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Strategies & Market Trends : The 56 Point TA; Charts With an Attitude -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Silverman who wrote (7349)	11/7/1997 7:54:00 PM
From: Dan A.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 79352

Dave: Y2K stocks are "Year 2000 Companies". These companies are reprogramming computers worldwide to get around a problem which occurs in computers in the year 2000. In a nutshell: Over the last 20 years, many programmers have take shortcuts to store dates as 6 digits. November 7, 1997 would be stored as 971107. By not storing the century (19) you can save 2 characters of space every place where the data is stored. Programmers did this for mostly technical reasons. In early days, disk storage was very expensive, so saving a couple of characters here and there could add up quickly. The problem occurs when try to subtract dates from two different centuries. Suppose we want to calculate my age for a pension. Today is June 8, 2000 and I was born June 8, 1960. Subtracting the 2 digits of the year (60) from (00) yields a very crazy number at the least, and at most, will crash the computer. Anyway you look at it it certainly won't come up with the correct answer .... 40. "Y2K" companies specialize in modifying old legacy programs, converting them to handle these dates as the complete year (2000). Y2K companies that have no other products or services will be hurting when the year 2000 rolls around, and they have no more work to do. Companies which do have other services will see revenues drop after the year 2000 rolls around. Personally I don't expect that sales will significantly drop until sometime in 2001, because there are many many companies that won't even find out that they have a problem until Jan 2, 2000 when their computer blows up. Then they will have to scurry around to find someone to fix the problem ..... fast. I would expect the boon to sales to reach its peak in 1st & 2nd quarter 2000. -Dan