Up until the early nineties, computer memory was so expensive that companies
which wasted space by storing the "19" part of the date were at a
competitive disadvantage, and so market forces pushed them to write software
which would not work properly beyond 1999. Very few people who wrote software
in those days ever thought that their programs would still be in use in the year
2000. In the event, they were proved wrong, and there is an unbelievable amount
of software in use today which was written in the sixties, seventies and
eighties. The result is that businesses all over the world are faced with the
task of updating all this software so that it will run in the year 2000. It has
been calculated that there are not enough programmers in the world to correct
all the software in time available. Luckily, some software companies had the
foresight to store the year as four digits, including
this one which has been using four digit
years since 1977.
Here are some links which will provide more
information
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