"Mary A. Banaszewski"  wrote:
>
> What is "the Y2K problem"?

Y2K is "Year 2000".  It's a problem that is anticipated when we reach
January 1, 2000 due to our heavy, and in some industries, sole
reliance on computers.  Early computer programmers (due to memory
constraints) represented years by the last two digits of the centurty.
 Thus the year 1970 is represented by the number "70" in many legacy
software applications.  For older systems, such as are currently used
by our government, the time will seem to have reverted back 100 years.
 So, when computing basic lengths of time, systems will return errors
or negative numbers.  (ie:  a person born in 1990 will be computed to
have an age of -80 in 2010 (10-90= -80)

The problem may seem easy to fix but actually is extremely difficult
and expensive to fix-simply modify the affected programs to change
existing date representations into a 4-digit form.  However, many
large corporations including our governments run thousands of programs
with millions of lines of codes and many programs relying on other
programs who are relying on yet other programs (and so on) containing
these erroneous lines of code.  The troubleshooting will be very
difficult and expensive to correct!

For more info. on Y2K, try accessing Microsoft's site:
ww.microsoft.com/year2000.

Yours Truely,

Julie L. Diaz of North Dallas where a recent cold front has
temperatures in the low 80's for the high today!!!
*aspiring* LC (wannabe)
currently employed in the computer industry where we are Y2K compliant!

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