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To: C.K. Houston who wrote (39978)	9/3/1999 9:26:00 AM
From: Alex	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116795

Y2K - Dead By Decree................... <<The bank said it routinely keeps large inventories of bank notes in the range of $6-billion and $7-billion to meet the need of peak demand times. That is about 25 per cent of the notes currently in circulation. Any increase in the demand for cash as the result of the year 2000 will have no impact on the economy or on inflation, it said.>> globeandmail.com

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (39978)	9/6/1999 12:58:00 AM
From: d:oug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116795

(off topic - Y2K) Cheryl, on CNN today more bug dates.... This new one mentioned I'am confused on how it can be a problem, but below a computer professor said it is, so ? My take is that it is not a problem because this 9-9-99 date is data thats stored in memory that is seperate from the memory where code is placed. I agree that data can be used to flag or signal a special action to happen, but usually its of a pattern not found in data, and 9999 is a number to likely appear in data storage no different than 9998 or 10000. Most likely you have read much more on this and if not a brother to this thread please update up in an off topic, as Sept 9 is this week. thanks, Doug KELLAN: January 1st, 2000 is not the only date that could cause trouble for older computers. Another dangerous date arrives this week: 9-9-99. RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These days, computers are tiny with big memories. But a generation ago, when the reverse was true -- big computers, tiny memories -- programmers sometimes used a string of nines to tell the computer when to stop doing whatever it was doing. Now, we're coming up on September 9th, 1999, a date so similar to the "stop" command used by the programmers of 20 and 30 years ago that it could bring some older mainframes to a screeching halt and give us all a taste of what Y2K day might be like. HOWARD RUBIN, COMPUTER SCIENCE PROFESSOR: So you'd find this in everything -- from banks to utility companies to insurance companies to telephone companies. LOCKRIDGE: Meaning there's a chance your bills might be late or your paycheck. But just how much of a chance? JOHN KOSKINEN, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON Y2K: We don't think that we're going to have major problems here. LOCKRIDGE: John Koskinen is the president's lead adviser on computer-date problems. KOSKINEN: It's much easier to find a series of nines when you're scanning code than it is to look at date processing, and everybody's been looking for it so that we think -- and everybody has been testing against it. We think that everybody will be able to deal with that effectively. LOCKRIDGE: But nobody really knows until each dangerous date arrives. And there are still a lot of old mainframes out there -- civilian and military. RUBIN: Military is another area that has -- perhaps the military itself may be the world's biggest computer historical museum. LOCKRIDGE: It's easy to sit back now and criticize the programmers of yesteryear for the two-digit year shorthand they used that got us in this fix, but they had little choice. The computer aboard the first Apollo lunar module only had 32 kilobytes of memory. Today's hand-held computers have 500 to 1,000 times as much. Programmers back then had to use whatever shorthand they could. And if they hadn't... RUBIN: Some people claim that the amount of money that would have been spent on the extra computer storage over the past 30 years to deal with four-digit years would equal the expense of dealing with the year 2000 problem. LOCKRIDGE (on camera): Upcoming dangerous dates: 1-1-2000, of course, the big one, and then February 29th, 2000 -- dangerous because some programmers didn't realize that next year is a rare century- opening leap year. The next dangerous date after that could be 1-1-10000, which is a bit far off to worry about now. But of course, that's what they said back in the 1960s too. For SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY WEEK, I'm Rick Lockridge. (END VIDEOTAPE)