1999 dress rehearsal for Y2K
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January 1, 1999: 12:39 p.m. ET
Computer bugs to strike long before millennium arrives
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The Y2K problem may be getting all the hype. But from new money to aging satellites, there are plenty of other computer problems that need to be addressed, long before the clock strikes 2000.
Members of the European Union began converting to their new currency Friday, with companies spending millions of dollars to reprogram computer systems -- money and manpower that could be spent fixing the Y2K bug.
"Although there are millions of programmers in the world, there are not enough to finish updating both the euro and the Y2K at the same time," said Capers Jones, chief scientist at Artemis Management Systems.
And computer bugs aren't waiting until next Jan. 1 to strike.
On Aug. 21, 1999, a full three and a half months before the millennium, internal clocks in global positioning satellites will run out of memory and reset to zero.
That reset could confuse the hi-tech Global Positioning Systems in cars and, more alarmingly, commercial airplanes. Banks and utilities use the same satellite to synchronize their clocks, as does the military.
"They've set some pretty aggressive deadlines to have their system rollover compliant. Whether they can do it, I don't know. I certainly wouldn't want to be the general who would have to say 'I put our troops at risk because the GPS system wasn't working,'" said Kazim Isfahani, industry analyst at Giga Information Group.
Sept. 9, 1999 is another date that could cause problems. Programmers say 9/9/99 is dangerously similar to codes they use to end computer files. The similarity, in theory, could cause computers to shut down.
These smaller, earlier problems may provide valuable clues about how to fix or at least cope with what might happen Jan. 1, 2000.
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Y2K.com
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