-Caveat Lector- What is the inventor of ASCII and coinventor of COBOL doing to prepare? Well, he bought two $200 water filters from Denmark for one. Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-07/18/ * * * * * * * * * We are knocking at the door of a high-rise apartment in Baileys Crossroads, with a question so awful we are afraid to ask it. We do not wish to cause a heart attack. A woman invites us in and summons her husband, who shuffles in from another room. She is 78. He is 82. They met in the 1960s as middle-management civil servants, specialists in an aspect of data processing so technical, so nebbishy, that many computer professionals disdain it. He was her boss. Management interface blossomed into romance. Their marriage spans three decades. They are still in love. "You know how we use Social Security numbers alone to identify everyone?" she says. She points proudly to her husband. "That all started with this kid!" The kid has ice cube spectacles and neck wattles. He has been retired for years. Some of his former colleagues guessed he was deceased. His phone is unlisted. We located him through a mumbled tip from a man in a nursing home, followed up with an elaborate national computer search. Computers--they're magic. . . . Here is what we have to ask him: Are you the man who is responsible for the greatest technological disaster in the history of mankind? Did you cause a trillion-dollar mistake that some believe will end life as we know it six months from now, throwing the global economy into a tailspin, disrupting essential services, shutting down factories, darkening vast areas of rural America, closing banks, inciting civic unrest, rotting the meat in a million freezers, pulling the plug on life-sustaining medical equipment, blinding missile defense systems, leaving ships adrift on the high seas, snarling air traffic, causing passenger planes to plummet from the skies? Obligingly, he awaits the question. . . . Technology has been the propulsive force behind civilization, but from time to time technology has loudly misfired. In the name of progress, there have been profound blunders: Filling zeppelins with hydrogen. Treating morning sickness with Thalidomide. Constructing aqueducts with lead pipes, poisoning half the population of ancient Rome. Still, there is nothing that quite compares with the so-called "Millennium Bug." It is potentially planetary in scope. It is potentially catastrophic in consequence. And it is, at its heart, stunningly stupid. It is not like losing a kingdom for want of a nail; it is like losing a kingdom because some idiot made the nails out of marshmallows. . . . Never has a calamity been so predictable, and so inevitable, tied to a deadline that can be neither appealed nor postponed. Diplomacy is fruitless. Nuclear deterrence isn't a factor. This can't be filibustered into the next Congress. . . . The search for a culprit is an honored American tradition. It nourishes both law and journalism. When things go bad, we demand a fall guy. A scapegoat. A patsy. Today we'll search for one, and find him. . . . The Y2K problem wasn't just foreseeable, it was foreseen. Writing in February 1979 in an industry magazine called Interface Age, computer industry executive Robert Bemer warned that unless programmers stopped dropping the first two digits of the year, programs "may fail from ambiguity in the year 2000." This is geekspeak for the Y2K problem. Five years later, the husband-wife team of Jerome T. and Marilyn J. Murray wrote it much more plainly. In a book called "Computers in Crisis: How to Avoid the Coming Worldwide Computer Systems Collapse," they predicted Y2K with chilling specificity. Few people read it. The year was 1984, and to many, the book seemed very 1984-ish: a paranoid Orwellian scenario. ComputerWorld magazine reviewed it thus: "The book overdramatizes the date-digit problem. . . . Much of the book can be overlooked." How could we have been so blind? Basically, we blinded ourselves, like Oedipus. It seemed like a good idea at the time. . . . Why didn't people realize earlier the magnitude of the problem they were creating? And when they did realize it, why was the problem so hard to solve? We sought the answer from the first man to ask the question. Robert Bemer, the original Y2K whistleblower, lives in a spectacular home on a cliff overlooking a lake two hours west of a major American city. We are not being specific because Bemer has made this a condition of the interview. We can say the car ride to his town is unrelievedly horizontal. The retail stores most in evidence are fireworks stands and taxidermists. In his driveway, Bemer's car carries the vanity tag "ASCII." He is the man who wrote the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the language through which different computer systems talk to each other. He also popularized the use of the backslash, and invented the "escape" sequence in programming. You can thank him, or blaspheme him, for the ESC key. In the weenieworld of data processing, he is a minor deity. We had guessed Bemer would be reassuring about the Y2K problem. Our first question is why the heck he recently moved from a