Y 2 K
The Y2K problem?
What were we so worried about?
How did it start?
After December 31st 1999, computers won't know what year it is. This might sound insane it might sound like a Science Fiction. It just happens to be true and here's why.
When computers came about programmers stored the date in the following way dd/mm/yy. This means that they allowed 2 digits for the day (dd), 2 digits for the month (mm) and only 2 digits for the year (yy). The day of the month and the month will always be 2 digits. The year is 4 digits. At least up to one second after midnight December 31 9999 when we will write the date January 1 10,000. But that is a long way off and we will deal with that problem when it comes. Can you see the problem we have now?
These examples might help:
*If you were born on January 23rd, 1955 that date would be stored in the computer as 23/01/55.
*The Wright Brothers achieved their first flight on December 17th 1903 and that's stored as 17/12/03.
Programmers have told computers to see 23/01/55 meaning 23/01/1955, and that 17/12/03 meaning 17/12/1903. When we get to January 01 2000 that date will be stored in the computer as 01/01/00. How will computers see 01/01/00? Will computers see 01/01/00 as January 01 2000 or as January 01 1900? Computers will see it as January 01 1900. "That is the problem"!
All computers that were built with only two digits for the year (yy) will think that 01/01/00 is January 01 1900. 100 years ago. All computers that were built with four digits for the year (yyyy) will think that 01/01/00 is January 01 2000. You might say so What?
To understand the big problems this little error can cause, we must look at one of the most basic and most common functions performed by computers, CALCULATIONS. In the case of wanting to know how long ago was a specific date in time, the computer does a basic subtraction calculation.
For example, how old are you?
If you were born on January 23rd 1955 and you ask the computer how old am I this year, the computer will subtract your birth date year from the current date (1999) and will tell you the answer is 44 years old. Remember the computer only has 2 digits for the year so it does a simple subtraction problem (1999 - 1955 = 44).
On January 01 2000 if you ask the computer how old am I this year, the calculation will be exactly the same. The computer will subtract your birth date year from the current year (2000) but the computer will see the year as (1900). So the computer will subtract (1900 - 1955 = -55) and tell you answer is -55 years old. Which is wrong! This type of error will cause problems with every calculations program in every company in every country, worldwide. This calculation problem affects more than just birth date calculations. It affects all calculation based on time. When will your driver's license expire... when was the last deposit made to your checking account... is this drug out of date... when should this machine undergo regular maintenance... when was this product built... how long has this bill been overdue... has the "TV Guide" subscription expired? All of these calculations are based on a specific date and create a response that affects these every day functions --- delivery, shipping, send, invoice, credit, debit, call, answer, increase, decrease, add, delete... if the computer does not know what date it is, then these calculations will no longer be accurate and everything will be late.
The thoughts in your head at this moment could be a collection of --- How could computer programmers be so stupid? --- Didn't they know the year 2000 would arrive? --- Why didn't they store the year with 4 digits? --- and last but not least --- Just put the extra two digits back into the program, how difficult could that be?
It isn't that simple:
Experts' say that the estimated costs to put in 2 missing digits is upwards of $600 Billion worldwide. Just so computers will see the year 2000 instead of 1900. It's a very real problem and affects everyone of us because who do you think will pay that $600 Billion? In the end every person that buys anything from a "Stick of Gum" to a "New House".
Let's answer the obvious question. "Why did they use only 2 digits when they knew we'd need 4 digits when the Year 2000 rolled around?" When computers first entered the business world in the late '60s and the early '70s, they were very expensive. This 'expense' was tied directly to two aspects of computing. How much data could the computer store and how fast could it process that data. The first computers made stored data on a piece of stiff cardboard known as a "Hollerith Card". By punching holes into this card, according to a set of patterns and reading those patterns with a beam of light, one could store and retrieve information in a computer. Each of these cards had enough space to hold only 80 characters of information. 80 characters is not a lot of information. Just write down your full name, address, phone #, birth date and bank account # on a piece of paper and count the characters. Remember a space is a character. Chances are very good you'll have written down more than 80 characters. Which means you'd have trouble storing all that necessary information onto a single "Hollerith Card". This is exactly the problem that programmers ran into in the late '60s and early '70s. "Hollerith Cards" were not big enough to store all the data they needed to store. So programmers compromised. They wrote 230155 instead of 23/01/1955, thereby saving themselves 4 precious characters, the 2 (/ /) characters and the 2 crucial (19) characters.
