Fill the Bath with Water, it's Nearly Y2K Day
by David Millikan
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

The price of saving two bits

WHAT EVERYONE AGREES UPON, however, is the reason for the troubles my usually circumspect friend, and the rest of the world, is facing. We face a problem which was built into the programming of computers 30 years ago when the turn of the century was too far in the future to think about. In those days programming was a laborious business and memory very expensive. It was easier and less costly to represent years with only the last two digits. So "70" meant 1970. As the years went by, the two-digit format remained unchanged. Suddenly, it has come home to roost, so that now there is uncertainty about what will happen when the computers go from "99" to "00". Will the computers take this to be, 1900 or 2000; will they freeze in confusion? It is a problem easily stated but its implications pose one of the most vexing technological headaches of the century.

In large computer systems fixing the problem is fearfully expensive. The most widely quoted figures have been produced by The Gartner Group at a recent Senate inquiry in the US, along with Merrill Lynch and Edward Yardeni, the New York-based chief economist of Deutsche Bank Securities. They put the global cost of battling the millennium bug at around US$600 billion.

In America the cost is predicted to reach US$10 billion for government systems and another US$400 billion for private businesses. These are the sort of sums which make analysts and computer consultants go weak at the knees. And of course the closer Y2K looms the greater is the demand and the more it costs. In January, Merrill Lynch reminded their clients that the cost of competent computer programmers had increased by 25 per cent in the previous six months. In Australia a recent survey by Morgan and Banks showed that 40 per cent of all employers in the country were putting on extra staff to deal with the problem.

To: Those staying stone-cold sober

Paul Mitchell Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor at Zadok and edits the e-zine www.shootthe messenger.com.au. (See Alan Gijspers' review of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace)