It’s the penultimate day of the A2Z Challenge 2019. In my last post, I forgot to mention that it was my 100th post. During keyword selection, I couldn’t work out the keywords for X, Y and Z. I started my journey by selecting 23 out of 26 keywords. In my 4 years of Engineering, I couldn’t remember a keyword starting with ‘Y’. Suddenly, an incident came into my mind. I remember that one of my professors narrated a story while discussing a problem and from there I picked up my keyword for ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. Today, I am going to write about the Y2K Bug.
The Y2K Bug (also known as the Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, Y2K and the Millennium Bug). Here, ‘Y’ stands for year, ‘K’ stands “kilo” i.e, any number followed by 3 zeroes. Prior to the year 2000, many programmers used 2 digits to store the ‘year’ part of the date – 61 meant 1961, 94 meant 1994, etc. This practice made the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Some systems might present it as 19100.
Programmers followed several approaches to fix the Y2K Bug. But, the most popular method was the Date expansion method. The two-digit year field was converted into a four-digit year field. But, this method proved to be costly. Introduction of new fields means the addition of memory spaces. This was expensive and time-consuming as the entire system had to re-configured.