Y2K - 10 years on

New Year 2010 is here - in just about 5 days!!

Well, this new year is special - just because it signals the end of the first decade of the 21st century!!

A little over 10 years ago, as the 21st century was about to be heralded - Y2K was the buzz word!!

Y2K was a critical computer problem - related to the fact that "years" in computer systems were stored in 2 digits. On 1 Jan 2000, the "year" was expected to roll over from 99 to 00.

With this, it was estimated that the systems would not be able to distinguish between the year 2000 and 1900. Many organizations across the world spent millions of dollars trying to fix the problem. The net result was highly successful - with very very few errors reported across the world!!

Catch all the details here!!

And one comment by Alan Greenspan in 1998 highlighted how programmers across the world underestimated their capabilities on developing long running computer systems!!

"I’m one of the culprits who created this problem. I used to write those programs back in the 1960s and 1970s, and was proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space out of my program by not having to put a 19 before the year. Back then, it was very important. We used to spend a lot of time running through various mathematical exercises before we started to write our programs so that they could be very clearly delimited with respect to space and the use of capacity. It never entered our minds that those programs would have lasted for more than a few years. As a consequence, they are very poorly documented. If I were to go back and look at some of the programs I wrote 30 years ago, I would have one terribly difficult time working my way through step-by-step. ”

—Alan Greenspan, 1998