Remember the Y2K, or Millenium, bug? (Robin, I know you do, since we did a report on it ) All the hype and hysteria surrounding it, the runs on the bank, bottled water, etc? Well, get ready for another one! This one is the year 2038 bug.

Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999′999′999 seconds to 1′000′000′000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.

Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.

The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.

Will this one cause the same panic as before, or be a bust just like the Y2K? I’d say a bust, but this one does seem more serious. However, by the time this bug would hit, I’m sure all computers would be fixed or upgraded so that they won’t be affected. That’s quite a few years away, and considering the life span of computers these days, as well as the rate programs are getting patched, I’m sure we’ll all be okay.