THE Y2K CHRONICLES

Covering year 2000, Millennium, Gregorian, and DST bugs.

There have been several computer problems having to do with dates and time. Among them are the following:

• The Nines-Stop Bug, where a date containing all nines was used by COBOL programmers as an end-of-file mark.
• The Millennium Bug, where people think the new millennium began on January 1, 2000.
• The Year 2000 (Y2K) Bug, where computers think dates ending on 00 are 1900, not 2000
• The 6-digit bug, where the date 1/10/2000 is wider than a 6-digit field.
• The Gregorian Bug, where equipment was built expecting no leap year in the year 2000
• The 7-digit bug, where the date 10/10/2000 is wider than a 7-digit field.
• The Julian Date Bug causes an error on 12/31/2000.
• Daylight-Saving Time Bug I (April fool bug), where some Microsoft computers change time on the wrong date.
• The UNIX EOF Bug has computers using the same bit pattern for a file end marker and the date 8/8/2001
• Daylight-Saving Time Bug II, Congress changed the starting and ending dates for Daylight-Saving Time.

Before January 1, 2000:

1. 1996: A Bloomington Hospital (Bloomington IN) computer started sending people born in the 1800s to pediatrics.
2. January 1997: Cash registers all over the US started rejecting credit cards with a "00" expiration date.
3. September 1998: During a Y2K upgrade, Mellon Mortgage's computers double-billed several automatic transfer accounts (including mine).
4. September 1999: Owners of brand new 2000 model cars in Maine received "Horseless Carriage" antique auto license plates for them.
5. October 1999: Hershey Chocolate's computers stopped shipping orders with payment due dates after December 31, 1999.
6. December 1999, Monroe County Indiana: The Assessor's and Auditor's offices reported that they were not yet Y2K ready. Good!

   Update: They still don't have fully functioning computers in 2007.

7. December 1, 1999: The Pine email system reached the date users were told to use to shut off the monthly update feature, and the feature turned itself back on.
8. December 31, 1999: It took me 7 tries to make a phone call in Bloomington IN. The system locked up after one ring the other times.

1. January 1, 2000: The Millennium Bug strikes! Millions believe they went into the 21st Century and the 3rd Millennium on this date. Both actually started on January 1, 2001.
2. January 1, 2000: A Japanese nuclear power plant lost its radiation-monitoring computer.
3. January 1, 2000: A computer in Ansan, South Korea recorded birth certificates as January 1, 1900.
4. January 1, 2000, Pyonghchons, South Korea: The central heating plant for a complex with over 900 apartments failed.
5. January 1, 2000: Hospitals in Norway, Sweden, and Egypt reported noncritical Y2K failures, including an X-ray machine in Norway.
6. January 1, 2000: Power fails in Uganda. There is nothing unusual about that.
7. January 1, 2000: 7-eleven cash registers in Norway quit working.
8. January 1, 2000: Some ATMs in Norway quit working.
9. January 1, 2000: A French spy satellite lost its error detection system.
10. January 1, 2000: Ground computer failures caused a brief outage of US spy satellites.
11. January 1, 2000: Security doors in an Arkansas nuclear power plant refused to open.
12. January 1, 2000: Many computers changed their dates to January 4, 1980. A few changed to January 1, 1990, and one kind changed to January 1, 19100. Most of them recovered after the correct date was inserted.
13. January 2, 2000: A Super Video Rentals in Florida presented a customer with a $91,250 late fee on the bill. The computer thought the tape was returned 100 years late.
14. January 2, 2000: Some video stores in Florida switched to pen and paper after computers quit working.
15. January 3 and 4, 2000: Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles had problems: The titling and registration computers quit working, and the driver's license system gave a 5-year expiration date instead of the legally mandated 4-year expiration.
16. January 3 -- 13, 2000: Cinergy, an electric utility in Ohio and Indiana, was unable to post bill payments to customers' accounts.
17. January 3, 2000: Aldi's Food Store, Bloomington Indiana, had half of the shelves bare after Y2K-crazed shoppers had bought them out of merchandise.
18. January 5, 2000: Air traffic control computers in the US were overloaded. Possible causes include patches to fix Y2K that take longer to run, and extra traffic because people avoided flights on the first 4 days.
19. January 6, 2000: Sidekick, a popular accessory program, refuses to run.
20. January 11, 2000: An issue of the Indiana University UITS Monitor contained an article that said IU was declared "Y2K-OK" and that no problems had been encountered. The issue was dated January 11, 0100.
21. February 2000: A newspaper article on a wire service reported that a woman was training for the "20004 Olympics." Was it a typo or a Y2K problem?

