Bill,
Once they realize that the world is not coming to an end on Jan. 1 2000, I predict they will come up with some variant of the "cascading failure scenario" which will cause computers to crash in later years due to "delayed" millenirm bugs.
As a bit of esoterica, this is actually true, but the effects won't be noticed until around 2050-2070 or so, if such old code (yikes!) is still running.
As a programmer, I see lots of code that determines which century it is from a two digit year by which side of 70, for example, that the two digits of the year fall. If the user input 82, it must be 1982. If the user input 68, it must be 2068. Though not Y2K "compliant" in any strict sense of the word, this code will continue to work just fine until 2071.
You are right that there will be no immediate cascade effect. If the funky stuff out there makes it past 1999, it should run OK for several decades. If this becomes the new doom story, wait till that round of hype has about topped out and short again. :-D |
