| Sumario: | Unless they are reprogrammed, many computers will crash or begin to behave incoherently on January 1, 2000, a date that they will mistake for 1900. This “millenium bug” is due to the decision by the first generation of computer-programmers to save valuable space on their punched cards by recording years as two digits. Specialist consulting firms, many of which sell advice on how to beat the bug, are anticipating a nightmare day when banks, hospitals, governments, factories, power stations, and transport networks lose the systems upon which they have become reliant. Although the cataclysm that they predict seems unlikely and the scariest estimates of fixing the problem are exaggerated, the scaremongers have at least frightened the world into working to avoid disaster. It is good to keep in mind that the kind of error represented by the millennium flaw, the introduction of which seemed and was sensible at the time, is intrinsic to many types of innovation.
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