How The Millennium Bug Gave Birth To Personal Computers
Things were going on well in the computing industry and firms until Computer gurus that all Computers were to mistake year 2000 for 1900. The first time since the invention on Computer History scientist were running against time to overcome the would be an end to Computer Era
All major companies had been using Mainframe Computers and were not thinking of upgrading to more powerful Super Computers. Mainframe Computers at that time were running on the hard drives called Hollerith card where dates and programs were stored on a Punch card which was limited to certain number of characters, as a result of character limitation; earlier programmers came up with a mechanism to have years truncated into two digits.
The main challenge here was that dates could only be recognized by the last two digits e.g. 78 rather than 1978. The millennium bug was a headache but the solution was very simple and it was just a matter of adding the first two digits of the year which early programmers did not put into consideration. At the time of the problem Personal Computers were developed with the right code to handle the four digit limitation
The big cooperation would not just let the mainframe Computers go away and were unsure if the small personal Computers could handle the sophisticated programs without crashing. The millennium bug poses various challenges at that time including companies were to revert to paper work storage mechanism.
All institution using computers including schools, hospital, and military system were to fail function and the airplane was to come crashing on the ground and to Crown it all: Computer era was coming to an end
Post millennium Bug has seen the development of enhanced Computing systems that are able to handle large amount of data and has also resulted into upgrade of Computer Components and the entry of Window Based Operating System and Application programs