This bug bytes!

• Author: Middleton, Saundra

Will You Survive Midnight 2000?

According to one study, more than 90 percent of companies in the U.S. - yes, 90 percent - are not prepared for the Year 2000. Worse, the U.S. is ahead of Asia and Europe in this imminent ride to chaos.

The Year 2000 computer problem is serious and complex. In a recent survey, the Information Technology Association of America found that 94 percent of information technology managers consider Y2K a "crisis," with 44 percent of those responding already experiencing Y2K-related problems.

For example, Kraft Foods, Inc. recently destroyed several million dollars worth of food, in error, because of a mix-up regarding the product's "00" expiration date, according to a report from Peter de Jager's Year 2000 Information Center web site. (De Jager is thought of as the Y2K guru among those in the know.)

"What's alarming is that the Y2K problem is not just related to your typical personal or business computer system," reported Sam Morales, president of Alaska High Tech Business Council (AHTBC). "Systems that operate telephones, elevators, bank vaults, environmental controls, medical services, and onboard auto controls - a whole range of today's conveniences - can all be impacted."

Ravnit Basi-LaChapelle, Northrim Bank's Y2K-preparation manager, said the problem exists for mainframe, midrange and PC computers alike. Equipment may experience a number of failings such as computer system crashes, corrupted data, instructional errors in automated systems, and data loss.

"The two-digit year field can be found in microcode, operating systems, software compilers, applications queries, procedures, screens, data bases, and data," she said.

Basi-LaChapelle expounds by saying that a business need not even have a computer for Year 2000 problems to affect their business. Problems may occur outside a company's realm of control in areas such as:

* supply chain vendors

* telecommunications

* financial systems

* gas, water and electrical utilities

* stock markets

* transportation

* national defense

* security systems and appliances

So How Did It Happen?

Y2K is not a computer problem. It is a date problem: 1969 became 69; 1980 became 80; 2000 becomes 00. And the latter is the problem.

According to the experts, most of the computer programs written from the 1960s to the 1980s did not consider the upcoming millennium change when they used a two-digit dating system because programmers didn't have the foresight to see that the programs would still be around in the year 2000. That, or they didn't think it was worth the money. So it became standard operating procedure to program dates into software and on microchips using only the last two digits.

Dick Lefkon, editor of the Year 2000: Best Practices for Y2K Millennium Computing (1988), reports that "adding two century digits to a date field for a 100-million record file (30-40 years ago) would have added at least 100 megabytes of storage requirement to a disk that costs upwards of $20,000 for 15-20 megabytes." Today, an equivalent disk would cost a couple dollars or less.

Program functions work fine until asked to add a "1" to "99," resulting in a calculation of "00." This becomes a problem when the program doesn't recognize "00" as more recent than "99." Other problems could result from improper validation...