Crashing Computers Do Not Bring About End of Civilization

Computergram International, Sept 10, 1999 by Rachel Chalmers

The world as we know it does not appear to have been brought to its knees by the fact that today's date is 9/9/99, a numerical string which is also used as an end-of-field marker in some Cobol software. Banking and financial services systems ran smoothly, as did telecommunications and power companies.

"No news is good news," International Telecommunications Union spokesperson John Tar told Reuters, "all I can tell you is that I did not hear a single squeak from our Year 2000 team today on anything untoward on nine nine ninety nine." The Four Nines non-event has been interpreted as an encouraging indication of how software will cope with the next two 'calendrical' anomalies: the new millennium on 1/1/00 and a once-in-every-four-hundred-years leap year day on 2/29/00. While experts warn against complacency, those holed up in the hills with canned food and shotguns may be over-reacting just a tad.