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Happy 8th Year of New Millennium!

Where is the bridge to somewhere? And is it virtual or real? Good solid bridges with long histories are those you can look at, ride over, and find on the road atlas. How about the bridge to the 21st Century? On December 31, 1999 things seemed a little precarious. Those prone to superstition, aided and abetted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, could reel off numbers to prove that we were coming to the jumping-off place. Those threatened by computers needed technical reassurance. Techies explained how memory deprived early computers were. Back when some computers had only 2k, meaning 2048 bits of memory, every bit counted. A bit is one binary digit, which is either off or on in the computer. To use space by putting “19" on the front of the year was wasteful. It could be patched, however. And river locks would work, plumbing would function, hospital ORs would have lights. There were plenty of old programmers to code the fixes. We trainees from the 60s knew about such things. I have a friend who hooked up with an outsourcing firm in Washington D.C. and worked for nearly two years in the offices of WorldCom. The division of the company which had once been MCI was important to the government for communications. Things worked out for everyone except for Bernie Ebbers who didn’t know how to keep books.