ISE FIRST CASUALTY OF THE MILLENNIUM BUG DECEMBER 31, 1999 FRIDAY RAMAZAAN 22, 1420

http://www.frontierpost.com.pk/bus2.html

ISLAMABAD (Fortuna) - Islamabad Stock Exchange became the first casualty to the Y2K bug as its computer software refused to acknowledge turn of the century.

The country's technologically most ill-equipped stock exchange failed to meet the Y2K challenge and the management of the bourse was forced early this week to exclude dates from all transactions, causing all sorts of problems for its brokers.

Islamabad Stock Exchange computers insisted that it will be 1st of January, 1900 after midnight of December 31, 1999. The dates and days and settlements will go haywire if the stock exchange lets brokers use dates for recording transactions ahead of the turn of century. For instance, the computer will put all transactions made on January 1, 2000 ahead of the first recorded transaction because the computer will recognise it as a transaction made on January 1, 1900 and therefore just a day short of 100 years before the last transaction.

This latest development does not please members of the stock exchange who have been forced to record manually each one of their thousands of transactions for the day.

"The fact that our computers are not Y2K compliant has literally taken us to the early 20th century period, with all members having to manually sort out their transactions," said a member of the Stock Exchange asking not to be named.

-- Jeanette Thomas (ou_2000@berkshire.net), January 01, 2000

Answers

Jeanette - I've gone to the site, and there's nothing about this anywhere I can find. I've done a search of all Pakistan news sources and Agence France; likewise, nothing. I can find a Karachi stock exchange; no Islamabad Stock Exchange.

I hope an analyst can verify or deny the report, ASAP.

-- Gary Gach (y2k@word.to), January 03, 2000.

Whatever problems the Islamabad Stock Exchange had must have been fixed. The following is excerpted from a news story in the Business Recorder, http://www.brecorder.com/story/S0007/S0709/S0709113.htm. The Business Recorder describes itself as Pakistan's national financial daily.

Islamabad Stock Exchange index gains 69.44 points RECORDER REPORT ..........ISLAMABAD (January 4) : Bulls invaded the floor of Islamabad Stock Exchange on Monday where equities scored handsome gains amid expansion in both the volume and the horizon of trade. .... ..........Brokers termed the Monday's positive rally as a healthy sign for the market as smooth and error-free working of the ISE computerised trading system encouraged the weak holders and margin hunters to enter back in game. .... ..........A ISE major player stated that he went to the market with a doubt of Y2K problem but the network computers worked smoothly like normal days and they remained busy in trading of different scrips throughout the day. Practically, he said the computers were performing error-free operations like any other day of 1999.

-- John Baker (jb5911@yahoo.com), January 06, 2000.