Whether it was because of the numerous compliance procedures and fixes
sold, cajoled or foisted on the computer using community most of the real
scare stories seemed to die a death. There were a few incidents over the
New Year involving airports and nuclear stations. There was a particularly
worrying incident when Russia had to reassure the United States the missiles
just fired were directed at a target in Chechnya. I would have thought whatever
problems Y2K threw up it would not have made the watching satellites so
navigationally challenged they could not tell whether a missile was targeted
from Russia to the south (Chechnya) or to the west (Europe/USA). This perhaps
raises the issue of other problems that might be inherent in the myriad
of sattelites that have nothing to do with Y2K.
Having operated various computers, both PC and Apple before, during and
since the New Year, I found very few problems arising in the PC's that were
supposed to be Y2K compliant apart from one or two incidents where dates
were incorrectly recognized in a couple of spreadsheets. The Apple's as
expected showed no problems whatsoever, even my oldest Apple which is now
a venerable 12 year old had no problems handling spreadsheets and date reliant
data records correctly.
I will be leaving the various articles about the millennium bug on archive
for some months as there might still be a few problems that raise their
ugly heads, links to those articles are given above. They might be useful
for those of you preparing for the next round of computer/date related problems
that will start arriving as the various 'fix' programmes reach their 'year
break date' set by the various algorithms used.
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Ieke van Stokkum, mcij, maip
Member, Association
of Internet Professionals
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