Y2k: Should We Be Worried? Essay, Research Paper

Some people wonder what Y2K is, and whether it is true or false. Should we be worried about Y2K? Some people are certain it is false, yet the intelligence stresses that it is true. This has many people in fright for their life. Some have been fixing for over a twelvemonth now because they think Y2K is traveling to hit and the power will travel out and perfectly nil will work. Should we believe this? Many people ask, & # 8220 ; What is Y2K? & # 8221 ; . It made me inquire one twenty-four hours, & # 8220 ; What does Y2K truly intend? & # 8221 ; . I went to the hunt engine Altavista and typed in & # 8220 ; What does Y2K stand for? & # 8221 ; . I looked and looked and eventually found a page that answered mine and many others & # 8217 ; inquiries. Y2K stands for Year 2000. Why K though? Why non Y2T? It is K because the Greek for 1000 is Kilo so we use K to stand for thousand.Then comes another large inquiry. What causes Y2K? There are two different factors in what causes Y2K. One factor being: Along clip ago, about in the 70 & # 8217 ; s different runing systems were being made for computing machines. The computing machine coders decided to do the day of the months in these runing systems and plans with 2 figures ( 73 ) alternatively of 4 ( 1973 ) . That was all all right until about the early 90 & # 8217 ; s when computing machine coders noticed something. They saw that when the twelvemonth 2000 rolled around the computing machines would read the day of the month as 00 alternatively of 2000. The computing machine would believe, & # 8220 ; 1900? & # 8221 ; , but I was made in 1973. This confuses the computing machine, hence, it resets it & # 8217 ; s self to 1980 and rearranges all of the scenes in the BIOS ( the plans that tells the computing machine which thrust to lade to, what sort of memory, what sort of CD-ROM the computing machine has, etc. ) . This could do a job, but nil that could non be fixed in 5 proceedingss. One ruin to that is every clip it got up to 2000 it would necessitate to be fixed once more. The upside being a plan that reads the day of the month with four figures is about 90 dollars depending on the sort of plan wanted.The other factor is a computing machine scheduling linguistic communication called COBOL ( common concern oriented linguistic communication ) . This computing machine programming linguistic communication is used by many concerns & # 8217 ; computing machines. COBOL handles Numberss and text so that concerns can bring forth studies and maintain path of all kinds of informations. It has no thought what a day of the month is. All & # 8220 ; dates & # 8221 ; are stored as Numberss. COBOL can see December 15, 1996 as 121596. Notice 12/15/96 in at that place. If a day of the month is stored this manner COBOL ( which doesn & # 8217 ; t cognize what day of the months are ) can & # 8217 ; t state if one day of the month is late

r than another. In order for programmers to make COBOL see a date so that it can tell which date comes first they made the year come first (961215). This way if a program sees December 15, 1996 (961215) and November 19, 1986 (861119) it can tell that November 19, 1986 is before December 15, 1996 because the number 861119 is smaller than 961215. This is fine until it gets to dates like December 19, 2005. Using a COBOL date it would appear as 051219. Is it before or after November 12, 1986 (861112)? Obviously it is before. This confuses the computer so much that it quits.With all of this talk about computers, some began to think, “Well, if that happens to PC’s(personal computers), then why wouldn’t it happen to the mainframes(the large computers that run the phone companies, electric companies, etc.)? And if it did, wouldn’t everything shut down; the world would come to an end?”. Many people think the “Y2K Crisis” is true. In some ways Y2K is true. All of the computers and main frames that do not have the four digit date are going to crash, but not to the point that they will never run again. Some of the old computers that this will happen to aren’t even worth saving. They might as well be junked or used for parts.There are very few people that believe this is all a big hoax. Most of the people that think this way are people that don’t care or people that know pretty much about computers. This is in fact a big hoax. Perhaps if we hadn’t thought about in the future and never caught this it might not have been a hoax, but we wouldn’t have known. Therefore, we wouldn’t have been able to argue it. Y2K would just happen, and then we would all be lost in the world. Many plants, animals, and people would die. We do know about it though and I am confident that we as a whole have solved this Y2K problem. Although PC’s will crash, it will not be a large amount of them. They can be fixed very easily.It is very easy to see that most people think Y2K is going to be big. Yet not all of the banks have their computers fixed ready for the year two thousand. All of the major businesses had a deadline of which they had to have their computers fixed. Many people that have PC’s have upgraded to Windows 98, the new Mac system, or have the program Norton 2000. And for everyone else, they have their bottles of water which they will not need and their canned foods. Who knows how they will cook them? We shouldn’t worry about Y2K. It’s not going to be big. It’s just plain not going to be.