New Year's baby 100 yrs old, German strikes it rich

New Year's baby 100 yrs old, German strikes it rich
AGENCIES

SEOUL, JAN 2: Y2K gitches resulted in a baby born in South Korea on New Year's Day being listed at a hospital as 100 years old and a German becoming a millionaire overnight The hospital in Ansan, outside of Seoul, said the computer-controlled patient registry system gave the new-born baby's birth date as January 1, 1900, as the computer apparently failed to roll over to the 2000 date and instead reverted to 1900. The Y2K-related glitch was one of a handful of more or less minor ones in South Korea. Among the more serious problems, about 900 apartments in the city of Pyongchon went without heating or hot water for hours on New Year's Day.

A local cable television network in the eastern city of Chilgok was partly disrupted in what was believed to have been Y2K-related. Three of 40 cable channels were affected. Meanwhile, a German salesman became a millionaire on paper when a malfunctioning bank computer inflated his bank account to more than 12 million marks ($ 6.2 million).

The Bild Am Sonntag newspaperreported on Sunday that the salesman from Bergheim near Cologne in Western Germany found 12,999,997 marks credited to his name when he logged into his home banking computer account. Not only was the amount wrong, but so was the date December 30, 1899. The millennium bug stems from mainly older computer systems which were programmed to read only the last two digits of a year. If left uncorrected, it was feared systems would misread 2000 as 1900, causing systems to malfunction or even crash.