ABSTRACT
Y2K, millennium bug, doomsday 2000 . . . these and other fearful terms were trumpeted around the world as January 1, 2000, approached. The fear was that a design flaw in computer hardware and software, which only processed dates by saving the last two digits of years, would render the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. In the middle to late 1990s, designers woke up to the fact that because countless older systems would still be in use at the dawn of the new millennium, fixing the glitch as newer machines were produced would not solve the problem. Government agencies were especially concerned because many of them were using older equipment.
