THE SAR, usually quick to embrace new trends, has been very slow in responding to the millennium bug.
That could prove disastrous for Hong Kong's service-led economy.
Also known as the Year 2000 problem, the bug can be traced to the lack of foresight by early computer makers. Older computers and the programs written for them typically recorded the year using only two digits - '98' instead of '1998'.
If the date was repeated hundreds or thousands of times in an accounting application, for example, then using only half the digits could save thousands of bytes of memory. That was a truly significant saving 30 years ago, but irrelevant today, when every standard Pentium PC is equipped with millions of bytes of memory.
Computer pioneers also never dreamed their hulking machines would last as long as they have.
Their humility is proving costly. Plenty of these machines are still running today, and they and their software applications - written in a now out-of-favour computer language called Cobol - still form the computational backbone of the majority of top financial institutions.
