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ds. The real fuckups were the programmers who decided decades ago that with only eighty holes per card and storage space so expensive, it would be better to abbreviate the year to two numbers. Instead of punching "1976", they punched "76" to save time and some of their limited computing power. Fix tried for a second to remember the figure he'd heard about how much that abbreviation was going to cost--something like a trillion dollars, between lost revenue, lawsuits, accidents, and corrections. Almost all the major computing systems and software in the world had been designed around six digit dates, as were countless microchips and billions of lines of codes in at least 2500 programming languages, and here they were on the eve of eight digits--2000/01/01--ready or not.
He laughed. Sure, there were real horrors that could result from this date thing. Everything run by computers stood a chance to get fouled up: every bank, restaurant, and hospital, not to mention the global positioning system satellites. There could be oil tankers and planes crashing into each other tomorrow.
But probably not. After all, there were scores of people like him working on solutions, right? That thought made his stomach sink, knowing how much guesswork and jerry-rigging they'd done on this job.
The biggest problem so far for this bank wasn't a technical one at all. Tales from the Book of Revelations couldn't touch the horrors that First Dominion had encountered: seven-headed beasts didn't hold much street cred anymore, but a vanishing bank account--now that was scary! As fears and rumours spread about the millennium bug, more and more customers withdrew their money. Yesterday, lineups wound around the block. People from PR tried to stem the outward tide of money with reassurances, but in the end, the people wanted real paper money to hold onto, and the bank had to give it out when asked. Trouble was, most of it wasn't there. Fix always held a Scrooge McDuck image in his head of vaults filled with hundred dol