Did COBOL Contribute to the Development of the Y2K Problem?

💡 The Answer

• COBOL programs frequently stored years as two digits to save memory and storage.
• This caused date calculations to fail after 1999, leading to potential system crashes.
• A massive global remediation effort fixed billions of lines of COBOL code before 2000.
• The Y2K problem raised awareness of technical debt and long-term code maintenance.