The millenium bug what was tath about?

Question

The millenium bug what was tath about?

Answer 1

When older computers were built and software written, date fields were written to account for only the last two digits of the year. For instance, this year can be shortened to 08. Older computers and software would have interpreted that as 1908 rather than 2008. Also, some mainframe programmers would use 9999 in a date field to exit a particular function. Well, on September 9, 1999, this would cause a problem. Any dates beyond that would be unpredictable. The whole scare called the "Y2K" bug was just a bunch of programmers and hardware manufacturers trying to fix what that hadn't thoroughly thought through to begin with..

I hope this answers your question....

Answer 2

i'm not a comp expert but it was feared that computers would glitch and crash or not be able to communicate from one to an other without a patch because of the date change. the format that some (older) computers and software use is mm/dd/yy... so if a new computer thought that it was 2000 or 01/01/00 and an older model thought it was 1900 cuz of the same 01/01/00 then all sorts of things would be messed. client records, reciepts, system bios, networking. i dunno but a bunch of stuff. it didn't seem to effect that much though. some people used patches that were released and newer software kept things ok. and others had slight agrivation. but it was all about the last two digits in the year messing up computer systems because of the confusion between 1900 and 2000.. atleast i hope i'm not totally wrong and that helped. :)