We’ll look at how the so-called
"Y2K bug" will (or won’t) impact your investments, politics, and your life
in general. This installment focuses on exactly what is this Y2K bug thing that
some are so concerned about.
Opinions and forecasts on the effect of
the Y2K bug span the entire spectrum, from "ho-hum" and "no big deal"
to recession, depression and worse. Y2K preparedness is a multi-billion dollar industry
and it's just getting started. Are these doom and gloomsters to be believed, or are they
just out there for a quick buck?
The roots of the Y2K bug go back to the
early days of commercial computing in the 1960s and in some cases even earlier. Back then,
state of the art mainframe computers, with much less computing horsepower and memory than
today’s palm top computers, occupied rooms the size of your house. These pea-brained
behemoths were dreadfully slow, and dearly expensive to run. Every byte of data was
precious and had to be conserved and managed with the skill of a neurosurgeon.
Given such tight
constraints, pioneering
computer programmers decided there was no need to track the "19" in
"1962," thus saving 50% of the computing resources needed to store dates. All
years and date-based transactions were stored and processed based only on the
"62." Efficient and practical.
However, this data processing shortcut
gets blown out of the water when you hit the year 2000. These two-digit year computer
programs, unless specifically and very carefully re-programmed to do otherwise, will read
the "00" as the year 1900, not 2000. If that happens, the programs will choke
and die a miserable death. None of their internal date-sensitive calculations will make
sense. The programs will not self-destruct, but they will no longer be able to perform the
tasks they were created to do. The old adage "garbage in, garbage out" will have
new meaning.
Note: We don’t
really need the end of the millenium per se to be the cause of all the hubbub. It's the
end of the century that's the issue for two-digit year programs. It’s that extra
third digit, not the fourth, that’s the rub. If in some parallel universe the
computer revolution had taken place in the mid-1850s instead of the mid-1950s, we’d
be talking about "the year 1900 problem." |
Over the years, as computing became less
expensive and as programmers became more adept at manipulating data, the old computer
programs were expanded and enhanced way beyond their original designs and purposes.
The crux of the Y2K problem is that for
most business and government data processing systems, there never were any clean cutovers
to a next generation of computers and programs. The old programs were
"grandfathered" in and used as the core of the new and more powerful programs.
Grandpa never got retrofitted to a full four-digit year system. This two-digit Trojan
Horse, in all its shapes and flavors, has propagated itself to millions of new computers
and systems around the world.
So, here were are at the dawn of the
third millenium, with a lot of 30 and 40 year old legacy programs still in at least
partial use. No one would have thought it possible.
The entire existence of our Information
Age civilization is inextricably dependent on the computer. Computers and computer
networks run everything to do with money, communications, power
generation, manufacturing, transportation, and just about everything else important you
can think of.
In many instances, there are no viable
backup systems; the old ones literally have become obsolete and unworkable in the current
environment.
A few examples:
A bank with millions of customers around
the world just cannot go back to the days of manually posting debits and credits to
account cards, period.
The New York Stock Exchange just
can’t handle a billion share day with hand-written trade tickets and paper ticker
tapes, period.
Just-in-time manufacturing just
can’t be done without precise tracking of raw materials and with vague shipping schedules,
period.
Air traffic around the world just cannot
be managed safely without sophisticated radar, navigational, and meterological systems, period.
On the bright side, the IRS just
can’t process a billion tax forms a year without a fast and powerful data entry
system, period. (This is not to say that they could ever do so
with their current system.)
So, the bottom-line questions are:
Can the world’s critical software
systems be diagnosed, repaired, tested, debugged and re-deployed within the next 347 days?
And if not, what will be the impact and
what can or should you do, if anything, to prepare for it?
Stay tuned!
"The Dark
Ages were caused by the Y1K problem."
-- Cyberjoke making the rounds at
high tech companies
Grizzly
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