A Millennium Horror Story

by John Boyd

When the Year 2000 Problem first emerged, it seemed like another hysterical horror story to throw in the bag, along with the coming ice age, the impending hot house age, the Michelangelo virus, and kidnappers from Mars. But with little more than two years to go, the Millennium Problem is growing more alarming by the day. Even if your company is conscientiously dealing with it and becoming "2000 compliant," the odds are that if you have extensive computer interactions with outside parties, you won't be safe when January 1, 2000, chimes in.

       The problem's seeds were sown back in the 1970s, when literally every byte of working memory and hard disk space on mainframes was precious. This compelled programmers to scrimp and scrape when they wrote code. One common way to do that was to condense any four-digit date into two digits - the year 1973, for instance, was coded as 73. This eliminated the "redundant" 19 and saved two beautiful bytes every time a date was used.

       "Probably most vendors and programmers suspected a problem [would arise] later," says Ken-ichi Katsumata, manager of a special department in Fujitsu set up especially to deal with the Year 2000 Problem. "But 2000 seemed so far off then."

       What's more, people at the time believed new technologies would come along to replace the existing systems. "But the new systems didn't replace the old technologies; they were just added to them," says Katsumata.

       The result is that when the year 2000 rolls around, unknown numbers of systems are still going to be relying on the last two digits, 00, which the computer understands as 1900. Obviously mixing dates a century apart won't compute, so we're going to see confusion and failures on a scale never before experienced.

       Japan will be no exception. While the nation has its own traditional two-digit dating system based on the length of an emperor's reign, business has long-since adopted the Christian dating system. "Japanese companies use the Western dating system," says Gen Eda, head of IBM Japan's Year 2000 group. "And even if they use both systems, the Japanese dating is derived from the primary Western system. So things are even worse here."

       Some vendors, like Fujitsu and IBM Japan, are marketing software tools that help system engineers search through code, locate two-digit dates, and change them manually. And third-party companies, such as Saitama-based AV Engineering, have their hands full helping worried companies tackle "The Problem."

       The enormity of the task should not be underestimated. Mainframe systems may be getting the most attention, given the preponderance of legacy systems installed. But according to Jun-ichi Taki, manager of NEC's 2000 business promotion office, any computer, system, network, or software using two-digit dating will be vulnerable.

       Take a corporation the size of Toyota, which employs thousands of different systems distributed throughout the enterprise in numerous locations; together these systems likely generate more than a billion lines of code. Certainly not all of these systems will be affected, but many will.

       William Ulrich, co-author of The Year 2000 Software Crisis: Challenge of the Century, notes that if only 50 million code-lines are suspect, that translates into 200 separate projects covering 25,000 lines of code apiece. Each project will need to be undertaken separately by the information systems department. But no company has the resources to complete so many projects in time if they have only just begun tackling the problem now.

       Smaller businesses will have correspondingly fewer systems affected, but they also have far fewer resources to devote to the Problem, even if they are fully aware of its importance - which many are not, according to the computer vendors.

       Let's say your company has already instituted a compliance program, and that you are on schedule to be 2000-compliant by the end of 1998. That doesn't mean you are free to relax. This is the era of the wired world: extranets and Electronic Data Interchange. Are your business partners, your suppliers, the financial institutions you deal with, your software vendors, and your customers 2000-compliant?

       It can take only one piece of bad financial data coming in from outside to affect an entire financial network. Just one piece of bad data will stop a part or invoice from being issued. One wrong sort in an accounting system could mean people and suppliers won't get paid, or will be paid too much. In a hospital or military system, wrong data could literally become a life-or-death situation. Then there's the legal fallout - and on it goes.

       The point is, don't just focus on internal compliance. Make sure those you do business with understand that this is one horror story we had all better take seriously.

John Boyd writes horror stories for a number of publications, including Winds and the Japan Times. If you too want the hairs to stand on your head, try relying on fail mail for all your communications, or even to contact John via his new address at boyd@gol.com.

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