank transaction on the 25th of July 1997 would be recorded as 07/25/97. Many software add the value 1900 to the two digits code to calculate the actual year. A credit card charged on 1st of January 2000 would have to bear the interest of 99 years because the transaction date would read 01/01/00. This means the computers assume that the same transaction took place on 01/01/1900. Another major problem with six digits dating occurs when we tend to compare the pre and post – 2000 dates. For example, 01/09/99 and 01/01/00, when converted into a simple code they would read 990901 and 000101 respectively. Obviously 990901 is older than 000101, which in reality is not true. As the computers cannot process the current date as year 2000 marches in, it is also unable to calculate the leap year. All years divisible by 4 is considered as a leap year except for centuries. A century will be considered as a leap year only if it is divisible by 400. For example, 1996 is considered as a leap year because it is divisible by 4 (1996 4 = 499) wherelse 1997 is not (1997/4 = 499.25). On the hand the hand, 1900 is not a leap year for it is not divisible by 400 (1900/400=4.75). Year 2000 is a leap year for it is divisible by 400 (2000/400 = 5) (with reference to explanation from: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/RGO/leaflets/leapyear/leapyear.html). As we step into the year 2000, existing computers will not be able to differentiate the two digits year anymore. The â€Å"00† date field might be assumed as 1900 instead of 2000. Thus calculations that involve a date would provide wrong answers. On the 1st of January 2000, computers will define this day as 01/01/00 and regards the year as 1900, leaving us 99 years behind time. This will interrupt public services, bank transactions, loan interest calculations and many more, causing formidable loss of billions of dollars. Only a few systems could be spared from the Y2K and it has been estimated that there are 500 billion lines of application code worldwide, with some 85% of which needs to be corrected. Various reports stated that by the turn of the millennium, as much as 50% of all businesses which failed to address the year 2000 challenge would fall apart. Besides being deadly, expensive and extensive, the year 2000 problem affects hardware (BIOS, real-time clocks), embedded firmware, languages and compilers, operating systems, random number generators, database management systems, transaction-processing systems, banking systems, PBX, flight scheduling and any other system that deals with dates. Surfing the net would prove that the Y2K's awareness level is growing with more more sites dedicated to this problem. Managers and IT resources are becoming heavy-hearted thinking about their future as 31st December 1999 rolls in. Knowing that there is going to be an IT disaster does not help much especially when there are few resources to handle the problem. A rough estimation to create solutions for the Y2K issue concentrated on something like US $400 -600 billion dollars worldwide. An additional 200,000 COBOL programmers will also be required. Organizations are not the only ones that are going to suffer from the virulent millennium bug, it can be anyone, even a personal computer user.