What the heck is the Millennium Bug?
Surely you (whom I assume to be a programmer) know that. But, anyway, here’s the meaning. The Millennium Bug is probably the worst problem people using and depending on computers face. The problem lies in the way almost all computers handle dates by dropping off the first two digits of the year. Thus, January 15, 1998 becomes 01-15-98. Obviously, such treatment of years would have problems when you’re dealing with centuries. This way of handling dates dates back to the time when computers were expensive and every byte of memory, a precious commodity. Programmers who hard-wired the code in early computers dropped off the two digits to save space. Unfortunately, this has become the standard and has since then been used on almost all computer systems. The Millennium Bug is one of the best examples of shortsightedness there is. (Another example was when the computer dinosaurs of old said that nobody would ever really need more than a megabyte of memory. Consequently, they designed PC proce
