"Y2K judgment day" turned out to be business as usual for Taiwan's manufacturing industry and the Central Bank of China on their first day of operations in the millennium year.
For the special task force set up by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (
"The manufacturing sector has safely passed through the test of the Y2K computer bug problem," said Lin Pei-chian (林培謙), director of the economic ministry's Y2K emergency reporting team.
According to Lin, the ministry asked 5,450 of the roughly 80,000 companies in the manufacturing sector to report on their post-Y2K first-day operation status. The production value of those companies accounts for roughly 75 percent of the sector total.
Ten cases were reported where computers had difficulty processing the year 2000 date, Lin said.
"However, it only resulted in some administrative change from computer control back to manual operations. No production was interrupted or disrupted," he said.
Lin said those 74,000 remaining companies would face computer checks by the targeted 5,450 companies.
But while the private manufacturing sector may have coped well, the government-issued Universal Invoice Lottery receipts (統一發票) -- which customers generally receive when buying goods, and which can be used for a lottery draw -- didn't fare so well.
Computer mistakenly printed the year 1988 instead of 2000.
"The public can still use the wrongly printed date receipts when making prize claims," Sean Chen (
An official in charge of Y2K operations management at the Central Bank of China (CBC,
"It's business as usual, at least until three o'clock," the official said. "However, there are some computer functions that are only used at the end of each month. Only then will we be able to say whether the system has successfully dealt with the Y2K computer management problem."
The CBC also said in a press release that international financial markets had operated properly, according to reports from the Bank of International Settlement (國際清算銀行) and other international financial organizations keeping an eye on the effects of Y2K.
The Taiwan stock market also celebrated its first day of the New Year Y2K glitch-free. The TWSE Index rose 307.71, or 3.6 percent, to 8,756.55, its highest close since April 1998. The rise was fuelled by a global technologies rally and an easing of millennium bug worries.
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