On New Year?s Eve, Norway?s new high speed express trains suddenly quit running. The computers on the trains did not recognize the date, despite being reprogrammed late last year in anticipation of the “Millennium Bug.”
“We didn?t think of trying out the date 31/12/00,” said Ronny Solberg of Adtranz, the company that manufactures the trains. They solved the problem temporarily by resetting the train computers to December 1, 2000. “Now we have one month to find out what went wrong so we can fix the problem for good,” Solberg said.
The Y2K bug has belatedly bitten in the U.S. as well. Cash registers in the 2,500 7-Eleven stores in Dallas refused to take credit cards because they read this year?s date as 1901 instead of 2001.
The company spent $8.8 million dollars fixing the glitch at the end of 1999, so when nothing went wrong in 2000, they thought they had solved the problem. “We did some 10,000 tests on it,” said spokesperson Margaret Chabris, “and it was working fine until Monday.”
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