The year 2000 may still be 2 1/2 years away, but the Millennium Bug already is a celebrity.
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It’s made the cover of Newsweek, and standup comics, cartoonists and other commentators are well on the way to making it a fin de siecle household word.
The glitch causing all the fuss is the demon child of computer programmers who long ago saved space by designating years using only the last two digits instead of all four.
Now some Cassandras of cyberspace claim that once Jan. 1, 2000, rolls around, the gremlin could make passenger jets fall out of the skies or cause elevators to go to the basement and shut down in the belief that they haven’t been inspected in more than 100 years.
Not surprisingly, they’re also selling solutions to the Millennium Bug infestation.
More realistically, experts agree that the Millennium Bug could cause problems ranging from bollixed magazine subscriptions to deep-sixed Social Security checks unless something is done to fix it.
“No one really knows if this will be an overhyped non-event or the biggest catastrophe ever to hit the insurance market,” said a typical participant in the raging debate over the issue, Rosalind Jones, a partner in the London law firm of Elborne Mitchell.
The London solicitor specializing in insurance litigation warned that if the problem is even remotely as bad as the Cassandras insist, it will trigger an unprecedented wave of lawsuits.
They will be filed in courtrooms from Tokyo to Toronto and from London to Lubbock over issues as varied as dropped rental car reservations to losses incurred while trading stocks with bad information.
Jones made her observation in remarks prepared for a European meeting on the so-called Year 2000 Crisis, often abbreviated as Y2K (in the metric system, 2000 is 2k).
On Sunday, a U.S. session arranged by the planners of the London conference and covering America’s Fortune 500 companies will open at the Fairmont Hotel with roughly 800 corporate computer executives enrolled to seek advice on protecting their firms from Y2K problems.
Giving credibility to the gathering of computer gurus from the cream of Corporate America are the co-sponsors, who include virtually every major business computing company in the United States, including International Business Machines Corp., Digital Equipment Corp., Platinum Technology Inc., Unisys Corp., and the Information Technology Association of America, a trade association with 9,000 member companies.
The gremlin causing this huge concern has been written by generations of technicians and programmers into the computer software that runs everything from nuclear reactors to VCRs.
Fecklessly, as it turned out, they chose to use only two digits instead of four to describe years (97 instead of 1997).
The convention, which remained standard operating practice long after it was no longer necessary, started out to save space in the 1960s when memory was tight even on IBM’s most sophisticated mainframe computers.
Programmers saved space by using the last two digits for the year in each computer record, knowing that it would be decades before anybody noticed. Today would be expressed as 06/22/97 instead of 06/22/1997.
Surely, concluded these early programmers, the machines they were filling with skimpy dates would be long gone by the turn of the century.
They were wrong. At least 6,000 old-style mainframe computers will be running at the very heart of corporate and official America at the turn of the century, and nobody knows yet how many will know what time it is when the calendar rolls over on Jan. 1, 2000.
Nobody at the top of corporate life is fessing up to being so short-sighted as to ignore the Y2K problem, although experts warn that many are doing exactly that.
Many corporate and government leaders are voting their skepticism by simply doing nothing in the face of a barrage of chilling warnings that failing to spend billions now for repairs could create chaos as big as ever filled a Hollywood disaster movie.
On Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission reported to Congress that efforts of the securities industry to prepare for the millennium “are not at the point they ideally should be.” Looking at its own operations, the SEC said of 53 critical internal systems, 14 comply with year 2000 requirements, one must be replaced and 38 need to be fixed.
Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who requested the report for the House Commerce Committee, said: “The lack of progress in many areas is troubling. It is unclear whether this is due to a lack of management attention, the high costs of conversion or competition for the pool of best-qualified systems experts.”
The prestigious Gartner Group, America’s leading computer industry researchers, now estimates that the cost of fixing the Y2K problem in advance could exceed $600 billion. And the cost will be much higher, say experts, if the problem isn’t fixed before it kicks in.
William Ulrich, a California computer consultant who has spent nearly a decade sounding warnings–and making what he acknowledged has been a “comfortable living” in the process–said in an interview that despite the huge publicity being given to his pitch, far more corporate players are ignoring the problem than are attacking it head-on.
“It is a sad fact of human nature that it is easier to ignore problems in the short term, particularly when a guy comes into your office and tells you that you need to take money out of your earnings to fix a problem that won’t be noticeable for several years,” said Ulrich, who is the chairman for the Chicago conference as well as the similar sessions in Europe and Asia.
Rob Figliulo, chief executive of Oak Brook-based SPR Inc., a computer programming company that specializes in Millennium Bug extermination, echoed Ulrich’s concern. He said that trying to sell his services to skeptical company brass can be like facing a firing squad.
“The chief information officer usually stands about eight feet behind us, because that’s the distance a bullet can travel after it passes through a human body,” he joked.
Yet the Y2K problem, said Figliulo and Ulrich, is global and affects far more people than those who make their livings using the mainframes at big businesses and governmental institutions.