1. February 29, 2000: Banking transactions could not be verified in New Zealand.
2. February 29, 2000: Japanese meteorological monitoring stations reported rainfall in the double digits, even though it did not rain that day.
3. February 29, 2000: The 1200 ATMs in post offices in Japan shut down.
4. February 29, 2000: The Jakarta Stock Exchange was closed as a precaution.
5. February 29, 2000: Singapore's mass transit systems rejected all rider cards that expired March 1st.
6. February 29, 2000: Passports issued in Bulgaria and Greece had the wrong date on them.
7. February 29, 2000: The weather service computers in the Netherlands could not transmit weather data to the news media.
8. February 29, 2000: The US Forest Service was unable to access some files, but they weren't sure if the Gregorian Bug was responsible.
9. February 29, 2000: Many pagers and Caller-ID boxes (including mine) gave the wrong date. Some continued to give wrong dates after this date.
10. February 29, 2000: The airline ticket check-in computers at Reagan National Airport (near Washington DC) failed to operate.
11. February 29, 2000: The US Coast Guard's electronic message system had trouble.
12. February 29, 2000: Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, a utility, shut down the record keeping program it knew would have problems that day.
13. February 29, 2000: At Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha Nebraska, computers keeping inventory of aircraft parts and vehicles acted up.
14. Many cities changed the year setting in their traffic lights, and replaced their firmware later.

1. January 1, 2000: The Millennium Bug strikes! Millions believe they went into the 21st Century and the 3rd Millennium on this date. Both actually start on January 1, 2001.
2. January 1, 2001: The 21st Century and the 3rd Millennium actually started -- right on time.

1. April 1, 2001: The Microsoft April-Fool Daylight-Saving-Time Bug failed to produce any newsworthy strikes.
2. The fact that Microsoft provided an upgrade in plenty of time prevented this bug from making much trouble.
3. As expected, no non-Microsoft products were affected.
4. Daylight-Saving Time caused its usual problems, including wasting more energy.

1. March 11, 2007: Millions of alarm clocks, VCRs, computers, and other devices failed to change time on the date Congress set for the time change. But the "Atomic Clocks" (which run off the National Bureau of Standards WWV standard time station) did change time on the correct date, as did DVD recorders that use PBS stations for time setting.
2. March 11, 2007: Indiana was not immune this time, because the stupid governor rammed a Daylight-Saving Time bill through, but was unable to deliver on the promise to put the entire state on central time, due to stupid federal regulations.
3. March 11, 2007: Many cities found their traffic signal systems to be an hour behind the correct time.
4. March 12, 2007: Many people found their Microsoft Appointment Calendar appointments were an hour late for the dates 3/11/2007 to 3/31/2007.
5. Many foreign businesses found themselves trying to do business with companies in the US an hour off schedule, because of the change in the time change.
6. Many US businesses found themselves trying to do business with companies in foreign countries an hour off schedule, because of the change in the time change.
7. April 1, 2007: Many of the computers, appliances and traffic signals, which were set ahead manually on March 11, now automatically set themselves ANOTHER hour ahead.
8. April 1, 2007: Businesses discover that the appliances and computers, which were set ahead manually on March 12, had automatically set themselves ANOTHER hour ahead.
9. October 28, 2007: Many devices that automatically change for daylight-saving time changed back to standard time a week early. No newsworthy events happened.
10. November 4, 2007: The date the change from Daylight-Saving Time to standard time took place. No newsworthy events occurred.
11. November 4, 2007: A crime was committed in Indiana that led to a court case where an alibi depended on which of the two periods from 1 am to 2 am the crime was committed in. The police records were ambiguous. This is a major fault of daylight-saving time.
12. November 4-5, 2007 The page author's "Atomic Clock" changed back to standard time one day late.
13. November 2-3, 2008 The page author's "Atomic Clock" changed back to standard time one day late.

