|
A New Year, but same old debate
January 1, 1997
Web posted at: 7:15 p.m. EST (0015 GMT)From Correspondent Margaret Lowrie
LONDON (CNN) -- The start of the new millennium is still a few years away, but its arrival is already causing havoc.
For starters, everybody's making their big plans for the eve of the year 2000. Even Robyn Catchpole, a scientist at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, admits that seeing all the numbers in the year change is "the exciting moment."
But to be perfectly accurate, he says, they should really wait another year -- until January 1, 2001 -- because the beginning of time as we mark it didn't begin at the beginning. It began with the year 1.
"When a child is six months old, it's in its first year. But it's only one year old at the end of the first year, and that's the way we've been counting years," said Catchpole.
So, midnight of December 31, 1999, does herald the dawn of the 2000th year of the Christian calendar. But 2000 years will only have elapsed at the end of that year.
If the human mind has trouble juggling the dates, most older mainframe computers can't handle it at all. To save space, they use just two digits for year codes, and are not -- in computer jargon -- "2000-compliant."
"The software, when it was written, was written in the early part of the '80s, and it only understood 80s, 81, 82, 83. When it goes over to the year 2000, it says 'Year 00 isn't valid.' It's just not prepared for it," said Ralph Martin, one of Catchpole's Observatory colleagues.
To help Britain become 2000-compliant, British politicians want to force companies to update software well before the end of the decade.
"All the indications are that there remains wide-spread ignorance and a lack of response to awareness of this problem," said David Atkinson, a British Member of Parliament.
"Even though the government has embarked on a program of encouraging greater awareness in the private sector, nevertheless, time is now running out."
Not only is time running out on the old millennium, mankind can't even decide where the new millennium will begin. Some say the sun will rise on the new millennium first on the International Dateline; others insist that midnight Greenwich Mean Time is the only time that counts.
Some decisions had better be made pretty soon, because of course, time waits for no man.
Related stories:
- Experts bemoan denial of '2000 bug' - October 10, 1996
- The year 2000 does not compute - January 7, 1996
Related sites:
Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
- Year 2000 Information Center
- The Mac OS and the Year 2000: Approaching the New Millennium
- IBM Readies Customers, Products and Services for Year 2000 Transition
- Year 2000: Fix It Now!
- Year 2000 PC Patch
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.
Tell us what you think!
You said it...
© 1997 Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.