Brief by Central Staff
Chronology – January 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
As we went to press, Y2K was winding down, which inspires some questions, like “What do we call the new year?” and “Is this the real start of the new millennium?”
The locution Y2K is an abbreviation for Year 2000 with K standing for kilo, a scientific prefix derived from the Greek word chilias, meaning 1,000. So it would be more accurate to use 2KY to refer to “2 kiloyears.”
Generally K stands for precisely 1,000 — a kilogram is 1,000 grams, and a kilometer is 1,000 meters. But in computers, it usually doesn’t, because computers don’t work internally with decimal numbers — they use binary numbers, or by extension, a system based on some power of 2.
So in bytespeak, K is taken to stand for “the power of 2 closest to 1,000,” which is 210, or 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte.
Thus byteheads shouldn’t be worrying about Y2K until 2048, except that many old computer programs used only two digits for the year, and chaos threatened if all these programs crashed when it was time to roll over from 99 to 00 — but everything kept running a year ago.
What to call the coming year? Bytespeak would give us “Y2K+1” or “INC Y2K” (from the processor instruction that adds one to a value by INCrementing it), and those are pretty awkward. We’re partial to “twenty aught-one.”
And by strict reckoning, it’s the actual start of the new millennium. Begin by noting that there was no Year Zero. So if you start with 1, the first decade would comprise years 1 through 10, the first century 1 through 100, and the first millennium 1 through 1000. The second millennium would thus have to run from 1001 through 2000, and that makes the start of 2001 the start of the third millennium.
So, happy new year, new decade, new century, and third millennium.
