The year 2000

The year 2000 has started to sound apocalyptic because of habits inherited from a typewriter keyboard devised some 100 years ago and paper punch cards of 50 years ago. The primary problem stems from punch-card days, when the "19" of a date was abbreviated because everyone knew what it meant, except the computer. As the 21st century approaches, any programs using this format do not know which dates are meant. Having locked themselves in most cases into 6 places to store dates, and because records have fixed lengths (punch-card fashion) to which countless programs refer in fixed fashion, these programs need a dual solution. First, they need to store the century with the date, still within 6 characters. Secondly, every program that either enters a date, reads a date or manipulates a date must be corrected to know how to read, interpret, or update the new representation. Another problem is that most computer processing is word processing, in which numbers are not recognized intrinsically.