Part one of term paper
What is Y2k? In one sentence, Y2k is "...the inability of computer programs at the year 2000 to interpret the correct century from a recorded or calculated date having only two digits to indicate the year".[Center for Computer Systems Engineering] What does that mean? It means that many of our computer systems, although sensitive to date and ...

Part two of term paper
... rolls over from 1999 to 2000, such systems will not have the contextual smarts to process our shorthand dates correctly. Some of these computer systems will produce obviously silly results, good for a laugh at the office. Some will produce subtle errors that may be passed on, undetected at the source, in an ever-expanding circle of bad data. And some systems will stop working altogether. How might systems fail? Let's look at an example program in which the omitted century is assumed to be '19' and ...