> In the midst of yet another conversation with my brother last night about
> Y2K, we decided to see if the rumors are really true. You know the ones,
> Check this out! I fired up my brother's 386SX16 in his basement, changed
> the date and watched it roll over to January 1, 2000. I then edited a file
> and checked the date written to that file. The result was 1/01/2000. I left
> So tell me what all the fuss is about with this Y2K thing - Please!!! Is it
It is a real problem. Yes, most PC's are OK, I performed the same
tests on my systems, and they work. BUT... there is a lot of software,
some of which I have written myself, that uses two digit dates and performs
date calculations. The answers to those will be wrong after the year
1999. (Fortunately, all of that software of mine is long obsolete.)
Hmm... will Dbase, Access, and Foxpro return reasonable dates? I don't
know.
Where are the problems? Driver's licenses, credit cards (mostly
fixed by now,) banks, expiration dates on food packages, (much of it fixed
by now,) insurance policies (major headache!!!) and worst of all, embedded
controllers in some critical applications.
Once city I read about ran some tests on their water treatment plant,
only to find that had they not caught it, all the chlorine would have been
dumped at maximum velocity, creating a deadly plume of chlorine gas
forcing evacuation of part of the city.
Employees of one food store were caught raiding the garbage at one
warehouse because certain food products were automatically discarded
shortly after being unloaded, because their post 1999 expiration dates were
deemed "expired" by the warehouse management software. Similar events
were reported by several food warehouses.
Electrical utility companies are worried that some of the aging
controller devices and backup power systems may trip off when the date
changes.
Was this a stupid thing to do? Well... estimates are that if all the
bytes saved on mag tape and disk storage were costed, and the money
invested, it would pay for all the fixes many times over. And much of
that software is long gone anyway.
What do I advise?
Fill your bathtub with water, make sure you have adequate flashlight
batteries, and freeze a fair bit of water in your freezer just in case you
need to keep your refrigerator cold for a day or two without electricity
after the Y2K event.
Civilization will not fail, because civilization is run by people.
However, diverse automatons may fail in their responsibilities. Many?
Probably not, because most don't care about the year, though some do.
Most service disruptions, if they occur, will not last more than a day or
two as people take up the slack, reset things, and get things going again.
And most controllers, if they even care about the year, will work once the
year is reset to some arbitrary year.
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