Computer hardware and software which uses four-digit integers to represent the year will fail on midnight Dec. 31, 9999. Their clocks will go back to the year zero, rather than correctly incrementing to Jan. 1, 10000.

 Almost none of today’s software allows the input of dates of five digits or more.

 Almost none of today’s computer clocks are Y10K compliant, except for recent Macintoshes.

 The Y10K problem is 100 times more serious than the Y2K problem, because computers will loose 10,000 years not merely a century.

 The Year 0 didn’t ever exist, since the first year after Christ was 1 AD not 0. The computer clocks would be going back 10,000 years to a year that never existed. At least, in the Y2K crisis, the year 1900 was a real year, and not such a bad one at that. Queen Victoria was still on the throne of England. In the USA, the Gold Standard Act strengthened the economy. In the 1900 Presidential Elections, William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan for a second time, this time with Theodore Roosevelt as his vice-presidential running mate. (Teddy Roosevelt later became president when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and became one of the strongest US Presidents ever. He was put as the Vice Presidential Candidate by Republican party leaders who appreciated his popularity as a hero of the Spanish American War but disliked his style, and wanted to put him in a position of little responsibility. But I digress.)

 To avoid the problem, almost every computer hardware and software now existing in the world will need to be replaced. The cost between now and the deadline may run into 100s of trillions of dollars, compared to which the $261 billion worldwide cost of Y2K fixes will be pocket change.

 If the Y10K problem is not avoided in time, civilization as we know it will come to crashing halt: Airline reservation systems will fail to work, utility companies will cease to operate, airplanes will fall out of the sky, all computers at banks will freeze, and intelligent cappuchino makers that use dates won't know which day of the week it is to make your special cup.

 Except a handful of computer-science academics, me, and now you, the world is almost unaware of the problem. Sure, the Y2K crisis is getting a lot of press now, but almost nobody has heard of the Y10K crisis.

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