David F. Leigh

Year 2000

Even though I've spent the better part of two years directly working on Year 2000 issues, I've held off on writing my own web page on the subject, simply because I've been inundated with questions about it and would rather just have one place to which I can refer people.

If you've got any comments or questions, feel free to send me e-mail.  I don't promise to respond to it, but I probably will.

Now for the questions:

• What are My Qualifications?
• Year 2000: What's the Problem?
• So We Know What the Problem Is.  Shouldn't That Make Solving it Easy?
• I've Heard It'll Be A Disaster!
• So What's the REAL Deal?
• Why Would Anyone Deliberately Cause Panic?
• How Can I Tell If I'M Compliant?
• Do I Need to Stockpile?

What are my Qualifications?

You might ask me, "Who the heck Are YOU that you can speak as an authority on Year 2000?"  Fair enough.  I've been computing, pretty much since the microcomputer was invented.  In 1982 I joined the United States Air Force as a Ground Radio Electronics Technician, where I performed component-level repair and maintenance of everything from Air Traffic Control circuitry to facsimile, cryptographic equipment, radio, telephone, and digital electronics.  I received the USAF Inspector General's Professional Performance Award in the performace of duty.  It was here that I started programming professionally, in 1984.  Since 1989 I've been a computer programmer and consultant for a wide variety of clients, from hospitals to retail stores to financial institutions.  Since June of 1997 I've been working nearly exclusively on Year 2000 issues for a major mortgage insurance company, where my responsibilities include tracking Operating systems and Network Infrastructure, Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software, and non-IT infrastructure.  For our specific needs I created a Year 2000 systems repository that enabled us to group free-standing but undocumented program components into related structures so that we could successfully complete our Year 2000 remediation and put these programs back into production without disruption (a task we completed September 30th, 1998).  Nothing like this system existed at the time I created it, and we'll be able to leverage the technology to useful purpose well after 2000.  A recent assssment reveals that every program and system I've designed since 1984 has been completely and totally Year 2000 compliant, so I must have something on the ball.

I'm not a historian, I'm not a preacher, and I'm not a professional lecturer.  When I speak, it's from first-hand knowledge and practical experience.  While these people are speculating about it, talking about it, and writing about it, I'm fixing it.  I won't give you guesswork, speculation,  or a hidden agenda.  Instead I'll tell you what I know.

Year 2000: What's the Problem?

You've heard the "Readers' Digest" (condensed) version in the newspapers.  Basically it goes like this:  'Way back when storage space was expensive, computer designers decided they could save space by dropping the century digits from the year.  For example, The January 1st, 1968 would be represented as "01/01/68".  It would be a long time before the end of the century, and by then the issue would be resolved.  Very few people predicted that the programs and standards in use in the 1960's would still be around 30 to 40 years later!  Well, they are, and that's the problem.  Because when January 1st, 2000 comes around, it'll be be represented as "01/01/00".  This isn't such a big deal for you and me, because we understand from context that the data means "January 1st, 2000".  However, computers don't have the benefit of intelligence or experience and so can't make that inference.

Try to sort the two example dates as a computer would.  Since "00" comes before "68", then "01/01/00" means to the computer "January 1st, 1900"!  If you try to do some "date math" (like finding the number of years between these dates) then the at the best you're going to come up with a wrong answer.  At the very worst you're going to crash the computer by doing something it doesn't allow.  You see, depending on how the data are stored, computers can be very strict about what you can do with them.  For instance, some data types don't allow you to store negative numbers (like you might get from determining the interval between non-compliant dates).  If you can't calculate an interval properly and can't store a negative number, you might even get a "divide by zero" error, which isn't allowed on or off the computer!

Other annoying effects are the "day of the week" and "leap year" problems.  You see, 2000 is a Leap Year, but 1900 wasn't.  Also, the days of the week were different in 1900 than they will be in 2000.

So We Know What the Problem Is.  Shouldn't That Make Solving it Easy?

Not so fast.  I told you it was a "Reader's Digest" version.  The problem is compounded by the fact that there really isn't a standard for storing dates, and the problem's not really a "Year 2000" problem, as you'll see in a bit.  There are literally dozens of schemes for storing and calculating dates, and most of them have little "gotchas" that make a single overall solution impractical.  Here are just a few of the ways you can store dates:

• As a string of characters:  "January 1st, 2000".  This could be in any format whatsoever.
• As separate numbers.  01. 01. 2000.
• As a single number representing the date.  It can also be in any of a number of formats, but it's commonly done by year, month, and day to enable sorting dates easily.  20000101.
• As as the number of days, minutes or seconds from any arbitrary date.  For instance, most programs written in the language C use a date class that measures the number of seconds since midnight, January 1st, 1970.  More on this later.
• As a coded symbol.
• Make up a scheme.  Chances are, it's used.

I've Heard It'll Be A Disaster!

