he millenium is fast approaching.

You may be thinking that the coming of the year 2000 is merely a religious event, or perhaps just a good excuse for a really amazing party. However, it's also a significant event for many computing systems. For over a hundred years it has been cultural tradition to refer to years by their last two digits, e.g. "the crash of '29," and so over thirty years ago at the dawn of business computing, it was no surpise that many programmers continued this practice in their projects.

Until recently, this has not been a problem.

Now, however, we are approaching a time when a glaring flaw in this method of data representation is becoming critical. The main problem is that one of the main things that computers do with dates is math: adding or subtracting a number of days or years from some base date.

For example, say that a bill is due on December 30, 1985. Every time the business' accounting program starts, it checks the current date against all of its outstanding bills, and complains to the customer for each one that is overdue. So let's say that bills are overdue after two weeks. In this case, that would be January 12, 1986. And let's say that it's January 12, 1986, and the computer figures out that it's been fourteen days or more. Fine, everything's okay so far except for the delinquent customer.

But now we're looking at a different bill, one due December 30, 1999. It's now January 12, 2000. The computer, calculating the overdue date of the bill, erroneously thinks that the overdue date is January 12, 0. Wow! That bill has been overdue for a hundred years! The computer can make this mistake because, internally, it draws no distinction between the year 0 and the year 2000.

It may occur to you that this is a pretty silly mistake, and pretty easy to fix. If that were true, we wouldn't have a business. If you're concerned about the fate of your computer systems when the millenium rolls around, we offer free consultations and reasonable rates for any diagnosis and fixes that we perform to your systems. We'll also be happy to tell you more about our services.

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