20 years after millennium bug fears, B.C. city plans to repeal Y2K policy

Nearly 20 years after the world welcomed the year 2000, the city of Fort St. John, B.C., is ready to stop preparing for Y2K.

The city plans to repeal its "Year 2000 (Y2K)" policy at a council meeting Tuesday.

"This one slipped through the cracks," said city spokesperson Ryan Harvey, explaining the city regularly audits its documents for policies and bylaws that are no longer relevant.

"Obviously, at the time, it made a bit of sense given what was anticipated."

In the late 1990s, technology experts warned of a data issue in which computers that used two digits to denote the year may read the "00" of the year 2000 as "1900" — or be unable to parse the year at all, causing problems on an enormous scale.

Many organizations paid large sums of money to update their computer systems and, in the end, no major problems were reported.

The city of Fort St. John's Y2K Policy states the need to "minimize degradation of services as a result of the transition to the Year 2000" and states that members of all city departments should coordinate on a plan to address any Year 2000 issues that might arise.

In the request to repeal the policy, Fort St. John's director of legislative and administrative services, Bonnie McCue, notes: "There were no disruptions to city services as a result of the year 2000 and this policy is no longer relevant to organizational operations."

Two digits bad

26 years ago

Duration 1:25

Computer programmers saving memory space didn't anticipate what might happen when the year needed to be exressed in four digits.

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