Art Buchwald on Y2K

By Art Buchwald
Los Angeles Times Syndicate
Thursday, September 9, 1999; Page C02  

Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the 
aid of their software.  

Once upon a time, when Stone Age man was just oozing out of 
the slime, he invented the computer. It was unwieldy and 
not much use for killing game, but as time went on great 
hairy minds kept reducing the size of it until a person was 
able to drop it from a tree on a dinosaur's head and knock 
the reptile out.  

Then a wise hairy man named Zilch, with a math degree from 
Cro-Magnon Tech, said, "There must be other uses for a 
computer than to drop it on a dinosaur's head. I will 
develop a program from mud so we can solve problems and 
make seat reservations when the airplane is invented."  

Everyone laughed at him, but Zilch was determined. He 
worked day and night creating a program that would make the 
computer useful to society.  

Unfortunately, the computer he was working with had very 
little memory and when asked such simple questions as 
"Where is Broadway and 42nd Street?" could not give an 
answer.  

So Zilch worked out a solution. When it came to the date, 
let's say 2097 B.C., he dropped the 20 because everyone 
knew the century was 20. That saved enough memory to print 
out Neanderthal cellular phone bills for a family of four.  

It was a brilliant move, and Zilch became the Bill Gates of 
the Stone Age.  

As time went on--and I mean lots of time--people wrote 
software programs for every business in the world, 
including hip replacement operations and slot machines, 
which got more sophisticated with each generation of 
computers.  

No one noticed that the lack of a century would have any 
effect on the computer system.  

Hundreds of years passed without problems. Then a freshman 
at MIT wrote a paper for his math class indicating that all 
hell would break loose in 2000 B.C. because every software 
program in the past 50 years had been written with two 
spaces for the year instead of four.  

He wrote, "When the computers hit double zeros at the end 
of their programs, or vice versa, they will revert their 
thinking to 2100 B.C. because there is nothing to tell them 
to go forward to the next century. This will wipe out the 
price of everything from Big Macs to Nintendo games."  

The student got a D because his paper was not neatly typed. 
But it didn't take scientists long to realize he was right. 
They played games to see what would happen. A computer that 
was supposed to book people's rental cars in Hawaii fired a 
missile into Trump Tower. A Wall Street computer that had 
been instructed to purchase U.S. government treasury notes 
wound up with a million diseased chickens from Shanghai.  

The president called a meeting to discuss a solution to the 
gravest problem the country had ever faced. His concern was 
that computers were the only machines essential to 
political fund-raising.  

After talking to all the experts, the president made his 
decision. Every double-zero computer in the United States 
would be confiscated and dropped on Saddam Hussein's head 
in Baghdad.  

It was a great plan and restored the original purpose of 
the computer.  

I know the big question people are asking is: "Now what 
happens to e-mail?"  

The answer is simple. You print it out, stuff it in an 
envelope, put on a 33-cent stamp, take it down to the post 
office, stick it in a box and mail it.   

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company   

http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/09/17
6l-090999-idx.html
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