Y2K

Ron Miller

1998

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 2nd quarter 1998, No. 351

This article is slightly different than the version printed in the magazine as this was converted directly from the author's word processor file.

In the deep dark days of the sixties computer memory was a scarce, rare commodity. Young programmers discovered another clever trick for using a little less memory. Each year consists of four numbers. Only the last one changes every year. The one next to it changes once every ten years. The next one only changes every one hundred years and the next one only changes once every thousand years. The year 2000 seemed very far away. This means that one can save a lot of memory if only the last two digits are used. When it is necessary to print it out a nineteen is automatically tacked on for the first two digits. This became such a standard method of programming that it was an automatic part of any program written. Now the year 2000 is fast approaching. On January one 2000, these computers will think that it is 1900.

No one is quite sure what will happen. It will probably depend on each individual case. In some cases the computer will not work at all. In other cases it will give wrong answers or simply function erratically. Others may simply run slower. Probably one of the first organizations to stumble over the problem was the Social Security Administration of the U.S. government. They project earnings and payments on retirement accounts into the future. An article in the September issue of "Mechanical Engineering" estimates a world wide cost of 600 billion dollars to fix the problem. Some computers may just be scrapped rather than try to find all the bugs.

The NASA, the U.S. space agency, has found that computers as new as 166 Mhz pentium computers are not year 2000 compliant. NASA has determined that 72 percent of their computers are not year 2000 compliant as reported in Federal Computer Week. The Mechanical Engineering article quoted professor Michael Lutz saying that anything that compares times will be affected. In one reported year 2000 test by Hawaiian Electric the entire system shut down.

Probably one of the most sinister impacts exists in what is called embedded systems. These are systems that have micro chips as an integral part of the system. The programming in such systems is essentially hard wired into the chip and not easily accessible. Federal Computer Week states that the Veterans Administration of the U.S. government is concerned about sophisticated medical equipment. All modern automobiles use many computer chips embedded in the engine system.

Computer software companies are busily writing programs designed to detect or fix the problem but no one will know how well they work until January 1, 2000. As the article in Mechanical Engineering stated, ``the end is near.''