Y2k: Should We Be Worried? :: essays research papers

few commonwealth wonder what Y2K is, and whether it is true or false. Should we be worried about Y2K? Some raft are sure it is false, yet the news stresses that it is true. This has many wad in fear for their life. Some have been preparing for over a stratum now because they think Y2K is going to hit and the power will go out and absolutely nothing will work. Should we believe this? Many people ask, "What is Y2K?". It made me wonder one day, "What does Y2K really mean?". I went to the front engine <a href="http//www.altavista.com">Altavista and typed in "What does Y2K stand for?". I looked and looked and finally nominate a page that answered mine and many others questions. Y2K stands for Year 2000. Why K though? Why not Y2T? It is K because the Greek for thousand is kg so we use K to stand for thousand.     Then comes another great(p) question. What causes Y2K? There are two different promoters in what causes Y2K. wh izz factor being Along time ago, just about in the 70s different operate systems were being made for electronic computers. The computer programmers decided to make the successions in these operating(a) systems and programs with 2 digits(73) instead of 4(1973). That was all fine until about the early 90s when computer programmers noticed something. They saw that when the year 2000 rolled around the computers would read the date as 00 instead of 2000. The computer would think, "1900?", scarce I was made in 1973. This confuses the computer ,therefore, it resets its self to 1980 and rearranges all of the settings in the BIOS (the programs that tells the computer which drive to demoralize to, what kind of memory, what kind of CD-ROM the computer has, etc.). This could cause a problem, but nothing that could not be doctor in 5 minutes. One downfall to that is every time it got up to 2000 it would need to be fixed again. The upside being a program that reads the date with fo ur digits is approximately ninety dollars depending on the kind of program wanted.          The other factor is a computer computer programming language called COBOL (common business oriented language). This computer programming language is used by many businesses computers. COBOL handles numbers and text so that businesses can produce reports and keep track of all sorts of data. It has no opinion what a date is.