"No electric plant or facility of any kind has been Y2K tested without some kind of impact."
David Hall
Cara Corp.
From the morning mumble of the clock radio to the evening news, media directs our attention. Leaving aside considerations of whether this is good or bad, I'd like to look at how this affects our perception.
The current news du jour is MonicaGate. Daily incremental reports keep us posted on what was done to whom and where. The Starr report is posted online and mirrored at thousands of web sites. Pundits predict. Congress debates. The President apologizes. And we get numb and wish for it to all go away.
It's only natural. Repetitive stimuli eventually get ignored. We have to do this to survive. I can't spend all my time at the computer noticing the words on my monitor case any more than I can pay close attention to every footstep. I'd walk into things all the time and never get any work done.
Pre President In Crisis, the media was hammering another topic: Y2K.
Y2K Defined
Y2K / The Year 2000 Crisis / The Millenium Bug:
"The fundamental cause is simple: in many computer programs written over the past several decades, dates were represented using just two digits for years: '67' instead of '1967', '95' instead of '1995', and so on. This was often done to conserve space in memory (both RAM and ROM), on storage media such as tapes and disks, and screen displays and printed reports. In other cases, though, particularly for systems developed over the past 10 to 15 years, lack of forethought, poor planning and design, reuse of old code, and programmer incompetence are the most likely reasons.
The problems start when such a computer program attempts to deal with a date involving the year 2000 or beyond. In such a case, it uses '00', '01', and so on. Some programs will presume that '2000' is meant and work correctly. However, many such programs will treat '00' as meaning '1900' (not '2000') or even something entirely different and will behave incorrectly in a variety of ways. For example, attempts to do elapsed time calculation may yield numbers that are too large, too small, or negative instead of positive. There are numerous variations on the causes and effects of the Y2K problem-for example, '99' and '00' might be used to signal some special condition rather than an actual date."
Source: Washington DC Year 2000 Group
Y2K Explained
A common assumption is that Y2K will only affect computers. This is not the case. Virtually every device more complicated than a can opener (manual, not electric) manufactured in the last 5-15 years contains one or more embedded processors. These processors tell the device (car engine, elevator, telephone, VCR, radar console) what time it is. If the programmers were diligent, the time "01.01.2000" will be January 1st, 2000. If they weren't...well, sorry.
If your can opener thinks it's 1900, there isn't much to worry about. If the embedded processors in your local power utility do, you might have a serious problem.
And it gets worse.
Not only do we have to worry about the power company failing to provide power or the bank failing to deliver money or the stock market failing to open its doors, but also about combinations of services failing. The modern world is so interdependent that there is a good chance that "isolated" failures could have a cascade effect: the gas pumps wouldn't turn on so the food trucks couldn't run and the store didn't open...and so on.
WHY2K?
None of the above is certain to happen.
But it might.
The reason that we should to pay close attention to Y2K (in my opinion) is that the problem is potentially so big and so complex that it could precipitate a Great Depression level crisis. If we work now to solve problems and to plan for the failure to solve problems, we'll be a whole lot better off in the unhappy event that the doomsayers turn out to be correct for once.
-andrew l. mcfarlane
october 6, 1998
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