14. 2008 and beyond: The DST II bug will continue to affect old equipment.

1. 1999: No fiscal-year problems turned up in the US federal government or any US state government.
2. 1999: Only a few future forecast errors occurred. They are enumerated above.
3. August 22, 1999: No newsworthy events came of the Global Positioning System (GPS) system rollover. Some obsolete units had to be reset once.
4. September 9, 1999: The Nines-Stop Bug never materialized. It shouldn't have, for the COBOL standard requires the field to be filled, as in 99/99/99, which is not a valid date anyway. Only one badly written compiler produced wrong code.
5. December 1999: Only a few Never-Expire bugs occurred. They are enumerated above. This is the case where the last date in the 1900s was used by some systems to prevent a setting from being timed out by automatic software. When that date was actually reached, the settings expired.
6. January 1, 2000: No power failures or utility outages were reported.
7. January 10, 2000: The 6-Digit Bug failed to produce any newsworthy strikes. This is where the date will not fit into the 6-digit field width for computers hard-coded to take 2-digit years as "19XX."
8. January 13, 2000: The Eastern Orthodox Y2K failed to produce any newsworthy events. The Eastern Orthodox Church never made the Gregorian Calendar correction shift, and is 12 days behind ours.
9. January 22, 2000: The Eastern Orthodox version of the 6-Digit Bug did not show up.
10. February 29, 2000: Most PCs did NOT show the Gregorian Bug (but embedded chips DID have problems, as did some mainframes).
11. February 29, 2000: New Hampshire's Office of Emergency Management did not find any PCs among those it tested that showed the Gregorian Bug.
12. March 4, 2000: The second wave of the Gregorian bug failed to produce newsworthy events. This was where all of the systems with the bug that are dependent on the day of the week first malfunction after these systems are reset to the correct date by technicians the previous Tuesday or Wednesday. All of these systems would have thought that this date was a Friday instead of a Saturday. They might have run factory processes, traffic lights, elevators, and HVAC systems on weekday programs on Saturdays.
13. March 6, 2000: The third wave of the Gregorian bug failed to produce newsworthy events. This was where all systems with the bug would have thought that this date was a Sunday instead of a Monday. They could have run factory processes, traffic lights, elevators, and HVAC systems on weekend programs on Mondays. Apparently all of the bugs were squelched on 2/29/00 or 3/1/00
14. September 10, 2000: The 7-Digit Bug failed to produce any newsworthy strikes. This is where the date will not fit into a 7-digit field width for computers hard-coded to take 2-digit years as "19XX."
15. September 22, 2000: The Eastern Orthodox version of the 7 Digit Bug failed to produce any newsworthy strikes.
16. December 31, 2000: The Julian Day Bug failed to produce any newsworthy strikes. Machines with the Gregorian bug, and others, could have experienced a Julian Day count error in calculating days between dates where the calculation crossed this date.
17. April 1, 2001: The Microsoft April-Fool Daylight-Saving-Time Bug failed to produce any newsworthy strikes: Some Microsoft software thinks that Daylight-Saving Time starts on April 8 instead of April 1 in 2001. Alaska, Hawaii, and parts of Indiana and Arizona were immune.
18. August 8, 2001: The UNIX EOF Bug failed to produce any strikes. Some UNIX machines use this date as an end-of-file marker.

1. 2025: At the current projected rate, the US will run out of phone numbers.
2. January 19, 2038 03:14:07: UNIX timekeeping rolls over.
3. 2075: The US will run out of Social Security Numbers. I hope they are abolished long before that.