Millenium Bug

The fear that the sky might fall on our heads has a long tradition, experiencing a renaissance around the turn of the year 1999/2000. Would all our little electronic helpers give up the ghost? Due to the widespread use of two-digit date notations in computer systems, there was concern that many systems might interpret the year ‘00’ as 1900. Media outlets and conspiracy theorists fuelled the fear that this could lead to worldwide com- puter problems, stock market crashes, power outages, plane crashes, misfires of nuclear weapon systems, and other disasters – the beginning of the apocalypse! Ultimately, the Y2K bug proved to be relatively harmless. The doomsday is postponed for now.