When designing a computer application you are always making compromises. There are compromises between what you'd like the computer to do and what you can afford. Programmers had to compromise between the quality and speed of delivery of the computers. They also had to compromise accuracy ---versus--- cost when they decided to store only 2 digits of the year. Even now the reasoning used to make these compromises still makes a lot of sense. You have got to remember this was the '60s and '70s and the year 2000 was 30 or 40 years in the future and computers were very expensive. So every place that programmers could save a little bit they took it. Another thought in minds of these programmers was that certainly a new code would come along to replace the old code. Sooner or later everything gets replaced by a better product. These programs that were written in the '60s were not expected to still be in use in the '90s. Unfortunately they are. There is too much old code, known as 'Legacy Systems', still in use today.
We can't put all the blame on the programmers:
One person will never make a compromise like this. This was a collaboration made by thousands of programmers, hundreds of computer managers and dozens of Companies. The thought was that if they stored all 4 digits they'd have to buy a bigger computer or they'd have to write a much larger and more complicated program and store that program data on 2 or 3 or even 4 more "Hollerith Cards". The vision of the computer industry was to have a computer in every business, most of the homes and maybe one or two in every school. Until just recently, when the cost of a computer dropped to an affordable price, this vision would have not came about. Back in the "60s and '70s, when most computer sales was to businesses, if 4 digits were going to be used instead of 2 the typical response from the customer would be --- "Are you crazy? You want me to spend another million dollars just to store an extra 2 digits of data in the year and it won't be used for at east 30 years! Just store the 2 digits! This is why the compromise became an industry standard.
The home computers of today are much more powerful than the computers used by businesses in the '70s. The trouble is that while computers changed the standard didn't. Many programmers still wrote the old code even after learning about the Y2K problem, knowing that the program they just wrote will fail in the year 2000. Why? Because businesses focus on immediate cost savings, profits and consequences. They are not very good at looking out into the future and planning for events that will take place 5 years down the road. Another factor that enters into this story is that computer 'professionals' are very mobile. It is unusual in the computer industry to work for a company for more than 5 years. So why worry about a problem that will take place in the future, when you'll probably be working for another company by then?
Just put in the 2 digits we need:
That might be your thought now... how difficult could that be? Well, in a sense, it's not difficult at all. Practically any programmer can look at a line code containing a date calculation, and make the necessary changes to the program to make the problem go away. The problem is its not that simple! There are 2 BIG problems in putting in 2 more digits.
1) The "Needle in the Haystack":
When you want to put 2 digits in the date someone needs to know where to put them. We don't know where the dates are to be put. The correct place has to be found in the coding. Finding that place is the biggest part of the problem, for two reasons. The first is that in the past 30 years a lot of programming has been done and it is not unusual for a company to have more than 100,000,000 lines of code. The number 100,000,000 is not a number we run into every day. It's rather difficult to get a sense of just how much work that represents. We all know that we can look faster than we can do. So how long it would take you to just look at all that code. If you spent 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and just take one second on each line it would take you just over 13 years to look at 100,000,000 lines of code. It would take 13 people one year or 156 people a month just to "LOOK" at 100,000,000 lines of code and this is only for one company. Remember your looking for those 2 digits that represent the year (yy) so you can add 2 more (yy). Good luck! The problem though, is more than just the sheer enormous size of the haystack.
