{For more recent news that has crossed our desktops, visit 1999 Y2K Problem News}
Important Note: The Y2K scene is constantly changing. I have chosen to focus on finding and creating materials to help people use Y2K for personal and social transformation. I have found that trying to keep general Y2K pages like this one updated takes a tremendous amount of time. Since there are dozens of sites that do that job better than I ever could, I've decided to refer you to them and to spend my time on what I do best -- collecting materials on transformation. Good sites to keep up with current genral Y2K information include: Wild2K, Douglass Carmichael's site (see especially his archived weekly newsletter), the Napa Valley, CA community group's site, Alan Lewis' Y2K Pages: Y2-KO or Y2-OK?, Larry Sanger's Daily links to and intelligent summaries of 6-10 top news stories about Y2K, Westergaard, Peter de Jager's year2000.com/ site and the comprehensive news source Y2Ktoday. I wish you good luck in your explorations. -- Tom Atlee
Is this Y2K problem for real?
The simple answer is yes. Corporations and governments wouldn't
be spending billions of dollars on it if it weren't real. But
will it be a real crisis? There are two answers to that:
But (you may well ask) how should we act NOW? This is the hard
question. The longer we wait to find out how bad it's going to
be, the less time we will have to prepare if it looks like a real
crisis is inevitable. But preparation uses up precious time, attention
and resources that we'd really like to use on other things right
now. So we are faced with having to make judgements about how
much preparation is wise, and when to start. Different people,
groups, communities, organizations and countries will come to
different conclusions. Time will tell whose judgements were wisest.
Personally, I think there is a real crisis unfolding which can
only be ameliorated by A LOT of us acknowledging that it is happening
and putting A LOT of attention on preparations. This page gives
you some of the evidence I have seen, which lead me to take this
problem seriously.
-- Tom Atlee
Official 60 Minutes Transcript,
the official and complete transcript of the May 23, 1999 60
Minutes segment on Y2K; look at how local governments, including
Washington, DC, are less prepared for a possible Y2K crash than
many think.
Gordon's Y2K Sifter http://www.pond.net/~nodrog/sifter.html - one person's intelligent attempt to pick the best pieces of info about whether Y2K is a problem and how to prepare.
"I came here today because I wanted to stress the urgency
of the challenge.... Clearly, we must set forth what the government
is doing, what business is doing, but also what all of us have
yet to do to meet this challenge together. And there is still
a pressing need for action.... In the business sector just as
in the government sector, there are still gaping holes. Far too
many businesses, especially small- and medium-sized firms, will
not be ready unless they begin to act. A recent Walls Fargo bank
survey shows that of the small businesses that even know about
the problem, roughly half intend to do nothing about it."
-- President Bill Clinton, in a speech about
Y2K at the National Academy of Sciences, July 15,1998
"I am very, very concerned that even as government and business
leaders are finally acknowledging the seriousness of this problem,
they are not thinking about the contingency plans that need to
be put into place to minimize the harm from widespread failures....
I think we're no longer at the point of asking whether or not
there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to
ask how severe the disruptions are going to be.... If the critical
industries and government agencies don't start to pick up the
pace of dealing with this problem right now, Congress and the
Clinton Administration are going to have to...deal with a true
national emergency." -- Senator Christopher J. Dodd
(Democrat from Connecticut), at the first hearings of the Senate
Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, June 12,
1998
"When people say to me, 'Is the world going to come to an
end?' I say, 'I don't know.' I don't know whether this will be
a bump in the road -- that's the most optimistic assessment of
what we've got, a fairly serious bump in the road -- or whether
this will, in fact, trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely
devastating economic consequences in some parts of the world...
We must coldly, calculatingly divide up the next 18 months to
determine what we can do, what we can't do, do what we can, and
then provide for contingency plans for that which we cannot."
-- Senator Robert F. Bennett (Republican from
Utah), chair of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000
Technology Problem, in a speech June 2, 1998, to The Center for
Strategic and International Studies.
"The nation's utilities told a Senate panel today [June 12]
that they were working to solve expected computer problems when
1999 ends but that they could not guarantee that the lights would
not go out on Jan. 1, 2000." -- New York Times,
June 13, 1998
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
-- a trade association for electric utility companies -- says
the Y2K problem will begin to disrupt businesses, including electric
utilities, a year before the new century begins: "Major disruptions
in technical and business operations could begin as early as January
1, 1999. Nearly every industry will be affected." [http://year2000.epriweb.com/year2000/
challenge.html]
Y2K is "the biggest screwup of the computer age" and
it may cost $1 trillion to fix. [For comparison, the Vietnam War
cost half that much, $500 billion.] -- Gene Bylinsky, "Industry
Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace," Fortune,
April 27, 1998, pgs. 163-180. [http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980427/imt.html]
Y2K is a "very, very serious problem.... There's no point
in sugarcoating the problem... If we don't fix the century-date
problem, we will have a situation scarier than the average disaster
movie you might see on a Sunday night." -- Charles Rossetti,
commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service
(IRS), cited by Tom Herman in "A Special Summary and Forecast
of Federal and State Tax Developments," Wall Street
Journal, April 22, 1998, pg. A1.
