WILL THE Y2K BUG BITE?

By Dave Wallace

RIVER BENDER - January, 1999

It depends on who you're listening to. Jerry Falwell says "Y2K may be God's instrument, to shake this nation, to humble this nation" and has even come out with a $28 video entitled " A Christian's Guide to the Millenium Bug." Falwell says that he plans to stock up on food, sugar, gasoline and ammunition.

Not surprisingly, even without computers, much of the same hysteria existed before the turn of the century at year 1900. With 2000 fast approaching, the doomsayers are at it again prophesizing all sorts of havoc from famine to the collapse of governments.

There's no question that a unique problem exists and one that has never been encountered before. It was caused by programmers' common practice of conserving memory by using a two-digit field to represent the year, i.e., "98" for 1998. At year 2000 "00" will be interpreted as year 1900. Unless something is done date/time computations could go berserk.

Lots of computer computations involve dates and time and are often difficult to verify. But programmers are accustomed to dealing with date/time glitches that happen all to often in the computer industry. Glitches will surely occur as we enter the year 2000 but to subscribe to the apocalyptic predictions that famines will occur from food scheduling problems, that airlines will be grounded because maintenance is overdue or that chaos in general will occur is probably going too far. The sky will not fall at exactly midnight on December 31, 1999. Programmers have already been working with dates in year 2000. After all, people have mortgage loans that extend into the next millenium.

As far as your PC is concerned, there's probably nothing catastrophic that will occur at year 2000. You won't see any smoke but your system clock may or may not display properly. Check this out by setting your PC clock to 11:59 PM and 12/31/99 then wait a minute to see if it goes into the year 2000. Holding your mouse pointer on the clock icon without clicking will display the date. Most modern PCs will pass this test.

Application programs that deal with dates and time are where you might run into trouble. There should be no problem with genealogy programs or any other programs where you input 4-digit years, i.e., 1798, 1898, 1998 but spreadsheets like MS Excel may have a problem because one can optionally enter a date using a format like 12/1/98. What happens when you enter1/1/00? Is the year 1900 or 2000?

Correcting the 2-digit year problem is generally a compromise. Here's how it's been handled in the MS Excel 97 spreadsheet: When you enter 00 through 29 for the year, Excel assumes that you mean year 2000 through 2029 and will perform computations accordingly. If you enter 30 through 99, Excel assumes you mean 1930 through 1999. This has been called the 70/30 fix. Some systems use a 60/40 fix. So what's the problem? Example: Suppose you wanted to determine the number of days between 1/1/98 and 1/1/29 (intending 2029) using the Excel "Days360" function. Excel assumes you mean 1998 and 2029 and computes the answer correctly. But if you want the number of days between 1/1/98 and 1/1/30 (intending 2030) it assumes you're going backwards to 1930 and provides an erroneous answer. The solution is to simply enter the full year 2030 instead of 30, which Excel permits one to do.

The Y2K problem is already here. If people don't panic, we'll probably make it into the next millenium fine. But next year companies will be testing out their software changes and serious problems could be uncovered. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, costs of Y2K changes reported by companies are averaging 26% higher than earlier estimates. AT&T just increased their estimate from $300 million to $900 million. One company, Samsonite, recently ran tests of a Y2K fix for its distribution system that ended up a failure and cost the company $10 million in lost sales.

We're not home free yet but let's just hope that the fears of bank failures, power outages and such don't lead to widespread panic as disruptive as the Y2K glitch itself.