The Year 2000—Will Computer Crashes Affect You?

IT HAS been said that when the computer made its debut on the world scene, it was the greatest invention since man harnessed electricity. Today, several decades later, many people wonder how they ever managed without computers. This magazine that you are reading was prepared using them. Computers can retain information stored in their memory and retrieve it instantly. Ah, marvelous computers! How wonderful they are! What would the world do without them?

In modernized areas of the world, almost every aspect of people’s lives is affected in some way by computers. If you rely on retirement income, disability checks from the government, tax and insurance refunds, or a host of other such payments, your receiving them is dependent on computers. If you are an employee, chances are that your payroll checks are computerized. Computers keep track of money deposited in banking institutions and the interest paid. They control countless devices in modern homes, such as those that generate electricity or purify water. They are a boon to doctors, clinics, and hospitals in diagnosing health problems—and saving lives. Computers are used to monitor weather conditions and to keep airplanes from colliding in the air.

How Smart Are They?

Computers are no smarter than the humans who program them. A computer solves problems only as instructed. It does not have any common sense. When wrong, it only reflects the imperfections of the humans who programmed or configured it. When it is right, man takes the credit. The computer may perform tasks more rapidly than a man, but it cannot provide answers to problems unless man has supplied the method for coming up with the answers.

Man’s foresight, for example, was short indeed when he first programmed certain computers in the ’50’s and ’60’s. Since computer memory was expensive then, programmers looked for ways to save on memory. In the computer each letter or number takes up space. So in order to save space when storing dates, early programmers devised a shortened code that left off the first two digits of year dates. For example, the year 1965 was shortened to “65,” 1985 to “85,” 1999 to “99,” and so forth. It was a simple matter to add the “19” to the “85” to get 1985 when printing out dates. Over the past few decades, millions of programs have been written using this shortcut. Few programmers thought that this seemingly harmless shortcut would have serious consequences, since they did not imagine that their programs would still be in use at the turn of the century. However, a number of programs with this shortcut are still being used and will store the year 2000 as “00.”

Some computers will interpret “00” to mean the year 1900! Now imagine the confusion in the computer program when the computer calculates a five-year loan starting in 1999 and projects the final payment as due in 1904! In other cases, date calculations will cause the computer program to halt with an error condition, and in severe cases, the program will crash completely.

“While the microchip has brought us an industrial revolution that rivals the invention of electricity,” wrote the Toronto Star newspaper, “it has also made us more vulnerable than its inventors could ever have imagined.” The Star also said: “Throughout the world there are computer systems and microchips that cannot distinguish between the year 1900 and the year 2000. Unless these systems are identified and changed, there could be global chaos.”

What Some Experts Predict

“Everybody is guessing how bad it will be, including me,” said U.S. Senator Robert Bennett, of Utah. “And no one will find out until New Year’s Day 2000 or a week or two afterward.” “There is some basis in fact for saying . . . there will be outcomes that will be extremely difficult for the economy and extremely difficult for people,” said an assistant to the president of the United States.

“We’re concerned about the potential disruption of power grids, telecommunications, and banking services,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. According to reports from around the world, some computers have already experienced problems when dates in the computer extended to the year 2000 or beyond.

“Experts are predicting more trouble in the health sector,” reported U.S.News & World Report, “as patient billing and insurance records at hospitals or HMOs are vulnerable. Certain kinds of biomedical equipment, including patient-monitoring devices, are also in danger of malfunction. Because many electric utilities have gotten a late start, localized power outages are a threat.” A Canadian newspaper echoes this same fear: “Our hospitals and medical technologies are all based on the all-pervasive microchip, so system failure could kill people.” “Because of the business we are in,” lamented one hospital administrator, “it puts this in a different arena. Other industries may not be in life-or-death circumstances.”

The more pessimistic computer professionals are forecasting stock market crashes, small-business failures, and a run on banking institutions by fearful depositors. In the United States, the deputy secretary of defense called the worldwide computer bug the electronic equivalent to the El Niño weather pattern and commented: “I will be first to say we’re not going to be without some nasty surprises.”

“The effect on businesses in Russia will be catastrophic if computers are not fixed before January 1 in the year 2000,” said the president of the American Chamber of Commerce. Reuters news agency reports: “German companies are sleep-walking towards millennium computer bomb disaster, and the fallout threatens chaos right across Europe.” A research director said that “you could apply the same criticisms to Austria, Switzerland, Spain, France and Italy.”

The Bangkok Post also calls attention to Thailand’s computer problem: “National statistical offices in the region face a dual millennium challenge: heading off the year 2000 (Y2K) problem in their computer systems, and getting ready to process a new round of population censuses, according to the United Nations Information Service.” Australia, China, England, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, and New Zealand all face the same problems. Indeed, it is a worldwide problem that begs for a solution.

The Staggering Cost

Some experts have set the cost for fixing the computer problems at a staggering amount. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, for example, estimates that it will take $4.7 billion to debug just the federal government’s computers. One group of experts says that a more realistic estimate for overhauling the federal computers would be $30 billion. What is the estimated price tag worldwide? A whopping “$600 billion to fix software and $1 trillion for the inevitable lawsuits when some fixes fail,” reported the New York Post newspaper. Another group of experts has estimated that the “costs of repairs, litigation, and lost business could total as much as $4 trillion.” “The Year 2000 problem,” wrote the New York Post, “is emerging as the most expensive in human history.” Another report described it as “maybe the largest, highest-risk, most-expensive project humanity has ever faced.”

Opinions Differ

How will this affect you? Depending on where you live and the effort put forth by the institutions that you deal with, it could range anywhere from being of no effect to mildly irritating to very difficult, especially in the first few weeks after January 1, 2000. If there are areas that are of concern to you, such as specialized equipment that you use for health care, contact the business or institution that provides the service and ask what effect the year 2000 may have on the equipment or service.

Over the past few years, there has been no shortage of rhetoric about the year 2000 problem. Some say the problem is extremely serious; others counter that the scenarios are overblown. There are those who charge that banks will fail, whereas banking experts say that by the year 2000, most of their problems will be fixed. “No one believes the telephone network is heading toward catastrophic failure,” said the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. He conceded, however, that there will be telephone problems at the turn of the century, but he said they would be annoying, not disastrous. Many organizations are already doing date simulation tests in laboratory environments. This may preclude many problems. Yet, the world will have to wait to see how serious the year 2000 problem will be.