2) What's a date?:
To understand the complexity of the question we need to understand a key concept regarding computers. Computers are "Idiot Scholars". They perform miraculous tasks, but have no understanding of what they're doing. Computers use symbols to store information. The symbols are either ones ("1") or zeroes ("0") and they might mean something to programmers, but to the computers they mean nothing. So we can't ask the computer to find the DATE. When you are looking for those two 2 digits that represent the year so you can add 2 more you are looking at lines and lines and lines and lines and lines of this -----
011100001101011010101101010101010000011100110101010101010
101101010101010110101101010110101011000101010101001100101
010101010010010101011010101101010110101010110101010101010
101101111100001100010101101001010100101010101010101101000
101110101010111111000001010101010110100101010101001010101
Where is the date? These (0s and 1s) could represent the year or a phone # or a person's name or anything. Since they don't contain all the necessary information you don't know. If programmers had labeled all the dates according to some naming standard, for example all dates must have the word "DATE" before it then finding the dates in our programs would we easy. Such a standard wasn't created. The "Date" in a program has been labeled everything under the sun. You can find 'Bdate' (for Birth date) to Snowball (for reasons known only to that programmer). So the idea of just add 2 digits is easier to say than do.
So now you have an idea why the experts say it will cost $600 Billion worldwide to fix the problem. Another part of the bad news is no matter how much code you have, no matter how much budget you have available for this task, no matter how skilled you are at the task, you have a deadline. You must have completed correcting the code, test the hundreds of thousands of changes and fix any errors the changes make by December 31st 1999. If this is not done a company's production line will stop, they may be unable to bill their clients or ship a product, because the programs, which drive these functions, are not working.
And all because programmers tried to save space on a "Hollerith Cards" 30 years ago!
If this information has upset you and you don't know what to do
may be the following view points will help.
NOTE
The next 4 statements are the opinions of the people involved and may not necessarily be the course of action that you should follow. You need to make up your own mind about what is best for you. "1st Choice Mall" does not endorse any of these opinions. We merely supply you with information so you can deside the course of action to take.
Thank You.
Preparing for the worst:
No one knows for certain how widespread Y2K damages will be. The fear is that when the year 2000 rolls around many computers will see the double zeros and interpret that as 1900, adversely affecting power, fuel and water supplies that are computer controlled. In preparation, some folks are heading to the hills, trying to live without electricity and power, and growing their own food so that when the Y2K crises strikes they will be self-sufficient.
From her farmhouse in rural Missouri, Candace Turner is trying to get the word out about Y2K. Using her CB radio and the Net, Turner is trying to convince anyone who will listen that they need to start preparing to live without food, water and power. Turner believes the Y2K bug will effectively turn back the hands of time and plunge the nation into chaos. Candace and her husband are busy readying themselves for a post-millennial life, stockpiling dried foods and spices, buying 6-month supplies of medicine and vitamin sprays. They've even gone so far as to design Year 2000 geodesic foam survival domes, which are heated by solar power. Candace hopes people will buy the domes to create Year 2000 survival communities, just as she is trying to do. Remote communities of Y2K survivalists are cropping up all over. But not everybody is heading back to the farm. Some people have decided to stay put while looking for a way to stay cool during the meltdown that might be coming
Going Grassroots:
One way to cope with Y2K uncertainty is to build your own network--a network of neighbors that is. To survive the coming century, Cynthia and Bill Grey started a Y2K community action group in their town of Santa Rosa, California. The group now meets once a month to share information and ideas. One of the greatest challenges facing the group proved to be weeding out fact from fiction. But no matter what happens come midnight year 2000, the Grey's feel the most reliable Y2K debuggers might just be their network of neighbors. The Greys are also getting ready by storing food, water and medicine. In case of a power outage, they have a crank solar powered radio standing by. Despite these measures, the Greys are also concerned with the possible effects the Y2K bug could have on their home business and even the world economy. "We're looking into whether or not we need to invest in gold, and what skills we have that we can barter with" states Cynthia. Bartering skills? Power and food shortages? Much of this sounds both grim and almost unbelievable.
