
And it begins, the early reports from England on a particular POS machine.
Although this glitch was related to Y2K, POS machines are flaky on the best
of days.

>There have been some problems with a small percentage (5%) of point of sale
>terminals (the card readers in shops that are used to process credit and debit
>card transactions). The affected terminals show an error message which simply
>needs to be cleared to allow the transaction to be processed. Although there
>is a simple workaround, details were not immediately available to all affected
>retailers, so consumers were inconvenienced yesterday. Now that the details
>have been widely disseminated, consumers are much less likely to be affected. 
>
>The problem is restricted to some of the machines produced by Racal Electronics
>plc. Although the fault relates to the Y2K bug, it will disappear on 1.1.2000.
>
>This is only a minor glitch. It is typical of the sort of problem that it was >expected would need to be dealt with over this period. This problem does not >affect any other point of sale terminals, ATMs, the cards themselves or other >methods of payment, and does not lead us to expect any significant problems in >the financial sector. 