Experts note that although the date-recording shorthand started with huge mainframe computers, the convention carried over to so-called embedded computers that keep time in devices as diverse as home heating dials, VCRs and control panels in high-rise elevator banks.
When the year 2000 dawns, unknown numbers of computers will either assume that it is 1900 and start making mistakes or else will shut down because of built-in safety features.
If the computer following an airplane in flight thinks it’s the year 1900, the software might lose track of where the plane has been and where it’s going.
Many machines are supposed to shut down when unpredictable events occur. That’s common in devices like elevators, and the result could be that the elevator will go to the basement and stop moving until a human intervenes.
The great bulk of Millennium Bug infestation, however, turns up in the bulging mainframes of Fortune 500 companies. Up to 30 years old and loaded with layers of often undocumented code modifications, such machines direct everything from in-house payrolls to merchandise delivery.
Even if the more apocalyptic Y2K scenarios don’t play out, said SPR’s Figliulo, the cumulative effects of a late shipment here and there could be enormous.
The bug looms with particular menace in today’s world, when computers have allowed companies to reduce warehouse storage needs by producing products close to the times they are sold, called just in time inventory.
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“When just in time becomes almost in time, you have lots of potential for legal problems,” said Figliulo.
He argued that the mere threat of such liability is enough to justify some Y2K effort in most major companies. “The more we do now, the more we can come back later and say we did the best we could,” he said.
One particularly alarming aspect of the problem is that those who fix their own problems may still encounter troubles when doing business with others who haven’t made fixes in a world where many computer systems are interlocked.
A widely quoted example is if one’s birth records are not corrected for the year 2000 bug on a particular computer, then all the other computers that might need to access the birth date to confirm such things as credit card information and insurance coverage might receive bad data, even if those computers are bug-free.
This problem almost assures that Y2K problems will surface, no matter how good a job is done by those sounding the warnings.
One rare firm that appears to be ahead of the Y2K curve is Hoffman Estates-based Sears, Roebuck and Co., which launched its effort in the summer of 1994.
Loraine Gornick has been senior project manager for “century compliance” at Sears ever since the company’s far-sighted chief information officer, Joseph Smialowski, started the effort, long before the problem entered the public consciousness. Even with the head start and a full-time staff of 50, she’s realistic about the magnitude of her task.
“Our approach is not that we’re going to fix all our programs,” Gornick said. “Nobody’s going to get 100 percent done by 2000. Our approach is to minimize risk.”
The company’s first priority is to look out for customers’ health, Gornick said. Her team is analyzing scores of household electronics that could fly off the handle with the millennium.
But although a VCR gone haywire may be annoying, it’s hardly life-threatening. A more pragmatic concern, she said, is the integrity of Sears’ supply chain to its more than 4,000 merchandise vendors.
“If they can’t deliver items to our stores because they have problems, we have a problem. And we can’t help them if we have trouble,” she said.
Sears just mailed 50,000 letters to banks and vendors that deal with it, asking them to specify their Y2K plans and timelines. Gornick said Sears hopes to have all its logistical systems ready for the millennium by June 1998.
Yet the web of interconnecting business relationships has the potential to carry an almost endless chain reaction of computer-related failures, according to Tom Wilkie, director of the Year 2000 project at Prospect Heights-based Household International Inc.
“If you go up six levels, everybody shares data with everybody,” he said. “All we can do is fix our own problem, communicate the danger to our suppliers, and recommend that they communicate to their suppliers.”
Wilkie said the knowledge that disaster could trickle down from far-removed business associates is especially unsettling.
But all the experts interviewed agreed that the only way to tackle the problem is to muddle through with fixes, because the price tag for simply replacing flawed machines with new ones without the problem would be ruinously expensive. Besides, it’s too late.
Such a solution, while reasonable in the long-term, won’t work for companies that need a quick Y2K fix, experts say. Wilkie said the time to start replacement projects would have been at least a year ago.
“Most major systems implementation programs are two or three years long,” he said. “After you do just the initial cost justification, budgeting and vendor selection, you’re already a year out.”
Besides, mainframes are too deeply embedded in corporate practices to replace quickly, according to Helmut Epp, dean of DePaul University’s School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Services.
“We have to think of these mainframe programs as the infrastructure of the country the same way that interstate highways are,” Epp said. “You can’t just pull up the whole Dan Ryan and put a new one down in two years. And you don’t just replace these programs with the next version of Microsoft Word.”
Gornick said her team is preparing for the worst. Even if they can complete their gargantuan task, she doesn’t want the company exposed to others’ failures.
“We will not be open on Saturday, Jan. 1, I’ll tell you that,” she said.
Meanwhile, Wilkie summed up much of the thinking of those gathering in Chicago for the planning session when he said, “If you can sleep at night, you really don’t understand the problem.”
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MONDAY: Who will profit from exterminating the Millennium Bug?
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