The threat of Y2K - 14 August 1998

One day this spring, a supervisor in the warehouse of a manufacturer of frozen food noticed something he'd never seen before on the expiration date of a shipment that was just going out. It said that the food was 40 years old.

Now here was a manufactured product that ante-dated the founding of the firm. Ridiculous. Still, to be on the safe side, the whole shipment was tossed out. I'm told that the same thing happened quite recently to a London department store. It destroyed tons of food while it was doing a long-term forecast.

These destroyed food episodes were due to the company computers providing the wrong date when the food was frozen and manufactured. I hope it's plain by now – I'd better say at once that this is going to be a talk about Y2K. Not to scare you off, but to scare you on. Y2K, the year 2000.

Y2K, probably the most ominous logo, the most threatening symbol to human life since E=mc², the formula for the first atomic bomb. I ought to have talked about this two years ago, when most people who'd heard of Y2K thought of it as a puzzle, something like an acrostic for computer buffs, a simple, almost a comical glitch that could be fixed right away.

We all knew then how simple the problem was. Mainframe computers, more than 10 years old, which surely most around the world are, were not programmed to handle a four-digit year. As in two zero zero zero. 2,000 AD "Well", snapped Bertie Wooster, a friend of mine, "just add two digits, I'd say!"

How did it come about? To save storage space, most programmers allocated two digits only to a year. In data files, 1993 is 93. 1917 is 17. Same thing happened by the way in producing microchips, and as recently as only three years ago. Now they're really sophisticated calculators of measurement of all kinds but, like the computers, chips that counted time were only designed, structured, in the jargon for this century.

So when 1999 turns over to 2000, the 21st Century, the chips and the software as they exist today will register not 2000 but 1900AD. And around the world, all the civilised institutions we take for granted could stop working. The power grid of your city or county, which takes in too your water supply. No telephones. Transportation? All railroad traffic is computed and so is the coal that fires the power plants. The supertankers that ship in oil from the Middle or the Far East, the banking systems everywhere. All government services, health services, hospitals paralysed. Police and fire services, and all general business activity.

I know this is a drastic and melodramatic list. It does not, however, come from some supermarket scaremonger tabloid. I have quoted directly from a speech given by Senator Robert Bennett of Utah. Delivered on 2 June to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.

Senator Bennett, who we may, if we are lucky, come to remember as a benefactor of the human race, is the chairman of a Senate sub-committee, the banking sub-committee on technology and financial services. And he's the first notable politician in this country to sound the fire bell, a year ago, by holding the first hearings on Y2K.

So what's the reply to my friend Bertie Wooster? And to others, even brighter. To anyone who thinks, or thought, way back in 1991 say, that codes could be changed by any halfway decent a mathematician or newly-trained programmer.

Well, the United States social security system began working seven years ago on its 30 million lines of code and by 1996, 400 programmers had fixed only six million lines. The tax people, the internal revenue service, began cleaning up, debugging its 88,000 programmes on its mainframe computers. By the end of last year, it had debugged 2,000 only.

There's a software research firm that studies the productivity record of programmers. And it's put out an estimate of the time it would take to fix, and then to test, all software that will currently be affected by Y2K – 700,000 person years! So unless somebody comes up with a miraculous, new, simple model for everybody, there aren't enough programmers in the world and there isn't enough time before New Year's Day 2000.

Senator Bennett confessed in that historic speech to the strategic big shots that his first exposure to the challenge of Y2K came when he decided to hold a hearing of his sub-committee to learn what effect Y2K might have on the banking system. It had crossed his mind that suddenly nobody might have verifiable assets or could get at them.

When that first hearing was over, a well-known senator, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, said, "Mr Chairman, this is scary stuff! We've got to have another meeting". They had six more, which mainly managed to scare them more by revealing the scope of the task ahead. The billions of useless chips, in many countries, the global urgency of the problem.

Senator Bennett stressed that so far, the people who are most aware of the problem are big industries, a giant motor car company, for instance. He says if Y2K were to hit this coming weekend, the company could not produce a single car in any one of its 157 manufacturing plants.

And then the senator made the sharp point that this is a management problem, every bit as much as it's a technology problem. And the biggest mistake you can make, if you're a chief executive officer or even a manager, is to say "the utilities people will fix it". For your company, in your country.

That had happened when he got a call from the head of a famous company who said, "We've taken care of everything. We started in 1996". Senator Bennett put to the man questions such as, "What happens when you get no dial tone on calls to any of your offices in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America?" "What happens when you can't transfer money into a branch office or do any banking overseas because their systems have broken down?"

The man was embarrassed to say the least. "You'll have to talk to our top management", he said, "My responsibility was only to fix our computers". Well, of course, the computer problem in all countries has to be solved first.

Senator Bennett ended by repeating the seven areas of concern that I've mentioned and said the first that must be maintained is the power grid. Power must be available even if every one of your computers has been repaired to comply with the turnover to 2000AD. And after power, water. Every water purification plant in this country is run by a computed system.

Relaxing before, by now, as you might guess, a thoroughly alert audience, Senator Bennett warned, "If you can't fix it in the year and a half that's left, develop now a contingency plan that'll see to it that at least you won't have to shut down".

Well, I don't know how it is in your country, but some governments have only just wakened up to the apocalypse that faces them 17 months from now. The American government waited far too long to appoint a man called, need I say here, a tsar, to concern himself exclusively on behalf of the whole presidential, the executive branch of government with Y2K.

He began wisely by not dictating or organising action from the top. He went round to each Cabinet officer – treasury, agriculture, state department, health, education and welfare, and so on – and said, "You are wholly responsible for solving this thing in your own department".

The senator never tires of stressing the management responsibility when he talks to businessmen, big or small, who think of it as a computer problem simply and believe that rushing a lot of student programmers through their paces will turn up some Einstein or Newton who'll fix us all up by next summer. The awful statistics I quoted about the turtle pace of the expert programmers employed by the social security system and the internal revenue department should dispose of that illusion.

Mr Bennett ended by saying there's no possible doubt about it, Y2K is coming. But don't, like Chicken Little, think the sky is falling in and all you can do is to plough up the backyard, put in the propane tank, a bomb shelter, and a large supply of dried food, that you can live on till the world finally comes back in three or four years. That kind of attitude, he said, will turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy.

When people say to me, "Is the world coming to an end?" I say "I don't know". I don't know whether this will be a very bad bump in the road – that's the most optimistic assessment – or whether this will trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely devastating economic and social consequences. We must recognise that the problem is coming and deal with it coldly, intelligently, efficiently.

Don't panic. But don't spend a lot of time asleep, either.

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