THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611010704
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 102 lines
What is the year 2000 problem? Many computers will gag on any year that doesn't begin with "19" because the year in computers is coded as just two digits. your computer - hardware and software - won't see "2000," but "00." And if you "fix" your system, don't forget the systems of vendors that import information into your network.
Click your brain forward to Dec. 31, 1999, just before midnight. Five, four, three, two, one. . . . Horns, champagne corks, confetti, all that. Happy New Year. Happy New Millennium.
Now, pretend your brain is a computer. It's 12/31/99. Five, four, three, two, one. . . .
Your two-digit brain rolls over to 01/01/00. Time to celebrate, but what? Is ``00'' the year 2000, or is it 1900 or 1000?
Headache time.
Computer programmers are calling it the ``Year 2000 Problem.'' Many computers will gag on any year that doesn't begin with ``19.'' Mainframe computer programmers created the problem themselves in the '60s, '70s and even early '80s - ``19'' that is - when they coded the year in computers as just two digits to save storage space.
Memory was high-priced back in the old days of computers - now it's cheap - and they figured by now their programs would have gone the way of the Commodore 64. But guess what? Those same two-digit programs and mainframe computers are still humming away in the basement of many offices - even some businesses that have dressed up their desk tops with new Windows95 PCs.
Businesses will have to spend, all told, between $300 billion and $600 billion between now and 1999 to fix this ``millennium bug,'' estimates the Gartner Group, a Connecticut-based computer consulting firm.
Programmers suggest adding a grain of salt to the Gartner Group's calculations, since they're in the business of selling fixes to computer problems. But computer experts admit it's a massive dilemma.
``I think even at the year 2000, there's going to be a lot of companies that missed it,'' says Roger Grimes, director of information services technology at Maryview Medical Center. ``The thing is a lot of fires come up all the time and this one is just sitting in the back. No message comes up and flashes and says, `Hey, Millennium problem.' ''
Maryview wrote into its strategic plan a goal of checking not only its own system but also the systems of vendors that import information into Maryview's network, Grimes said.
In many cases, the problem is not difficult to fix - but may be hard to find. Lt. Tom Siu, who works on the problem at the U.S. Navy's Commander Operational Evaluation Testing Force, summarizes the Year 2000 problem this way: Do you realize where all the software is in your life?
Probably not, Sui says. How about the timer on your VCR? Or the time stamp on a digitial pager? Or the clock on your PC?
The Navy is testing all its hardware and software to find the date codes and correct them. That's a monumental task in itself, Sui says.
``The risk is there may be other problems we don't know about,'' Sui says. ``Many program managers are not even looking at it yet, there's a lot of denial. It'll be a crisis next year and managers will pull their hair out.''
What exactly could happen?
William R. Franklin, manager of information systems at Crestar Bank in Richmond, gives this example: To calculate the interest on a savings account, a computer takes today's date and subtracts last month's date. It gets a difference of 30 days, and multiplies that times the balance times the interest.
A computer carrying the millennium problem in January 2000 would subtract, say, 12/15/99 from 12/15/00 and get a negative number.
Crestar started working on the problem several years ago, because some long-term certificates of deposit would mature after 2000. So far, so good. So far, though, Crestar's spent nearly $100,000 evaluating its systems - and that's just for taking an inventory and making a few patches.
The bank will hire an outside company to come in and search every line of code for dates, Franklin said. They hope to have the problem completely fixed by the end of 1998.
``Every business in the world has this issue,'' Franklin says. ``It's being called the biggest issue in computing since the advent of the PC. We can't just look at the obvious things, we're looking at everything.''
Crestar's push to finish the job early is not just prudent, it's cost-effective. The cost of rewriting code is expected to jump from about $1 per line today to as much as $7 per line in 1999, as companies discovering the problem at the last minute bid up the services of mainframe programmers.
Old mainframes stayed around longer than expected because companies discovered that replacing an entire computer system was like ``having open heart surgery,'' Franklin said.
So the programmers hacked together codes to keep things running. Shawn O'Rourke, a senior software analyst with Computers & Concepts Associates in Virginia Beach, says this is called ``spaghetti code.'' It was ugly, but it worked. Until now.
``It's going to be hard to hire people to look at it unless the people who created it are still around,'' O'Rourke says.
O'Rourke is in a business that stands to benefit from the year 2000 problem. Businesses that go into companies to evaluate their software and hardware are springing up across the country.
Some companies will evaluate their old systems, realize how costly it is to re-code everything, and decide to upgrade, O'Rourke says. Smaller businesses may never recognize the problem and may even have to shut down. The Gartner Group says 1 percent to 3 percent of companies could be put out of business.
``We will ramp up to a crisis situation in 1998 and 1999 as people realize they can't find enough coders to go through it,'' O'Rourke says.
That's why when everybody else is ringing in the next millennium, the programmers may be coping with one massive hangover.
KEYWORDS: YEAR 2000 by CNB