A momentary embarrassment, perhaps, but hardly the end of the world.JEFF CARLOCKBerkeley, CaliforniaSIR My own awakening to the potential millennium bug problem occurred in the late 1970s when I was a junior programmer put on to a project to convert applications from one mainframe to another.
Beneath Rosenberg's office are three mainframe computers attached to a library of 400 gigabytes recording every imaginable datum about corporate finances and stock prices.
A literal-minded reading of the section means that if three mainframe computers are used as security for a $30 million loan, and are then transferred to three different subsidiaries, each computer carries the whole $30 million of debt the computers are "subject to".
Microsoft profited from the decentralization of PC hardware, from a few thousand mainframes and offices to hundreds of millions of households and individuals.
A dozen years ago, the entire country boasted just four or five IBM mainframe computers, says Lakshmi Narayanan, the boss of Cognizant, a big Indian IT-service company.
Last year, the Senegal Ministry of Finance bought two I.B.M. mainframes to help monitor all the imports, exports and customs duties at the African country's 30 border checkpoints.
McKinsey believes that the transformative power of all of this data will amount to a fifth wave in the technology revolution, building on the first four: the mainframe era; the PC era; the Internet and Web 1.0 era; and, most recently, the mobile and Web 2.0 era.
By using virtualisation, one costly mainframe could be partitioned so as to run many different applications all at the same time each within its own "virtual machine" in a layer of software running on top of the physical machine's actual operating system.With modern hardware so cheap, Intel-based servers that dish out applications and data have proliferated like rabbits.
The company operates through three segments: Mainframe Solutions, Enterprise Solutions and Services.
