Coming Soon to a Screen Near You ...
"The Millennium Fiasco"
"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." - Santayana
by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley
The curtain parts and the movie begins. You can tell the picture will be glorious. The credits roll, the music ("Also Sprach Zarathustra") plays. We see an alignment of the earth, the sun, and a giant fetus enclosed in a transparent sphere, with kettledrums and trumpets blaring like crazy. It is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, all right. Looking good!
But wait a minute. The celluloid is bubbling on the screen. The music slows to a trudge and stops. The film snaps, flaps, and the lights in the theater go on. What kind of movie is this?
But wait some more -- this movie isn't in a theater. It's an in-flight movie. The lights in the cabin go off. The engine conks out. Oxygen masks dangle above every seat like little hanged men as the plane begins following its right wing downward.
We told you not to do it, but you went ahead anyway and billed a flight that would have you in the air, 28,000 feet altitude, over a series of pointy coral reefs at the moment of Midnight, January 1, 2000.
Whatever happens now, you had it coming.
There, There ...
Well, maybe it won't be that bad. But it will be sort of bad. Some experts are warning you to be prepared for Millennium Day to cause you inconveniences. While other people are planning parties -- it will be the New Years Eve of thirty lifetimes -- you should be getting your affairs in order. One good idea is to have ready spending cash. Don't imagine you can waltz up to your ATM that morning, with cars driving into light posts, the old neighborhood in flames, and people collapsed over porch railings with arrows in their backs, and punch the buttons and get money. The brilliant people who figured out how to charge you $1 for your own money may not be brilliant enough to figure out what year comes after 1999.
At the stroke of midnight on that dread date, millions of computers, including many of the most powerful, are going to stop working, unless their owners find a way to inform the systems that the 1900s are over.
And fill that car tank full of gas. Who's say to say that your friendly self-serve station will even be able to open the front door that day, much less run a credit card check on customers it has done business with 700 times. And if worse comes to worse, you can make a getaway to the country before the meltdown reaches your block.
If you're really farsighted, invest now in fishhooks. Because the kind with the barb in them that keeps the fish from slipping away will be very hard to make in the postindustrial future. In the Age of Aquarius the man with the most fishhooks will be king. Plus, you get all the fish.
The Problem
The problem, as you know -- this is probably story number 2000 you have read about the Year 2000 Predicament -- is that on January 1, 2000, a lot of the computers in the world will conclude that the year is actually 1900, or maybe 1980. Any computer that deals with time will be in jeopardy that day.
When computer programmers laid down the first tarmac of corporate code back in the 1970s, memory was precious. The decision was therefore made (by the usual suspects, ultra-intelligent middle-aged white males in white lab coats and Buddy Holly glasses) to only allow two digits to enumerate the date. Thus 1997 is just "97" to the computer. This was an exceptionally bright plan that failed to envision that the universe would still be around in 30 years. Cuz when you hit 100, those computer programs read it as 00 -- 1900. Or maybe 1980.
People who should know better don't always. A recent survey conducted on the comp.software.year-2000 Usenet newsgroup asked 39 programmers, averaging of 17 years of work experience each, to rate the seriousness of the problem on a scale from 1 (no problem) to 5 (flaming helpless hell). The average response, according to C-Net: 3.96. You would want that figure to be much lower.
Return with Us Now
OK, so how bad is it really? Meaning, how bad will it be for you?
It could be bad. Machines made as recently as two years ago by big names such as IBM, Compaq, Dell, AST, Hewlett-Packard and Gateway have failed a simple Y2K test.
MS-DOS should understand four-digit dates all the way until the year 2108 -- although you may have to help it a bit at first to make it work properly. Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 are supposedly good until 2108.
Macintoshes, no matter how old they are -- brace yourself -- are OK. All Mac operating systems are good at least until 2040.
The rule of thumb is, recent PCs and PC programs, including operating systems, are safe. The PC makers and software makers have the person power to correct their BIOS and other dating sources. The Internet and the Web will continue as before.
But if your place of work relies on older IBM-type computers, you may want to take a test to see how it will handle the end of the century, he said.
Here's it is:
Reboot your computer. While it's starting up, flip over to the setup program that is part of your CMOS system. Now reset the system clock on your PC to Dec. 31, 1999, 23:55.
