Q. Is it true that if I put my bank card into a cash-point machine on January 1st next, I might accidentally launch a Russian nuclear warhead?
A. Who's to know? The problem you are referring to, however sardonically, is known as "the millennium time bomb" (if you're a tabloid newspaper editor) or "Y2K" to the rest of us. Back in the days when computers were the size of a large house, memory was at such a premium that programmers shortened commands to a minimum wherever possible; hence 1959 became "59" etc. So as 1999 clicks over into 2000 the computer will only recognise the "00" and think it is 1900, becoming a tad confused in the process.
The reason the early programmers didn't envisage the Y2K problem is that they thought that in 40 years time we'd all be living on the moon or something, and it wasn't realised until the early part of this decade, when US citizens, whose driving licences have expiry dates into the next century, were having their cards rejected by the computer systems of car rental companies.
The nightmare Y2K scenario envisages 50,000 mainframes crashing in succession in the early hours of the new millennium, causing economic and social chaos and possibly provoking a global economic meltdown. A more likely scenario, however, is just that burglar alarms will go off, your fridge might defrost and your video records Songs Of Praise instead of Brookside (which to be fair, could be construed as an Apocalyptic disaster in its own right).
Once you dismiss the conspiracy nutters who think that Y2K is: (a) a sign from God that we're spending too much time on the Internet, or (b) that it doesn't exist, having been made up by the computer industry to make huge wads of dosh pretending to "reprogramme" our computer, you're left with the biggest, and most serious, manmade disaster to hit information technology. Everything from aircraft to cameras to, most worryingly, missile systems is at risk, but the realistic consensus is that almost everything will be Y2K-complaint in time.
The solution to Y2K is surprisingly simple: you get somebody to reprogramme your computer. But it will cost you. An average business may have several million lines of code in their computer system and each individual line has to be checked by the reprogrammer. In Britain alone, the total reprogramming cost will come to about £52 billion, with the worldwide cost coming in at around £370 billion.
As the year progresses, expect a mini-outbreak of urban hysteria about Y2K, with more fraught people stockpiling food, drink and hard cash in case of global computer malfunction. If you do insist on worrying about it, best save your concern for the hundreds of thousands of computer workers drafted in to deal with the problem over the last few years, who, come next year, will find themselves unemployed. Or should that be "in a non-compliant employment situation".
