99 + 1 = ?

Here's an article I wrote in the early part of last year for a local publication aimed primarily at Seniors. Nothing has changed enough for me to alter a single word.

The mail won't bring your pension check
It won't be sent to you
When you're no longer sixty-eight,
But minus thirty-two.
(from the "Year 2000" song, Author unknown)

They say confession is good for the soul. Therefore, as I have something to come clean about, I need to tell you about my part in the Y2K problem, or the Millennium Bug as it is also being called. If you don't have the foggiest idea what these are then remembering that "ignorance is bliss," you may not want to read on. I offer no advice - but more of that later!

Many years ago, before the Earth cooled (in computer terms that is - '60s / '70s by calendar dating) I was one of those people busy changing the world working with computers and their programs. I am somewhat consoled by the fact that I didn't actually WRITE any of the programs - I never got the hang of it! I just managed the people who did, the programmers. Maybe that was worse! But, to this day, can anyone truly control programmers? They are not entirely of this world !

I will not dwell upon the nature of the problem other than to say that an enormous number of people will be clock watching at midnight 31st December 1999 and not just to see in the New Century! Having to think twice before dating a check will be peanuts compared to the majority of computers and computerised devices in the world immediately going screwy. Is this going to happen? I'm keeping my opinion to myself. Sorry, but it's the safest thing to do - or so I'm told.

Why may it happen? Back in those days we didn't have the room to put the full year into a computer program. We settled for just the last 2 numbers and told it to add 1 to the last digit on January 1st. Unfortunately nothing is ever simple with a computer. We forgot to allow for what happens to the FIRST 2 numbers every hundred years.!!

I have read articles that accuse us of having lied to computers in those days. We didn't. We didn't know how to. But to quote the late Winston Churchill we may have been guilty of Terminological Inexactitudes. Another consolation is that those who understand the old days are not blaming us. Those who don't settle for calling the old programs junk. That's OK provided you call the old hardware the same thing. Why is all this old software still around? Because it's been working all these years, and if it ain't broke why fix it?

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