Now exit the program, saving changes. Your computer will automatically reboot. Now go make yourself sandwich and let your computer stew for five minutes. (It has to be completely off for the test to work.) After you've wiped the mayonnaise from your chin, turn the computer on again. Once it's up, check the time. The clock should say it's a few minutes past midnight, in the auspicious year 2000. If so, say "whew!" and celebrate with a tall cold one.
But maybe it doesn't say that. Your computer may hang up at the switch from 1999 to 2000, but after that disruption it will be OK. Or your computer may require you to change the clock each time you turn it on. (This is true of my kids' PC.) If the PC doesn't allow you to make that change, congratulations (mine did) your $2500 machine is now landfill.
One possible solution for older PCs is for manufacturers to issue recalls of computers, like car companies do with cars, and replace faulty BIOS chips with chips that don't see the 20th Century as a Moebius strip. PC makers may mail the chips to users, or to dealers, who will make hay charging you $100 a shot to milleniize your system.
It may even be possible to reprogram your existing BIOS through network uplinks: your system calls IBM (for instance), IBM scans your system, finds the location of the BIOS dating information, and rewrites the chip. Sort of like airborne refueling. But I wouldn't bet on this happening, though. And if it did, I wouldn't count on it working.
And anyway, PCs aren't the reason you want that tank full of gas and pocketful of cash. Big mainframe and network computers are. The kind relied upon by oil companies, governments, armies, and airlines.
Red Letter Date
Now, you are doubtless wondering, just how bad is it to have a bad date stamp? You may remember the old days before computers had clocks, and you either filled in the date each time you booted up, or you ignored it (and all your files were dated January 4, 1980, remember?).
But to today's multitasking machines, a date stamp is crucial. Billing software, investment software, and financial software will become useless overnight without accurate dating. And you can toss your diary, calendar, and checkwriting programs in the trash.
You can imagine what this will mean to large institutional systems. Big companies like AT&T, the IRS, and Citicorp have a head start on fixing the problem. But how about where you work -- do you think they've got a handle on this yet? The clock is ticking.
The Gartner Group has placed the cost of fixing all the code affected by the Millennium Bug at more than $600 billion worldwide. Let's pause to consider how many zeroes are involved in that number. Since roughly half of the world's big computers are right here in the United States, that means we have to foot the bill for about $300 billion, including the $30 billion the federal government needs to spend to gets its machines to work right.
And the hits just keep on coming. What about lawsuits? Some in the ambulance pursuit trade feel that litigation by ticked off consumers and businesses will stimulate domestic trade by a whopping $1 trillion. That's a lot of contingency. For that kind of money you could buy the nuclear stockpiles of the old Soviet Union, blow it all off in your backyard, and fill the hole with Tamagotchis.
Fortunately, we have that kind of cash lying around, in seat cushions and car ashtrays. Or we can borrow it and out it on our country's Visa card -- the deficit. But then there is the time factor. There is simply not a lot of time in the remaining 700 or so days before you-know-when to fix everything.
So kick back, we may be on the brink of a catastrophe deeply satisfying to both technophobes and apocalyptics alike: the collapse of western civilization because computers turned out to be too stupid for the future.
My guess is that the long-term results of the millenium problem will not show up until about 2010. That is when testing will start to show that our kids and grandkids, to whom we handed down our chronclastic computers, don't have an especially firm grasp of time. What year is it, kids? 1980? 1900? Would that be AD or BC?
That will pretty much be the end of the future. Forty years from now, I foresee kudzu, lots of it, overgrowing the computer centers of the world. Traffic lights will have shut down. Cars will sit rusting at the intersections the died at. Grass will flourish in the cracks of Wall Street and every other street. In a few years we'll have returned to a fishhook economy. It will be a world in which nanosecond precision has given way to many-moon vagueness.
We will sit around fires telling tall tales about the wizards of the golden age at Microsoft and Intel, who could carve cathedrals out of a grain of sand. They could do anything, except think 20 years in advance.
Call me sentimental, but let's go back to the plane crash. If you survived the crash, you may have two futures in store for you, neither one of which seem very much like a future. In the one, it's 1900 again. The Right brothers have not yet flown, and you are wondering how you come to be sitting amid all this jetliner debris.
In the other, it's 1980, and you have to live through the Carter and Regain administrations all over again. Inflation, Khomeini, recession, supply-side, the works.
Buddy, can you spare the time?
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