Computers have become the backbone of the world today. Is there a time bomb slowly ticking down inside of the computers that run everything from your laundry machine to Wall Street? "The year 2000 bug is a flaw in the programming of embedded chips in most electronic devices"(Outsmarting 2). These chips only calculate the date in the ending 2 digits of the year. For instance, the date 1-1-1999 in the computer comes out 1-1-99. "When the year 2000 comes around, the computers will think that it is the year 1900"(2). Any program or system that relies on dates to perform certain functions, such as calculating ages, time periods, or payrolls is at risk of crashing on the stroke of midnight. Programmers in the 1970's were saving a lot of space in programming by only using the last 2 digits of the year. They had no insight into the problem they were creating by cutting this programming corner. The justification for cutting this corner was two fold. First, think of all of the coding and......
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Approximate Word Count: 1015
Approximate Pages: 4 (260 words per double-spaced page) |