MANY PROGRAMMERS ON old computer systems dating mostly from the 1960s used bunches of nines to instruct a computer program to shut down, or prepare for maintenance.
 
So the theory is that on Thursday, computers will come across a series of nines and grind to a halt, throwing a spanner into the works of a huge range of businesses from  banking to electricity generation and car manufacturing. You can relax, for the next 100-odd days at least.
 
Experts say there is almost no chance that 9/9/99 will have any impact at all. “The reality is that 9/9/99 is one of the persistent myths of the year 2000 problem. It’s not quite a unicorn, not quite 100 percent mythical, we’ve only been able to identify two
instances of 9/9/99 coding in extremely obscure systems,” said Andy Kyte, analyst with the U.S. information technology research company Gartner Group.