Back in the tail end of the 20th century, it suddenly occurred to people that the practice of displaying years as "19xx" and only storing the xx part would cause great problems when we rolled into the 20th century. 

Ouch!

Although many laypeople now dismiss the Y2K bug as hype intended to increase IT spending, I spent from 1997 to December 31st, 1999 helping convert our systems to Y2K-compliant ones.  I don't know what it looked like at AT&T or Bank of America or Southern California Edison, but at our place it took two failed attempts before we found a system that worked.  

Our fiscal year 2000 started July 5th of 1999, after which all of our national contracts would have been invalid.  We rolled the last division onto compliant systems the weekend of July 3-4. 

These pages represent my first real Web site, and my commitment to inform my friends of what was going on.  So, naturally, I don't really want to delete it.  I've gone through a changed a few minor things (changed old e-mail addresses, removed links to sites that no longer work, added comments, etc.).  Anything I've changed is in purple, like this. 

By the way, all of this would have been easily prevented.  In the 1970's, the Air Force's computerized payroll system was found to store dates as a single digit and display them as "197x".  Changes were rapidly made to make the system 1980's compliant, but it's hard to believe that no one though, "Hey, it's only a bit over 20 years to the 21st century."