Word: jager
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Meanwhile, the torch of Y2K awareness passed to a new generation. In the fall of 1977, a young Canadian named Peter de Jager signed on as a computer operator at IBM. His first task was to boot up a nationwide banking system run on an IBM 370. When the machine whirred into life, it asked for the date. As De Jager, a mathematics major straight out of college, entered the number 77, a thought occurred to him. Did this machine care what century it was? With the impetuousness of youth, he marched off to his manager and informed...
...that, at least for the next 13 years, was the attitude De Jager adopted. "We used to joke about this at conferences," he says. "Irresponsible talk, like 'We won't be around then.'" But by 1991, De Jager, a self-described "nobody" in the industry, had decided he would be around. Four years later, he was giving more than 85 lectures a year on the topic and posting regular updates to his site, the Web's first for Y2K warnings, www.year2000.com...
...then, and not two decades earlier? Why De Jager, and not Bemer? Proximity to the millennium may have had something to do with it as well as the increasingly ominous tone of the warnings. This was Bemer's dry 1979 prophecy of doom: "Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity." Twenty years later, here's De Jager's jeremiad: "The economy worldwide would stop...you would not have water. You would not have power...
Will the bug industry succeed? Last month the American Stock Exchange let investors hedge their hunches. It began trading futures options based on the 18-stock De Jager Year 2000 Index, made up of companies such as giant Dun & Bradstreet and smaller outfits like Data Dimensions and Viasoft that are racing to devise solutions. The options represent bundles of stocks in the index, named after the computer consulting firm De Jager & Co., which took a lead in addressing the 2000 issue. If these companies can't find a solution before the millennium, a new breed of speculators--call them bugbears...
...strains of the Russian anthem faded, veterans Biondi with a silver medal and Jager with a bronze found themselves looking up at the 6-ft. 6-in., 192-lb. frame of Alexander Popov, a fresh-faced 20-year-old who was virtually unknown in swimming circles until last year. Popov's gold in the 50- m race followed his victory two days earlier in the 100-m freestyle, where Biondi holds the world record. At the postrace press conference, Popov was asked how it was possible to succeed amid the chaos of the former Soviet ( Union. "We were preparing...