How hard will the Millennium Bug bite?
Kilen Mathews Special to the Middle East Times . Starting in the wee hours of 1 January 2000, the world will be very different. If you listen to the doomsayers, January 2000 will not be a good month. They make predictions of hospitals able to provide only emergency care for the first month, electricity only available 50 percent of the time in the first week and major disruptions to postal, telephone and transportation systems. And let’s add very confused computerized bank vaults and automatic teller machines for good measure. Leaders in almost every industry in the States are scrambling to avert disaster: government, law, finance and insurance are likely to be the hardest hit. All this stems from the fact that many computers and programs in use today use only two digits for the year instead of four, as a result of programmers and system designers in the early days of computing saving precious disk space and bytes of memory. On one customer billing system I worked on in the early 1980s,
