At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st the world was taken by IT, an abbreviation that stands for Information Technology. A programming omission, known as Y2K, would complete paralyse the world. Programmers had identified the date in programs by two digits (e.g. 99), and not four (e.g. 1999). Thus at the turn of the century in those programs the new date would be "00". The subsequent result would be that computers would close down, would go wild or would portray any other undesired behaviour.

To make it worse, the programming omission would not just affect computers themselves, but also home and industry appliances that contained chips. It was seen as so serious that certain people, like Nostradamus followers, even predicted that the world was coming to an end. Although the world smoothly survived the Y2K bug, the entire situation showed how central computers have had become in people's lives, both business and private.

The foundations of the Information Technology were laid in 1895, when the initial equipment was built to transmit electrical signals through the air [SEE "WIRELESS COMMUNICATION] and in 1947 when the transistor, which is seen as the very start of the computer, was invented [SEE "ELECTRICITY"]. Increasingly the computer technology and wireless communication was and in the current times is still being integrated, not just in computer equipment, but also in mobiles and other electronic devices.

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