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Yahoo! News
AP Headlines
Monday January 4 4:45 PM ET
Early Y2K Glitches Reported
By CHRIS ALLBRITTON AP Cyberspace Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - Worries that the first few days of the new year would bring computer problems similar to those expected when the dreaded Y2K bug hits appear to be mostly unfounded.
There were concerns that computers looking a year ahead could crash or that the ''99'' in ''1999''would signal programs to cease calculating.
For the most part, the worriers were proven wrong and computers operated smoothly Friday and Monday. But the few glitches that did pop up were a sign that a year from now thing could get tricky.
For instance:- In Singapore, computerized taxi meters went dead at noon Jan. 1 for about two hours, according to The Sunday Times;
- Two medical products, a Hewlett-Packard external defibrillator and Invivo's Research Inc.'s Millennia 3500 multiparameter patient monitor, perform basic functions properly, but display the wrong
time and date if not reset properly. More than 39,000 of defibrillators and more than 2,000 patient
monitors are in use around the world;
- And according to the Sunday Telegraph in Sydney, Australia, computers at police offices in three
Swedish airports failed at midnight Jan. 1, when they were unable to recognize the year 1999.
Travelers who needed temporary passports were unable to have them issued, although the problem
was fixed some hours later.
''These are kind of whispers in the wind for what's going to happen in the year 2000,'' said Chris
LeTocq, a Year 2000 analyst at Dataquest Inc., a computer research firm. ''If you're hearing stories of
software having problems with 1999, that means Year 2000 is real.''
One of the problems that some organizations faced this weekend was the number 9, which is the
highest digit that can be plugged into a date code. Programmers over time have used a series of 9s to
indicate ''end of file'' or ''cease operating,'' and this code can make the following dates risky:
- Jan. 1, 1999 - the beginning of the last year in the century;
- April 9, 1999 - the 99th day of the last year for the century;
- Sept. 9, 1999 - The four nines of ''9-9-99.''
The other problem that may have cropped up this weekend was computers looking ahead a year and
choking on the Year 2000 problem - often simply called ''Y2K.''
The problem occurs when some computer programs, especially older ones, may fail when the date
changes to 2000. Because they were written to recognize only the last two digits of a year, such
programs could read the digits ''00'' as 1900 instead of 2000.
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