The Etymology of "Y2K" By: Ted Rose Y2K was born on Monday, June 12, 1995, at 11:31 p.m. It was delivered in the middle of an otherwise unintelligible e-mail, a contribution to an Internet discussion group of computer geeks exploring the millennium bug long before most people were surfing the World Wide Web.

The efficiency of the term is undeniable--"Y" for "year," the number "2," and "K" for "thousand" (from the Greek "kilo")--and it eventually caught on. But its creator remained unidentified until just over a year ago, when someone performed the equivalent of a computer paternity test by searching the discussion group's archives for the term's first use.

The father of the phrase is a 52-year-old Massachusetts programmer named David Eddy, who's now the president of a Y2K consulting business (click here to visit his Web page). "People were calling it Year 2000, CDC [Century Date Change], Faddle [Faulty Date Logic]," Eddy says. "There were other contenders. [Y2K] just came off my fingertips."