Y2K

Definitions

1. The Year 2000 problem — a class of bugs caused by software storing years as two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. The largest coordinated remediation effort in software history, costing an estimated $300 billion globally. Its uneventful resolution is often mischaracterized as overreaction, when in fact it was successful engineering.

   In plain English: The bug where old computers stored years with only two digits, so they might think the year 2000 was 1900 — the massive fix effort actually worked.

   Example: My mom stockpiled canned goods for Y2K while my dad, a COBOL programmer, spent 18 months quietly fixing the actual code.

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