What is Millennium bug?

The

millennium error was a computer problem that threatened the activities of corporations, energy companies, financial industries, government agencies and even science. In midnight stroke between 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000, he feared that all computers had the potential to turn off. The millennium error is also known as the problem of 2000, Y2K problem, Y2K error and most often referred to as simply Y2K.

Millenium bug was specifically a problem of programming. It was the result of a combination of space and lack of forward thinking by programmers in 60 and 70 years. During the initial phases of computer programming, memory and other storage space, they were rare and expensive, so the character saving was a priority.

Programmers wrote a business application code using COBOL (common business language) and RPG (message programming generator) to run on the main frames. Programmers have saved the data insertion yymmdd, which included a total of six characters, automatically sorted in ascendingthe order. Each of these characters was equal to one whole space (byte) of a computer storage. As a result, the storage of two storage bytes was significant for each date, considering the amount of data fields stored on cards, tapes or discs in all records in all files on all computers.

up to 80 and 90 years. The programs have been modified to change the business needs to maintain, improve and add new requirements to old applications to rewrite them from scratch. Upgrading and adjustments were sufficient for the original systems to work.

during the middle of the 90s. The programmers began to realize that the data would not be properly equal by 2000. Within the computer community, it has become a problem to be corrected. Then, in 1997, the situation became public knowledge.

it was necessary to make a decision to either start again and rewrite the programs from the beginning to the conCE, or to repair already existing programs and stored data. This option had another challenge because part of the source code was lost.

Many companies have been created to solve these problems. One option was just to add a century to an existing date. This would include the addition of two more bytes for each date stored anywhere in their disk files. Others decided to rewrite their software and use new networks and object -oriented technologies when they moved their critical applications from mains computers.

More than $ 300 billion (USD) has been spent on repairing a millennium error. In addition to the fear of software, countless survival emerged and benefited as a result of the concerned and proactive public.