Word: bugging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...John, the New Testament's dense and cryptic vision of the last things. But in these final days of the 20th century, religious millennialism has once again found a real world problem on which to hang its visions of doom--the Y2K (that's the year 2000) computer bug...
...much the better that the Y2K bug is something akin to the original sin of technological society, a mortal flaw bred in the very bones of the modern world. And that the proposed solution is a head-for-the-hills survivalism that speaks nicely to the enduring American fascination with ingenuity and self-reliance. And as it has for decades, the prospect of apocalypse now also offers the promise of escape to millions of people alienated from a civilization of intimidating global corporations, boundless personal gratification and unnerving manipulations of nature, like cloning...
Then there's Harrison, Ark., a quiet Ozarks farm town (pop. 11,611) that is becoming a mecca for anyone who fears the worst from the computer bug. Up to 100 local citizens there attend twice-monthly meetings of a group called Y2K Watch. And in August, a Y2K town meeting brought at least 700 people to an auditorium at North Arkansas College. "My purpose was not to scare anyone but to begin talking about economic self-sufficiency," says former mayor Dan Harness, who organized the gathering, which had representatives from a local utility, a bank, hospital and phone company...
...digits. That's all. Just two lousy digits. 1957, they should have written, not 57. 1970 rather than 70. Most important, 01-01-2000 would have been infinitely preferable to 01-01-00. Though most of the dire predictions connected with that date--the Year 2000 computer bug's moment of truth--are unlikely to come true, a little computer-generated chaos would provide a fitting conclusion to a 40-year story of human frailties: greed, shortsightedness and a tendency to rush into new technologies before thinking them through...
...this happen? Who is responsible for the bug we call Y2K? Conventional wisdom goes something like this: back in the 1950s, when computers were the size of office cubicles and the most advanced data-storage system came on strips of punched cardboard, several scientists, including a Navy officer named Grace Murray Hopper, begat a standard programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language). To save precious space on the 80-column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year...