Bill Wattenburg–radio talk show host, former nuclear weapons designer and inveterate inventor–has come up with a Millennium Bug solution for IBM computers that works.
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And nobody is likely to buy it.
His Web-based company, Y2K-OK, has begun to offer software that Wattenburg says will fix the Year 2000 problem in two families of IBM computers, the S-390 and AS-400, the former typically used in Fortune 500 companies and the latter in medium-size businesses.
Wattenburg’s system uses “new arithmetic” to avoid the pending Y2K problem for another 50 years. And although an IBM official describes the method as technically sound, he is quick to point out that it runs the danger of becoming another innovation without a customer.
Most S-390 owners have already fixed their problems, said Steve Carre, IBM’s manager of Y2K for that system, and the remainder just don’t seem motivated to do anything.
“I wish all my customers who are not ready for [Y2K] would call Bill,” said Carre, who has advised Wattenburg on his plan. IBM and Allstate Insurance Co. came up with a Y2K fix similar to Wattenburg’s a couple of years ago, but couldn’t get anybody to use it, he said.
Like those of many computers, the operating systems of older S-390s and AS-400s display years in only two digits–98 for 1998, for example. When 2000 rolls around, software applications such as payroll, inventory or stock brokerage databases may become confused and garble the data.
Two-digit numbers can only represent 100 years, from 00 to 99. But Wattenburg has filed a patent application for his “new arithmetic”–named the Wattenburg Factor–that stretches two digits to 150 years by creating new characters. In his system, digits don’t stop at nine, but continue on to the new numbers, A, B, C, D, E and F.
In this system, a single digit can represent a number as large as 15. A “D,” for example, equals 13. The two-digit number 9E represents the number 104, which the computer will read as the year 2004.
The Wattenburg Factor applies only to these two systems because they do arithmetic calculations in a particular way.
Extending the decimal system is not a new idea. Mathematicians and computer programmers have done similar things for years, said Dave Cooper, the head of computer sciences at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which ran a quick “sanity test” on Wattenburg’s idea, and concluded it might work.
For tens of thousands of IBM S-390 and AS-400 machines and their clones, he said, his software can eliminate the need for “windowing,” the most prominent method used to correct Y2K glitches. “Armies of programmers must manually scan and modify source programs that may have been written years ago,” he said.
Wattenburgsaid he took on the Y2K challenge because he was mad at the chutzpah of “$10,000-a-day Y2K gurus.”
Wattenburg and his partner, former IBM engineer Al McBride, are offering a free demo version of their software on-line at www.y2kok-solution.com. The demo version audits software and finds up to 50 problematic points. The full audit program will sell for about $2,000, Wattenburg said.
With little more than a month remaining before 2000 arrives, it’s late in the day to be selling a new fix, as Wattenburg and McBride acknowledge. But they think they may pick up business after Jan. 1, particularly in less-developed countries, where Y2K has not been adequately addressed.