The Year 2000 Problem, commonly referred to as the Y2K bug, was a problem involving the date past the year of 1999. This was a problem because many computer programs being written in the 1900s used two-digits to represent the year; for example, instead of writing 1990, the computer would only read “90” in order to take up less storage space. However, as people began to realize close to the end of the 20th century, these programs could have read the “00” as 1900 instead of 2000. Although this may seem like a small issue, this could have caused severe problems. For example, many loans involving interest through banks would have led to problems. For example, if you were lent money in 1950, the calculated money that you owe to the lender would be less than the money you were initially lent. Additionally, airlines that used computers to record scheduled flights would be showing no flights, since computers would be displaying flights for 1900, not 2000. The United States spent millions of dollars to fix the problem, and the solution was to expand the date in computers to four digits. Although the situation was tense and the United States managed to fix the problem, other countries that did not do anything to try to solve the problem did not experience any issues. As a result, many people claimed the Y2K bug to be a hoax. However, those who worked behind the scenes to try to fix the problem assured that it was indeed a real threat.
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Y2K was an issue since space was limited in the early computer days. Similar to the Y2K problem, the year 2038 also poses an issue (specifically 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038). This is because a very common data type, time_t is measured off the number of seconds from the beginning of 1970. However, in 32 bit systems, the largest number this can hold is 2^31 - 1 = 2147483647 seconds, which falls on 2038. Any subsequent increments would lead to an overflow, which would make the number of seconds negative. There aren’t many good solutions to this problem, other than working with 64 bit systems and thus increasing the capacity.
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