Computer is probably the greatest invention in the last hundred years. The impact that it has created on our lives is tremendous. It affects so many areas of our daily routine like no other single invention has ever managed to accomplish. We are becoming more and more dependent on the computer with the passage of time. Right from weather predictions to the fuel injection systems in our cars make use of computers. We are dependent on one single kind of machine to run our lives like no other generation that lived before us. And this trend is all set to continue in the future as well.
While it is good that computers help us in different ways to make our lives better, our total dependence on them can lead to dangerous consequences. We have not developed a standby system that can be immediately put into place if computers suddenly failed. In fact, the world came dangerously close to this scenario with the Y2K problem. Since we were already using the computer for so many applications by the end of the last millennium, we were extremely apprehensive of what could happen when the dates rolled over to the new millennium. Fortunately, nothing drastic happened and mankind felt a huge relief.
But that doesn’t mean that another similar problem cannot occur. The Y2K problem just made us more aware of how much we depended on computers and the things that were at stake. If a similar problem was to crop up, we would still be totally unprepared to deal with it, as we were a decade ago. Unless we developed a robust standby system that can handle the processes that computers manage today, we are always at the risk of having unforeseen consequences if our computers systems were to fail suddenly.