Crash course receives the Xmas spirit

The millennium bug, like heaven, can wait. Or at least this seems to be the thinking at the software company ICL.

The millennium bug is an in-built flaw in the majority of software programmes which means that computers will not recognise dates from the year 2000 onwards, and will crash on New Year’s Eve 1999.

The Diary was concerned to note that a briefing by ICL Retail Systems on “The millennium time-bomb” has been postponed until next year.

A fax on behalf of ICL explained that the meeting, which was to take place this week, had been put on hold “due to pressure of conflicting events in the pre-Christmas period”.

At a time when businesses are being told that it could cost half of their IT budget to iron out the problem, ICL’s relaxed and festive attitude to the matter is interesting, to say the least.

One wonders if ICL perhaps knows something we don’t.