The History And The Hype
Time Magazine 18Jan99

Computer scientists may disarm the Y2K bomb in time, but that doesn't mean they didn't screw up

If anyone had paid attention to "a group of Mormons in the late '50s who wanted to enlist the newfangled [COBOL] machines in their massive genealogy project", we wouldn't be facing the Y2K problem now, says the current issue of Time magazine. Oh, well.

[Editor's Note: It turns out that this group of Mormons, in seeking to use early computers for genealogy, initiated a fix that gave programmers the ability to use 4-digit dates in early computers. However, this fix was ignored by the vast majority of programmers, leading to the Y2K problem we face today.]