Computers Not Choking on 9/9/99

Can you feel it in the air? The countdown to Year 2000 takes on special meaning today. Just looking at the date -- 9/9/99 -- engenders a sense of the millennial rollover that's less than four months away. The four nines also signify another digital deadline that the world's computer systems appear to be processing without manifest mayhem.

Just at the Y2K bug relates to the fact that programmers for decades didn't bother counting centuries when recording dates, the putative nines problem derives from a common convention that marks the end of a data file with four nines. The fear was that computers processing today's date might shut down or simply ignore any data that followed. But as anyone who has filled out a form lately knows, computers also like days and months to be stored as two digits. This means that most computers looking at today's date see the less dramatic 09/09/99. Indeed, no fireworks have been reported as of Thursday morning. The U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson already checked in about Y2K tests running today for 500 utilities throughout North America, saying "The success of the drills held today is yet another step to assure electricity customers that the lights will stay on in the new millennium." In Asia where the day comes first, Japanese companies and financial markets also reported no computer-related problems Thursday, although The Bank of Japan said it had to infuse the banking system with billions in liquid Treasury bill as some banks scrambled to get extra funds in case there were any problems in the computer- dependent financial markets. MORE >>