Posted Thursday, July 2, 1998

I've just come off a marathon two weeks' worth of reading about the "year 2000 problem." It's taken several days for some of the implications of this to settle.

Everyone probably knows the routine by now: a long history of using two digits to represent the calendar year will cause problems with some computer programs, and possibly with "embedded systems," those hard-coded microprocessors found in everything from factory equipment to nuclear power plants to city water lines to elevators, ad infinitum. Will the year appear to be 1900, causing garbage output, or will the systems merely stop running?

A friend recently emailed me a link to an interview on the Salon Magazine web site, an interview with Ed Yourdon, author of Time Bomb 2000. After reading the interview, I promptly ordered the book online from www.amazon.com. Things snowballed from there.

Yourdon (who co-authored the book with his daughter Jennifer) paints a somewhat eerie picture of cascading failures potentially impacting every facet of our lives. He suggests contingency plans for each of these areas of impact, ranging in time from a few days to up to 10 years. Throughout, he is careful to avoid specific predictions, and in many cases allows that a 10-year contingency plan is highly unlikely. However, one is left with a chill running up one's back.

Turning to the Internet, mother of all chaos, one finds a large number of sites devoted to the Y2K problem, as well as a myriad of links to articles, Senate Committee testimony, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, etc. The volume of data is overwhelming.

A noticeable trend, which I think is disturbing, is the tendency for some writers to assume that everything that can possibly fail will fail, all at once. In this model, our world is a house of cards, waiting to collapse at the slightest perturbation. Taking this model even further is the tendency to assume apocalyptic collapse of world governments and institutions following the failure of merely one system (a domino effect), returning us to some early 19th-century preindustrial existence. This makes for some nightmare reading.

The problem I have with the apocalyptic pundits is that there are some who very much want this systemic collapse to occur. Their reasons may be religious or economic or delusional. The result is the same: utter chaos, wailing and gnashing of teeth, hardship, and death. I am not a student of psychology. However, I understand from what reading I have done that this wishful-thinking phenomenon does indeed exist, whether it is based on religious apocalyptic teachings or faulty computer programming.

To my mind, this is anything but healthy and is the sort of attitude we should be striving to avoid.

The sad truth is that we here in the United States, apparently further ahead than many nations in remediating or fixing our computer systems, are likely running out of time; we cannot fix everything. As a result, there will be disruptions, possibly economic recession, and other hardships. Some geographic areas will fare better than others.

I would like to see the Federal Government and state governments be more frank and open with the American people about what is going on. Let us have some straight facts, if possible, while at the same time not inducing panic. People need to be made aware of the Y2K problem so that they can better assess their own situation, whether in terms of their financial investments or making provision for emergency supplies.

In the meantime, while I realize that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I hope that the most shrill of the doomsayers will back off. In this particular case, nothing is to be gained by screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. There is much work to be done, and not a great deal of time in which to accomplish it.

This entire document is a Year 2000 information disclosure as defined in the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, S 2392.