"Serious vulnerabilities remain in addressing the federal
government's Year 2000 readiness, and ... much more action is
needed to ensure that federal agencies satisfactorily mitigate
Year 2000 risks to avoid debilitating consequences.... As a result
of federal agencies' slow progress, the public faces the risk
that critical services could be severely disrupted by the Year
2000 computing crisis." "Unless progress improves dramatically,
a substantial number of mission-critical systems will not be year-2000
compliant in time." -- Joel C. Willemssen in the Government
Accounting Office report "Year 2000 Computing Crisis:
Actions Must be Taken Now to Address the Slow Pace of Federal
Progress" [GAO/T-AIMD-98-205] (Washington, D.C.: General
Accounting Office, June 10, 1998). [http://www.gao.gov/y2kr.htm]
"The focus of conversation among those best versed in this
issue is about how we are going to clean up after what appears
now to be an inevitable train wreck. As a society, we are on the
point of conceding failure. Those unwilling or unable to move
off the track are numerous. Federal agencies. State governments.
Local and municipal governments. School districts. Private sector
industries. Small and mid-sized companies. Critical infrastructure
players. And most foreign nations. It's crazy. It's frustrating.
It cannot be happening. But it is. Now the "smart" questions
have shifted to concentrate on contingency planning, crisis management,
and liability. Lawyers are circling, and that is not a good sign.
Failure is not part of the American fiber. Yet after this transition
to the new century, society may have to admit that here was a
situation it saw coming. Everyone understood its hard deadline.
Everyone appreciated its worldwide scope. Everyone realized its
massive potential to cause harm. And everyone let it happen. Given
where the federal government stands today, I feel very confident
in predicting that some mission critical government systems will
fail -- perhaps as early as January 1, 1999. A recent ITAA survey
showed that 44% of organizations have already experienced a Y2K
failure." -- Harris N. Miller, President of Information
Technology Association of America (ITAA), a trade association
representing 11,000 information technology companies, testifying
to the House Subcommittee on Oversight, Ways and Means Committee,
May 7, 1998.
"I plead guilty to journalistic incompetence for ignoring
what may be one of the decade's big stories: the Year 2000 problem....
The House subcommittee on government management, information and
technology, chaired by Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), estimates
that the federal government has almost 8,000 'mission critical'
computer systems and that only 35 percent are now prepared for
the year 2000. At the present rate, the committee projects that
only 63 percent will make it. Most disturbing is the estimate
that only about a quarter of the Defense Department's 2,900 systems
are now ready. Among private companies, readiness also seems spotty.
The head of General Motors' information systems recently told
Fortune magazine that the company is working feverishly
to rectify 'catastrophic problems' at its plants.... The FAA reports
that its radar has a date mechanism to regulate a critical coolant.
If the software isn't fixed, 'the cooling system will not turn
on at the correct time ... and the [radar] could overheat and
shut down.' Potential glitches like this abound. No one knows
how many there are. Millions of lines of software have to be scanned
and, if wrong, rewritten, computers must then be tested.... Little
testing has been done. It's complex and time-consuming. Often,
systems can only be tested on weekends when not in use. For the
press, I grasp the difficulties of covering this story. It's mostly
hypothetical....[so] anyone writing about it now is shoved uneasily
toward one of two polar positions: reassuring complacency (fixes
will be made); or hysterical alarmism (the world will collapse)....
I lean towards alarmism simply because all the specialists I contacted
last week -- people actually involved with fixing the computers
-- are alarmed. On the record, they say the problem is serious
and the hour is late. Their cheeriest view is that 'no one knows'
what will happen. Off the record, they incline toward Doomsday....
We can deny the possibilities and pray they don't materialize.
Or we can pay attention and hope to minimize them. Either way,
the year 2000 won't wait." -- Robert J. Samuelson,
"Computer Doomsday?" Washington Post, May
6, 1998
"I would like to tell you that...the efforts of hundreds
of Y2K-focused consulting firms around the world has pretty much
worked, and that long before we hit the Y2K wall less than two
years from now, the problems will be pretty much solved. I would
like to tell you that-- but it would be a lie.... Many, many firms,
including some surprisingly large ones, have continued to drag
their feet...and now won't possibly be ready to avoid disastrous
problems come that cold January morning. For one thing, virtually
everyone competent in the Y2K analysis-and-fixes business is already
fully booked through January 1, 2000 and beyond. Companies with
Y2K problems often cannot find people to work on those problems.