So somebody's telling you that on the stroke of midnight leading into January 1st, 2000, the planes will fall from the sky and the prison doors will fly open to release murderers and rapists into the streets to prey upon your children, right?  That everything with a microprocessor is at risk and you'll no longer able to use anything from your automobile to your VCR to your microwave and toaster?  That the power plants will stop generating and we'll all be subject to massive blackouts?  That the world's economic systems will crash?

• The planes won't crash, their engines won't stop running, and their control systems won't fail simply because the date changed.  And a failure of the Air Traffic Control systems will NOT cause the Air Traffic Controllers to jump out of their seats and rush madly into the streets!  Do you really, honestly believe that they'll forget the planes currently in the air simply because a display goes dead?  Or that their radios will quit working?  As a former US Air Force ground radio technician I can assure you with high confidence that they will not.  And guess what?  There's a technical reason that the ATC systems won't fail, as well, just keep reading!  By the way, in case you're interested, the Chinese government has come up with a novel approach to ensure diligent work on the Year 2000 problem.  They've ordered all of their aviation officials in charge of the work to be in the air when the clock ticks into the new century.
• The prison doors will not fly open.  Period.  Nor will the guns and guards quit working either.  Listen.  If YOU were the warden of a Federal prison and you had any doubt in your mind whatsoever that some automatic system failure were to put you at risk, then wouldn't you turn off the automatic system or even set the clock back?  I know I would.  And so would they.
• About 90% of the VCRs in the world are flashing "12:00" right now, precisely because their owners have never figured out how to set the things at all, or because they couldn't be bothered to re-set them after every power outage!  Has that stopped yours from working?
• You can't even set the date on your microwave... only the time. Pay attention, because this is important...just because something has a microprocessor, it does not follow that it needs to process dates.  Extend that thinking from microwaves into your other electronic devices and you'll realize that a huge number of electronic devices that couldn't give a rat's patoot what day it is.  Doomsayers will have you worry about them, but don't waste the effort.
• The power companies will not fail you, at least not for long.  The risk is to their billing systems, not to their generation and transmission.systems.  Even if the generators were to go off-line, it happens all the time.  Have you never had a power outage, ever?  If not you're either very, very young or you're in denial.  How bad could it be?  Well, in November of 1965 a faulty relay in Canada blacked out the entire Eastern Seaboard.  Year 2000 won't be that bad.  Why not?  Well, because we learned from the 1965 blackout, that's why not.  Following that crisis the Federal Power Commission went to great pains to establish and enforce the concept of "local security".
• As I write this it's January 24th, 1999.  Wall Street's computer trading systems have already been tested.  Most of the world's banks have been tested individually and are awaiting industry testing.  I work in the financial industry (mortgage insurance), and we're compliant and are currently engaged in industry-wide testing.  If the world's financial systems fail, it will NOT BE because of computer failure!  (update as of August 1999... Doomsayers spent several years predicting that the the banking systems would start failing in June of 1999.  GUESS WHAT?  They're still working.)

So What's the REAL Deal?

OK, so the Y2K bug is not a walk in the park, and it's not going to cause a global meltdown either.  The truth is somewhere in between, but where?

• It is widespread.  There are a lot of computers out there, and a lot of programs will fail, but not all of the failures will be important.  That's so significant that' I'll say it again: NOT ALL OF  THE FAILURES  WILL  BE  IMPORTANT!!  What do I mean?  Well, if Microsoft Word doesn't automatically insert a date into your document properly, what will you do?  You'll type it in yourself, that's what.  And Windows 95 isn't compliant, but the three points of failure are all in systems that you've probably never used anyway ("find" by date, the "fileman" program, and the command prompt) and which won't cause the operating system itself to fail even if you do use them. The point is that the more complicated a program or system is, the more likely it is that a portion of it can fail without affecting anything else.  Especially if that functionality simply supports features you didn't really need or use in the first place.
• It's not just Year 2000.  Remember all of those arbitrary date systems?  Remember the one that says it can be a count of number of seconds/days/weeks/years since an arbitrary date?  And remember that computer data types can be restrictive?  Now let's add all of this together.  Some data types only allow you to count to a specific number, no higher.  It just so happens that these data types are also very efficient and fast, so they're very commonly used.  These data types are commonly integers and they can be 8, 16,32, or 64 bits in length.  Because computers use binary arithmetic, these types are limited as follows:
• an 8-bit integer can count to 255
• a 16-bit integer can count to 65,535
• a 32-bit integer can count to 4,294,967,296
• a 64-bit integer can count to about 18,446,744,074,000,000,000.
For instance, most Unix systems, including Linux, use a 32-bit integer to represent the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 (There's no special significance to this date, it just happened to suit the purpose).  Since a 32-bit integer can count up to a little over 4 thousand million, 32-bit Unix computers will run out of timestamps in 2036. 64-bit Unix will run out of dates sometime after the heat-death of the Universe. And those Air Traffic Control computers?  They run out of dates in 2004, not 2000.
• It's not being fixed, it's being postponed.  The "fixes" that companies are putting in place today largely use a technique called "windowing".  Now this does nothing to change the way that the data is stored, because doing that is difficult and expensive.  What windowing does is try to make the computer a little smarter about the way it interprets those dates.  Pick a date.... say, 1940 (this is the date that IBM uses).  This is your pivot date, also known as a boundary or rollover date.  Now, any two-digit year from 40-99 is interpreted to be in the 20th century; two-digit years from 00-39 are interpreted to be in the 21st century.  Obviously this isn't a permanent fix... ironically, it pushes the problem back about the same amount of time that it was postponed back in the 1960s!  Now Remember that date types aren't standardized?  Well, it might amuse you to know that neither are the pivot dates.  IBM uses 40, Microsoft can't seem to decide on a single one, though most of their products use 30, and many of the companies that have recently "fixed" the Y2K bug have used 50.  And to make it just that little bit extra confusing, some programs use a "sliding window"  that moves the pivot every year.  Although the designers of the sliding window would like you to believe it's a permanent solution, new problems are introduced when dates that are alread in in your database slide out of the window! (Sliding windows are very good, though, when you want to simply interpret 2-digit years that will be stored in a compliant form).
• It's solveable, but it ain't easy.  This all sounds pretty bad.  But remember that for the most part, the Milennium Bug has been postponed.  January 1st, 2000 will NOT be the end of the world as we know it.  Not only that, it's clear to everyone how to solve this problem forever.  But any solution that's permanent requires that the data be stored in a completely unambiguous form that doesn't suffer from practical limitations.  Doing this means changing the structures of the existing data, and that's not a thing to be done lightly... it's why windowing was used this time.  But changing those structures has to be done, or to paraphrase Yogi Berra, in 30 years it'll be deja vu all over again.