big city all the way out to East Bumbleflop, U.S.A. It's a good place to be next New Year's Eve, he says. From a kitchen drawer he extracts two glass cylinders about the size of the pneumatic-tube capsules at a drive-through teller. Each is filled with what appears to be straw. "They're Danish," he says. "They cost $500. We ran water with cow[poop] through them and they passed with flying colors." They're filters, to purify water. If Y2K is as bad as he fears, he says, cocking a thumb toward his backyard, "we can drain the lake." Bemer is 79. He looks flinty, like an aging Richard Boone still playing Paladin. He has started a company, Bigisoft, that sells businesses a software fix for the Y2K problem. So, for selfish reasons, he doesn't mind if there is widespread concern over Y2K, though he swears he really thinks it is going to be bad. That's why he has requested that we not mention the town in which he lives. He doesn't want nutballs descending on him in the hellish chaos of Jan. 1, somehow blaming him. Who, then, is to blame? Bemer rocks back in his chair and offers a commodious smile. In one sense, he says, he is. Binary Colors In the late 1950s, Bemer helped write COBOL, the Esperanto of computer languages. It was designed to combine and universalize the various dialects of programming. It also was designed to open up the exploding field to the average person, allowing people who weren't mathematicians or engineers to communicate with machines and tell them what to do. COBOL's commands were in plain English. You could instruct a computer to MOVE, ADD, SEARCH or MULTIPLY, just like that. It was a needed step, but it opened the field of programming, Bemer says, to "any jerk." "I thought it would open up a tremendous source of energy," he says. "It did. But what we got was arson." There was no licensing agency for programmers. No apprenticeship system. "Even in medieval times," Bemer notes dryly, "there were guilds." When he was an executive at IBM, he said, he sometimes hired people based on whether they could play chess. There was nothing in COBOL requiring or even encouraging a two-digit year. It was up to the programmers. If they had been better trained, Bemer says, they might have known it was unwise. He knew. He blames the programmers, but he blames their bosses more, for caving in to shortsighted client demands for cost-saving. "What can I say?" he laughs. "We're a lousy profession." . . . . The longer a program is used, the larger the database and supporting material that grow around it. If, say, a program records and cross-references the personnel records in the military, and if the program itself abbreviates years with two digits, then all stored data, all files, all paper questionnaires that servicemen fill out, will have two-digit years. The cost of changing this system goes way beyond the cost of merely changing the computer program. It's like losing your wallet. Replacing the money is no sweat. Replacing your credit cards and ATM card and driver's license and business-travel receipts can be a living nightmare. And so, even after computer memory became cheaper, and data storage became less cumbersome, there was still a powerful cost incentive to retain a two-digit year. Some famously prudent people programmed with a two-digit date, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who did it when he was an economics consultant in the 1960s. Greenspan sheepishly confessed his complicity to a congressional committee last year. He said he considered himself very clever at the time. . . . A group did adopt a written standard for how to express dates in computers. We are looking at it now. It is a six-page document. It is so stultifying that it is virtually impossible to read. It is titled "Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 4: Specifications for Calendar Date." It is dated Nov. 1, 1968, and took effect on Jan. 1, 1970, precisely when Brooks says the lines on the graph crossed, precisely when a guiding hand might have helped. On Page 3, a new federal standard for dates is promulgated. . . . Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 4, Paragraph 4 and Subparagraph 4.1, is another of those statements. Here it is, in its entirety: Calendar Date is represented by a numeric code of six consecutive positions that represent (from left to right, in high to low order sequence) the Year, the Month and the Day, as identified by the Gregorian Calendar. The first two positions represent the units and tens identification of the Year. For example, the Year 1914 is represented as 14, and the Year 1915 is represented as 15. Ah. The Y2K problem. Set in stone. By the United States government. FIPS 4, as it was called, was limited in scope. It applied only to U.S. government computers, and only when they were communicating from agency to agency. Still, it was the first national computer date standard ever adopted, and it influenced others that followed. It would have affected any private business that wanted to communicate with government computers. It might have been a seed for change, had it mandated a four-digit year. . . . 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