There are a lot of reports of systems failing to understand the year 2010 but I've no idea why. Current systems I look after are working fine as far as I could tell but I'd like to know what the actual problem is to search better.
Could anyone shed some light on it please?
Edit: http://www.rte.ie/business/2010/0105/bug.html - Information about it affecting credit cards in Germany
Several protocols used in banking and telecommunications - including the SMS protocol - encode the year as BCD in a single byte.
From 2000-2009 one could easily make the mistake of interpreting the year as a standard binary number since the encoding would be the same:
Encoding Binary-interpreted BCD-interpreted
0x01 2001 2001
0x02 2002 2002
...
0x09 2009 2009
0x10 2016 2010
...
That is most probably the cause of the Windows Mobile bug.