Topics covered in this page - We live in a world where
computerized information systems manage, help and control much
of our society, our resources, even our lives. This ranges from
the alarm clock that wakes us up in the morning, the home
thermostat, the cellular telephones, the television and VCR,
automobile, hotel door locks, and children's toys. In other
words, we trust them to handle a lot of tasks, and even though
we may not say it out loud, we expect those services to be
performed continually and reliably on an ongoing basis without
supervision. But with the coming of a new century, we are
realizing that there may be a few failure modes in these
faithful servants. specifically, we see that some of the
computer programming that went into so many of these devices may
not have always handled the end of the century calculation very
well where January 1, 2000 is treated as January 1, 1900. This
is the simple "Y2K Problem." Now that we recognize that there
are human elements in the computer programs that can