How It All Began

At some point in the 1990's business leaders were dragged into accepting that their systems might have been built on computer code with massive flaws built in. The two most dangerous, as explained in Wikipedia: "First, the practice of representing the year with two digits became problematic with logical error(s) arising upon "rollover" from xx99 to xx00. This had caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after 1 January 2000, and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "... 97, 98, 99, 00 ..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid.

Secondly, some programmers had misunderstood the Gregorian calendar rule that determines whether years that are exactly divisible by 100 are not leap years, and assumed that the year 2000 would not be a leap year. In reality, there is a rule in the Gregorian calendar system that states years divisible by 400 are leap years – thus making 2000 a leap year."

If you know the stories of discovering how and why logic errors occurred around the rollover date and how business leaders were persuaded to invest in the work to identify and correct these error, I would love to hear your stories in the comments.

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