Description
This is a real problem which has erroneously been called a
'virus' by the press, again exhibiting their tendency to
call any software problem a virus. It has absolutely
nothing to do with viruses.
The issue is that many computer programs - especially old
programs and mainframe systems, but also many on PCs and
other platforms - store years in dates as only the last
two digits, and assume that the first two are '19'.
Obviously this will very soon be no longer true, and this
is becoming a big problem.
The programmers of these systems never imagined that their
programs would still be in use by the year 2000, and
therefore didn't write their software to cope.
Therefore, this is a big problem, but absolutely nothing
to do with viruses (although virus code may have this
problem too!).