I seem to remember that Darwin was right, and Origin of Species was well received in both the scientific and Christian communities. It wasn't until Descent of Man that he upset the church.
Older computers used a two digit number for the year, to save coding space, so 1989 would just be 89. They realised late that when 2000 came along, nobody really knew what would happen when all these system suddenly went to 00 - would they think it was 1900? Would data be lost? Air traffic control systems fail? Nobody really knew what the effects would be, so there was this massive push to rewrite millions upon millions of lines of code to make the dates four digits and avoid the problems - which never came in the end, anyway.
I don t think that it s weird that John Langdon-Davies predicted that democracy will be dead by 1950. The guy lived when totalitarian regimes (like Third Reich, USSR) were reaching their peak.
Al Gore