Special Report.

Fixing Y2k

December 11, 1998|By Jimmy Guterman. Special to the Tribune.

The world will not end when 1999 slips away and 2000 roars in. The airplanes won't all fall out of the sky, the elevators won't all slam into the basement, the electric power grids won't all flash off for good.

The millenarian programmers who have built designer cabins stuffed with canned goods, off-the-grid generators and weapons to ward off those who weren't smart enough to hoard supplies will be surprised when civilization doesn't end. The Year 2000 computer problem won't destroy all we hold dear, but that doesn't mean it won't cause a potentially substantial dislocation.

As most everyone knows by now, the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem is a result of programmers using two digits, rather than four, to store year-dates in computer programs. When 2000 arrives, millions of programs will think it is 1900. Suddenly, that mortgage that is one month overdue appears 100 years overdue in a computer's simple mind, so it tells the bank to foreclose.

We have just under 400 days until Y2K, but problems are likely to appear even earlier. Many programs have 1/1/99 or 9/9/99 hard-wired expiration dates, and many companies and governments start fiscal year 2000 sometime in the second half of 1999.

Don't blame short-sighted programmers for the problem-or at least its origin.

One megabyte of computer RAM may cost less than $5 now, but back in 1970 you'd have to pay $3.2 million for that much memory. Programmers back then had no choice but to save as much memory as possible; adding those two characters to a database holding several million records would have cost a fortune. Besides, no one expected a program written in 1970 to be operational 30 years later.

If you must blame someone for what many pundits have labeled the most expensive mistake in human history, consider pointing a finger at the programmers, bosses and budget makers of the 1980s and '90s. They're the ones who stuck with the two-digit years because making new applications compatible with earlier systems was less expensive than updating the old data.

We now know that it was a false economy. Researchers for the Gartner Group, an IT consulting company based in Stamford, Conn., estimate $600 billion will be spent by next year to solve the problem, and it's still unclear how successful the attempt will be.

Your life won't be ruined if you can't recalculate some Excel macros for a few days while Microsoft hacks out a fix. The Y2K problem's more worrisome aspect is how it affects embedded systems, like those used by utilities to manage power supplies.

What if your electric company's systems go down and you're a diabetic who needs refrigerated insulin? What if your financial well-being is dependent on timely arrival of your tax refund?

"Failure to achieve compliance with Year 2000 will jeopardize our way of living on this planet," said Arthur Gross, chief information officer at the Internal Revenue Service.

Indeed, in August the U.S. Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, reported that it was only 45 percent Y2K compliant, putting it far behind the Social Security Administration (93 percent) but well ahead of the State Department (36 percent).

Edward Yardeni, chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, a global investment banking firm, has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the burgeoning Y2K industry. He said his research suggests there is a 70 percent probability that the Year 2000 problem will cause a global recession. In a report he delivered with recent U.S. Senate testimony, Yardeni asked, "Hey, is everybody on Prozac, or what?"

Yardeni's job, he said, is to shake people up so that they'll pay attention to the issue.

Jim Seymour, a longtime consultant in Austin, Texas, said people are indeed starting to pay attention. "Sometime, roughly in the middle of this year, the talk shifted from talking to doing-but not fast enough," Seymour said. "It appalls me the number of business people and technical people who say it's obvious what the problem is, and because it's obvious, it must be easy to fix. These are very sound business people-people I like and respect-but they don't get it. American business is not as far behind the curve as it was two years ago, but it's still behind the curve."

Of course not everyone agrees with Yardeni and Seymour's grim assessments.

"The worst part of Y2K so far is the paranoia and panic that is not warranted," said Norman Shakespeare, a Zimbabwe native now living in British Columbia who has 20 years of experience in electronics, PC and mini hardware, networking, programming and training. He also wrote the definitive "Y2K in a Nutshell" ($19.95, O'Reilly and Associates).

"You won't need large supplies of cash on hand when the clock turns over," Shakespeare said. "If the power grid stands up properly, as I believe it will, we'll experience a couple of days of inconvenience in most instances.