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  • Subject: Year 2000 Crash
  • From: Dave Mahadevan <mahadevan@xxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 09 Jun 1997 12:55:50 -0400
  • Organization: Stoner and Associates

> 
> The Stock Market Crash of  '29  will look like a small party compared to this
> one

June 2, 1997 Newsweek has a cover page special article on year 2000
which reads "The Day the World Crashes - Can we fix the 2000 Computer
Bug before it's too late?"

Some quotes from the article:

Y2K expert Capers Jones predicts that more than 5 percent of all
businesses will go bust.

"It is ironic that this administration that considers itself on being so
high tech is not really facing up to the potential disaster that is down
the road a little bit" says Sen. Fred Thompson.

The harder BankBoston works at solving the problem-it now has 40 people
working full time on it-the more complicated it seems...Of the 200
BankBoston applications that need revamping, only a handful have been
completed so far.

As bad as it seems in the United States, the rest of the world is
lagging far behind in fixing the problem.  Britain has recently awakened
to the crisis-a survey late last year showed that 90 percent of board
directors knew of it-but the head of the Britain's Taskforce 2000, Robin
Guenier, worris that only a fraction really understand what is required.

On the Continent, things are much worse; most of the information
processing energy is devoted to the Euro-Currency, and observers fear
that when countries like Germany and France finally tackle 2000, it
might be too late.

Pentagon study listing the Y2K problem...One intelligent system reverts
to the year 1900, another reboots to 1969.

The Senate Banking Committee is even worried that vertiginous computers
might automatically erase the last 99 years' worth of bank records. 
Some Y2K consultants are advising consumers to make sure they dont enter
the 1999 holday without obtaining hard-copy evidence of their assets.

One possible danger is computer lockup: while planes will keep moving at
12:01 a.m. on Jan 1, 2000, the Air Traffic Control screens monitoring
them, if not upgraded, might lock.

Ford Motor Co. reports that if the Bug isn't fixed, its buildings could
literally shut down-the factories have security systems linked to the
year.

At a state prison, a computer glitch misread the release date of
prisoners and freed them prematurely.

In Kansas, a 104 year old woman was given a notice to enter
kindergarten.

Peter de Jager ... "If you are not changing code by November of this
year" he warned, "you will not get this thing done on time-it's that
simple.  We STILL DON'T GET IT"

The bill for all this?  Gartner Group estimates it could go as high as
$600 billion.

"You can make some very reasonale extrapolations about litigation that
takes you over $1 trillion, and those are very conservative estimates"
says Dean Morehous, a San Francisco lawyer.

Come on, you say.  Two measly digits?  Can't we just unleash some sort
of robo-program on all that computer code and clean it up?  Well, no. 
Forget about a silver bullet.  It seems that in most mainframe programs,
the date appears more often than "M*A*S*H" reruns on television-about
once every 50 lines of code.  Typically, it's hard to find those
particular lines, because the original programs, often written in the
ancient COBOL computer language, are quirky and undocumented.  After all
that analysis, you have to figure out how to rewrite the lines to
correctly process the date.  Only then comes the most time-consuming
step: testing the rewritten program.

It's tough out there on the front lines of Y2K.  And in less than a
thousand days, it might be tough everywhere.  "There are two kinds of
people" says Nigel Martin-Jones of Data Dimensions.  "Those who aren't
working on it and aren't worried, and those who are working on it and
are terrified".

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

End of quotes from Newsweek June 2, 1997 Special Report pp. 52-59

-- 
Thank You.

Regards

Dave Mahadevan.. mailto:mahadevan@fuse.net
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