While many will spend the coming year gearing up for millennial celebrations, the world of computing will endure a worrisome countdown towards that crucial dawn on January 1st 2000, which some think may herald a sort of apocalypse with chips.
Or maybe not.
That's the tricky nature of the Year 2000 or Millennium Bug, computer problems caused by the inability of computers and microprocessors to make sense of the date 2000. The world will gain a much clearer understanding of both the scope of the problem and our ability to cope with it as the year unfolds.
While there are those who continue to believe the problem has been vastly exaggerated to the benefit of computer companies and consultants which hope to sell the panicky a cure, recent indications offer a more worrying picture of a problem estimated to cost from $1 trillion to $2.5 trillion to repair (up from $200 billion only two years ago), and another trillion in legal repercussions.
The scale of the problem is incomprehensibly vast. Despite below-the-surface fears of computer technology which occasionally find expression in characters like the almost-omnipotent HAL, the computer gone berserk in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, we have been more than willing to place ourselves in thrall to the machines' small but powerful silicon brains.
Almost everything associated with modern life depends in one way or another on the over 90 billion microchips in use today - the stock exchanges, controls for our electricity, gas and telephone systems, the timers for traffic lights, the machinery which creates and packages the goods we buy, toasters and ovens, building lifts, thermostats to household heating systems, even heart pacemakers.
We may have inadvertently created one of the greatest disasters in human history. Some worst-case analysts estimate that 10 to 300 million people could die from the impact of the millennium bug, once the effect on supply and delivery of everything from food to seed and medicine is taken into account. One British insurer predicts that some 1,500 people in the UK alone will lose their lives because of accidents and problems at hospitals. Certainly, at the moment both businesses and governments remain woefully unprepared. In the united States only 50 per cent of Defense Department and 36 per cent of State Department systems have been adjusted, and about 90 per cent of corporate respondents to a recent Cap Gemini survey acknowledged they had missed deadlines in getting their systems ready. In the UK, two in five small to medium-sized businesses have still not made any preparations. In Ireland, consultants say businesses remain similarly unprepared, while Government and semi-State agencies say they are on time with Y2K overhauls.
Those wondering how to prepare themselves for the problem as 1999 rolls on might note that the British government's official Y2K body, Action 2000, recommended in December that people stock up with two weeks' food and water rations for the date changeover.
Even the potentially massive blows to the world's economy which would follow worldwide business failures pale next to recent revelations that US and UK nuclear power plants may or may not be able to deal with Y2K problems, and nothing whatever has been done at any of the former Soviet Union's 100 ageing reactors, where employees often have gone unpaid for months. Likewise, warheads contain embedded chips which may be affected by the date glitch.
Already there have been demands for governments to work together and international bodies to evaluate and oversee systems compliance. The United Nations has entered the ring belatedly, passing a resolution in December calling for nations to get their computer systems in order and work together to address the international ramifications of the problem.