Millenium Bug

A software mistake made in a large number of programs that incorrectly computed the date starting with the year 2000. The mistake was that the programmers took a short cut, using only the last two digits of the year, such as "97" instead of "1997". When the year 2000 arrived, programs with the mistake (called a "bug") incorrectly used the year "00", which was interpreted as "1900" in many cases. This resulted in an apparently negative jump in time, which caused programs to fail in many different ways. It was widely thought that because the problem was so ubiqitous, there would be massive and wide-spread failures of many systems (government, transportation, health care, and so forth) when the year rolled over. However, after spending huge amounts of time and money, most of the bugs were found and fixed on time, and only a few minor problems actually occured. The Millenium bug is also known as the Y2K bug.


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