Time's a wasting

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Time's a wasting

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Time is passing by.

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It will not stand still.

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There are less than 51 months to go.

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If you have digit deficient mission critical systems... then your company will collapse on January 1st 2000.

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Everybody knows about the problem, but who is doing anything about it? Are you?

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There are two reasons for the problem.

We created a faulty standard, it'll cause trouble in the future. The standard in question? How we enter dates into a computer, usually as YY/MM/DD or DD/MM/YY or some other variation where the year is allowed only 2 digits. This means that 1945 is stored as 45 in most data files.

We also did this to save storage space, at a time when data storage was expensive. Two bytes for the year took less than 4 bytes, a savings which will cost us more than we bargained for.

Why does all of this pose a problem? A simple example should explain the inevitable consequences. If you were born in 1945 and you ask the computer how old you are today, it subtracts 45 from 93 and announces you are 48 years old. So far so good, but what happens in the year 2000?

The computer will subtract 45 from 00 and will state you are -45 years old. If you are in any endeavour where dates and time spans are used to run your business, then your systems are going to produce garbage.

Do all computer systems contain this bug? No... not all programmers and systems designers forgot about the consequences of the year 2000. The real question of interest to your company is... Do your computer systems contain this error? What are the business implications if they do contain this time bomb? Will your business survive past January 1st 2000?

You need to examine and possibly re-write your systems as soon as possible. Perhaps this is what will push all systems to a new platform. If you have to re-write the systems anyway, why not do so on a more flexible platform?

If you want proof of the severity of the problem, then I dare you to set the time on your computer to January 1st 2000 and do a full day of processing and watch what happens. How many of your systems crash and burn?

Who should worry about this problem? You won't be in your current position in the year 2000! It's not your problem... Who's problem is it?

If you can't get your data processing management to look at this very real problem, then send this article, and others like it, to your CFO and CEO. Perhaps they'll be interested to know that their computer systems will blow up in less than 51 months.

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Have you done anything yet? Or is it someone else's problem?

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This article is copyright: 1995, Peter de Jager, Tel: (905) 792-8706 Internet: pdejager@year2000.com AND... you have permission to use this article internally to your organization for the express purpose of increasing Year 2000 awareness... If you do use it... could you let me know? Good luck on your Year 2000 project!