Follow the money.  The worlds' corporations will be worth exactly as much on Milennium Day as they will have been the day before.  If there's a stock crash, it will be the hugest opportunity that ever existed to buy, buy, buy.  Prepare to make your fortune.  This is exacly what the professional fear mongers are counting on.  The bigger the dip, the richer they'll get.  Selling panic ensures a BIG dip. If you already hold stocks, and wind up caught in the slide, do not sell!  Ride out the dip.  You can't lose money if you don't sell.

The second reason is fanaticism; usually religious fanaticism.  That's where you'll find Gary North,  the king of the fear mongers.  Gary tells you on his site that he's a historian, not a computer expert.  Well that much is obvious.  However, he doesn't tell you that you that he's a reconstructionist Christian.  Now I've got nothing against Christians.... I am one.  However there is a big fat black line between hopeful anticipation of a Second Coming, and actively trying to force it to happen.  It's my personal opinion that trying to force the hand of God is not just futile, it's wrong... it's the height of self-aggrandizement; the antithesis of humility. If Gary North told me the sky is blue, I'd look up and see for myself before believing him.

How Can I Tell If I'M Compliant?

Nearly every manufacturer of every piece of equipment you own has a website.  Chances are, if you're reading this you can check them.  But when you're checking compliance you'll want to apply some common sense guidelines... if you can't set a date on the thing then don't bother.  Your new Sunbeam iron is probably safe.

Hardware
As far as your computer hardware goes, if it's an Apple Macintosh, you're compliant.  If your computer's running Linux, you're compliant, whether or not the hardware is.  For anything else, check the web sites.

Operating Systems
Again, Mac, Linux, and any Unix are already compliant.  For Windows you'll have to download patches from Microsoft's website. OS/2 can be made compliant through patches available from IBM.  If you're still running DOS you don't need to get Windows at all... you can upgrade to DR-DOS 7.0, available from Caldera free for personal use, and which compensates for non-compliant hardware.  For anything else, you'll have to check the publisher of the software.

Application Software:
Y'know, most software publishers also publish Y2K data on the web.  However, there are some other resources available to you as well.  The Government generally does a great job of publishing lists of software compliance, but you may have to look at several sources.  The best software publisher's site is IBM's without a doubt.  IBM maintains a very complete database and will tell you exactly what you need to do to make your software compliant, so long as you bought it from one of the IBM subsidiaries (like Tivoli or Lotus).

Some fo the Doomsayers are advising you to move to the country, dig a well, plant crops, withdraw all of your money as cash, stockpile food, and raise animals, buy gold.

These are fine things to do if you really like the country and really want to do subsistence farming and live a healthy lifestyle.  On the other hand, if you do it simply because you're afraid of the end of the world, you'd probably better just stay wherever you are.  Remember that these same people who are "advising" you are more than happy to sell you a plot of land in West Virginia, sell you gold and survival manuals, a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, etc.  Can you say, "conflict of interest?"

You might want some cash on hand not just in case your ATM doesn't work properly (highly unlikely), but also because you'll want to take advantage of that stock market dip, if and when it comes.  Stockpiling food?  Well, my mother always keeps two weeks of canned and dry goods on hand just in case of a hurricane  This is a safe practice any time, and you never get hungry if you forgot to make a run to the store recently.  I'd not suggest a year's worth, though, and I wouldn't suggest doing it just because it's the Milennium.

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