Word: y2k
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this happen? Who is responsible for the bug we call Y2K? Conventional wisdom goes something like this: back in the 1950s, when computers were the size of office cubicles and the most advanced data-storage system came on strips of punched cardboard, several scientists, including a Navy officer named Grace Murray Hopper, begat a standard programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language). To save precious space on the 80-column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year...
...kind of work that calls for thinking outside the 20th century box. Bemer obliged by inventing the picture clause, which allowed for a four-digit year. From this point on, more than 40 years ahead of schedule, the technology was available for every computer in the world to become Y2K compliant...
Programmers ignored Bemer's fix. And so did his bosses at IBM, who unwittingly shipped the Y2K bug in their System/360 computers, an industry standard every bit as powerful in the '60s as Windows is today. By the end of the decade, Big Blue had effectively set the two-digit date in stone. Every machine, every manual, every maintenance guy would tell you the year was 69, not 1969. "The general consensus was that this was the way you programmed," says an IBM spokesman. "We recognize the potential for lawsuits on this issue...
...boat. And no one could alter the course IBM had set, not even the International Standards Organization, which adopted the four-digit date standard in the 1970s. The Pentagon promised to adopt century-friendly dates around 1974, then sat on its hands. Bemer himself wrote the earliest published Y2K warnings--first in 1971, then again in 1979. Greeted by nothing but derision, he retired in 1982. "How do you think I feel about this thing?" says Bemer, now an officer at his own Y2K software firm. "I made it possible to do four digits, and they screwed...
Meanwhile, the torch of Y2K awareness passed to a new generation. In the fall of 1977, a young Canadian named Peter de Jager signed on as a computer operator at IBM. His first task was to boot up a nationwide banking system run on an IBM 370. When the machine whirred into life, it asked for the date. As De Jager, a mathematics major straight out of college, entered the number 77, a thought occurred to him. Did this machine care what century it was? With the impetuousness of youth, he marched off to his manager and informed...