Y2K Reality check:
The Year 2000 could strike a number of services but the end result will be far from Armageddon. Jon Arnold represents Edison Electric Institute, a trade association that accounts for 75% of the nation's electricity. He states that ---the millennium bug won't crash the power grid, but could cause some brownouts. We're cautiously optimistic that if there are any problems, they're going to be minor nuisances, short lived and very isolated.
But a huge task faces the electric industry, which like many other industries is confronted with the tedious task of locating billions of embedded systems or chips. Chips with a Y2K issue typically have date specific functions, meaning they help machines keep track of date and time. Some fear that when 1999 becomes 2000 many of these systems will fail. But a recent estimate found that only one in 100,000 chips actually has a problem, and in most cases the consequences aren't life threatening. Although no industry is guaranteeing anything, most experts agree we don't need to worry about domestic phone service, getting food from grocery stores, getting fuel from gas stations, or cash from ATMs. In fact, when it comes to Y2K and banking, this industry is one of the best prepared. And to make sure there's enough cash to go around, the Federal Reserve has even printed up an extra 50 billion dollars. That doesn't mean that there isn't anything to worry about. John Koskinen is Chairman of the President's Council on the Year 2000 and he said that --- at this point I don't think there's any reason for people to abandon their neighborhoods and jobs and take off for the hills. On the other hand, we still have a small number of agencies that have significant challenges.
U.S. local carriers don't foresee Y2K glitches:
A series of tests on the systems of local telephone carriers controlling 90% of U.S. phone lines found no disruptions were likely to occur due to Year 2000 computer problems, the companies said. In nearly 2,000 tests performed on a simulation of the connections between the seven companies' phone networks, no significant problems occurred, the companies said. Problems arose in only six cases, but none of the problems were serious enough to prevent calls from being completed and all were rectified by upgrading software or making other changes.
Is my computer going to fail?
It isn't that hard to find out. There is a company on the Internet that has a "Year 2000 Test" that is simple to run and it is FREE. All you have to do is log on to the Internet and go to ----- http://www.nstl.com/.
Have a formatted blank floppy disk in hand. When the site is loaded
First click on -----
Year 2000 Testing Services -- including YMARK2000,
Then click on -----
YMARK2000 NSTL's Year 2000 System Compliance Testing Tool
Finally click on -----
DOWNLOAD YMARK2000
This is a self-extracting ZIP file containing the test utility and readme.txt file.
These are the instructions for using YMARK2000 to test your computer:
1. Download YMARK2000 from NSTL's web site. The file, called Y2000.EXE, is small and it only takes a couple of minutes to download. It is very important to remember the path to the file (where it is saved on your hard drive).
2. Reboot your computer to DOS. If you are using Windows 95, simply shutdown and click the choice, "Restart the computer in the MS-DOS mode."
3. Y2000.EXE is a self-extracting file that produces two files: 2000.EXE and README. TXT. Execute the file Y2000.EXE by typing the path to the file followed by the file name. For example, if you stored Y2000.EXE in c:\temp you would execute the file by typing at the C prompt: c:\temp\Y2000.exe.
4. Execute the test program by entering 2000.EXE at the DOS prompt.
5. The test results will be displayed on your monitor.
6. You can also copy YMARK2000 to a floppy diskette and run the tests from a floppy.
a) Boot to DOS. Put a blank or unused diskette into drive A. From the DOS prompt, type in the command: FORMAT A: /S Copy the file 2000.EXE to drive A. Leave the diskette in the drive and reboot the system.
b) Execute 2000.EXE At the DOS prompt, type in the command: 2000
c) Read the results on your monitor. As YMARK2000 executes, watch the test. A summary of test results is shown at the end of the test.
We hope this information has helped you.
Of course you should consult with a computer technician and find out if you computer needs fixing.