Warren Buffett: The Impact of Y2K on the Economy and Stock Market

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• published: 24 Aug 2013
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The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K) was a problem for both digital (computer-related) and non-digital documentation and data storage situations which resulted from the practice of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits. In 1997, The British Standards Institute (BSI) developed a standard, DISC PD2000-1, which defines "Year 2000 Conformity requirements" as four rules: No valid date will cause any interruption in operations. Calculation of durations between, or the sequence of, pairs of dates will be correct whether any dates are in different centuries. In all interfaces and in all storage, the century must be unambiguous, either specified, or calculable by algorithm Year 2000 must be recognized as a leap year It identifies two problems that may exist in many computer programs. Firstly, the practice of representing the year with two digits becomes problematic with logical error(s) arising upon "rollover" from x99 to x00. This has caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after 1 January 2000, and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "...97, 98, 99, 00..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Secondly, some programmers had misunderstood the rule that determines whether years that are exactly divisible by 100 are leap years, and assumed the year 2000 would not be a leap year. Although most years divisible by 100 are not leap years, if they are divisible by 400 then they are. Thus the year 2000 was a leap year. Companies and organizations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems. The number of computer failures that occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000 in spite of remedial work is not known; amongst other reasons is the reticence of organisations to report problems. When 1 January 2000 arrived, there were problems generally regarded as minor. Consequences did not always result precisely at midnight. Some programs were not active at that moment and would only show up when they were invoked. Not all problems recorded were directly linked to Y2K programming in a causality; minor technological glitches occur on a regular basis. Some caused erroneous results, some caused machines to stop working, some caused date errors, and two caused malfunctions. Reported problems include: In Sheffield, United Kingdom, incorrect Down syndrome test results were sent to 154 pregnant women and two abortions were carried out as a direct result of a Y2K bug. Four Down's syndrome babies were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group.[24] In Ishikawa, Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight; however, officials stated there was no risk to the public.[25] In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.[25] In Japan, at two minutes past midnight, Osaka Media Port, a telecommunications carrier, found errors in the date management part of the company's network. The problem was fixed by 02:43 and no services were disrupted.[26] In Japan, NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT DoCoMo), Japan's largest cellular operator, reported on 1 January 2000, that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up.[26] In Australia, bus-ticket-validation machines in two states failed to operate.[27] In the United States, 150 slot machines at race tracks in Delaware stopped working.[27] In the United States, the U.S. Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, gave the date on its website as 1 Jan., 19100.[28] In France, the national weather forecasting service, Meteo France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday's weather forecast as "01/01/19100".[27] This also occurred on other websites, including att.net, at the time a general-purpose portal site primarily for AT&T; Worldnet customers in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K