The Y2K . Millennium Bug
In 1993, Canadian computer engineer Peter de Jager published an article entitled "Day of Judgment 2000" in which he talked about a mistake made by computer programmers while designing the way to handle dates on electronic devices.
This article caused uproar and panic in all sectors of the technology-driven industry, as well as the reaction in the stock markets.
At the beginning of the computer industry, hardware components were expensive, with few capabilities and sizes. This is explained by a statement attributed to Bill Gates that "640 kilobytes of random memory would be enough for anyone."
For this; When engineers designed the way dates are stored, they shortened the year number to show only the last two digits of the year instead of the four digits in order to reduce memory consumption.
For example, 1980 is shortened to only 80, 1981 is shortened to only 81... And so on. Although the idea was ostensibly successful in saving memory, it contained a catastrophic error that nearly destroyed the tech industry.
If we keep counting in the same way and express the year with only the last two digits, what will happen the day after December 31, 1999? The
computers are supposed to move to the next year, which is the year 2000 AD, which will be expressed by the number 00, but the catastrophe is that the number 00 in the system refers to the year 1900 and not the year 2000, meaning that all computers and devices that deal with dates will go back 100 years!
Imagine a banking system that calculates interest on a one-year loan that a person obtained... and when a person goes to pay off the loan, he is surprised that he is required to pay the loan and 101 years of interest on it!!
The error was a disaster for literally all sectors that rely on technology in counting and statistics including banks, hospitals, power plants, government agencies, aviation and navigation systems, as failure of the device to deal with history means the failure of the entire system.
For several years, government organizations and major companies have been racing to update their systems with solutions to address this problem, most notably redesigning the way history is dealt with to use all four numbers instead of two numbers; This solution was used by large companies who can afford this change and have sufficient memory space.
Another solution that was used is to modify the date display algorithm to treat the year 2000 as a leap year that is divisible by "4 / 100 / 400" to convert the date to it instead of going back to 1900.
In some cases and complex systems the only solution was to replace the entire hardware.
The process of updating hardware and software to solve this problem was very stressful and expensive, and the most beneficiaries of this problem were the programming companies that specialized in providing solutions to this problem and issuing certified certificates to the official systems and companies that their devices were ready for the year 2000 AD.
The cost of confronting the Y2K millennium bug has reached, according to some estimates, $460 billion. In the United States alone, it is about $300 billion.
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