Not just enough people, but any people.... The Y2K business ...
is full of misinformation, hype, fear mongering and exaggeration.
Certainly some of that is crass, self-promoting hype by such entities
as consulting and programming shops, which stand to benefit from
spreading fear about Y2K meltdowns. But a tragic if understandable
backlash has begun against Y2K warnings that is ultimately even
more destructive: the claim that Y2K is a myth, a nonissue that
will go away if the loudmouths will just shut up. It will not.
It is real. I believe Y2K will be the single biggest business
crisis many of us will face in our lifetimes.... I've avoided
writing a Y2K Fears column until now because I find it unseemly
to be associated with the sky-is-falling types. I've been confident
that American business, indeed global business, would address
this problem early, aggressively, effectively. I was wrong. They
didn't. We didn't." -- Jim Seymour, "The
Hidden Side(s) of Y2K," PC Magazine, February 10,
1998 <http://www8.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/seymour/js980210.htm>.
"The fact is no one knows how much progress is occurring
among state and local governments, private business firms, foreign
businesses, and foreign governments. No one can say with any certainty
that the following systems won't fail to some degree during 2000:
nuclear missile systems, electric power grids, oil and gas distribution,
telecommunications, air traffic control, transportation, shipping,
manufacturing, distribution, banking, finance, and government
services. I suppose, we can be naïve optimists and conclude
that all will be well because the consequences of failure are
so terrible. This blind approach is unacceptable, in my opinion.
We need more answers about Y2K so we can assess the risks and
prepare contingency and disaster recovery plans." Dr.
Edward Yardeni, Chief Economist & Managing Director,
Deutsche Bank Securities (a global investment banking firm), testimony
July 22, 1998 to the Senate Committee On Agriculture, Nutrition,
and Forestry, Hearing on the Year 2000 Problem and Agriculture
(read the rest of his testimony at http://www.senate.gov/~agriculture/yardeni.htm
for an excellent set of 11 questions regarding the vulnerability
of our food supply in 2000)
"Research has shown that only 43% of businesses suffering
a disaster ever recovered sufficiently to resume business, according
to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington,
D.C. Among businesses that do re-open, only 29% are still operating
two years later. Even more ominous, is the fact that 93% of businesses
that lost their datacenter for 10 days or more had filed for bankruptcy
within one year of the disaster. And 50% of businesses that found
themselves without data management for the same time period filed
for bankruptcy immediately." American Power Conversion,
http://www.apcc.com.
"We do not know or cannot really realistically make an evaluation
of what the economic impact is as a consequence of the breakdowns
that may occur. We do not know the size. We do not know the contagion
and interaction with the system, and we do not know how rapidly
we can resolve the problem." Federal Reserve Board Chairman
Alan Greenspan, Senate Banking Committee Testimony,
February 25, 1998.
"Year 2000 is truly a 'weakest link' problem. The single
system or date conversion we miss may be the undoing of the 99%
we did find. Because the telcos can't recreate the entire public
network, the true test of the network won't come until January
1, 2000." A. Gerald Roth, VP of Technology Programs
at GTE, InformationWeek, June 22, 1998.
"The biggest problems and opportunities with the Y2K bug
are not going to be food storage, debugging code, or power outages,
but how people react to the situation: how we treat each other;
how much we help each other through this; what kind of creative,
appropriate responses we meet the challenge with will determine
whether we build and bring together our local communities or whether
things degenerate into mob rule." Michael Connolly,
WizCity, http://www.wizcity.com/
Has the Y2K bug bit your PC? Find out with tools that analyze, report, and sometimes fix this date dilemma. Read Computer Current's February 23, 1999 article, Y2K Revisited.
See also South African Year
2000 Decision Support Centre
This evidence is gathered from Rachel's
Environment and Health Weekly -- one of the most respected
research journals in the environmental movement -- Issues 604
(6/25/98) and 605 (7/2/98) of the electronic edition.
By the year 2000, there will be an estimated 25 billion embedded
systems, according to the Gartner Group, which advertises itself
as the world's foremost authority on information technology.
ref: http://gartner12.gartnerweb.com/public/static/home/home.html
[Embedded systems are microchips embedded in machines, appliances,
equipment and automated systems of all kinds. -- Tom]
By Gartner Group's estimate, two-tenths of one percent of these
25 billion embedded systems will be [Y2K] noncompliant. Two-tenths
of one percent of 25 billion is 50 million. Therefore, the
problem, according to Gartner Group, is to identify and replace
those 50 million noncompliant embedded systems in the next 500
days. To solve this problem, someone would have to identify,
replace, and test about 100,000 chips each day between now and
December 31, 1999. Does the U.S. have enough technicians to
identify, replace and test 100,000 chips each day? It seems
unlikely.
ref: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roleigh_martin/y2journ.htm>.
Because non-compliant
computers could harm a company's financial picture (up to and
including bankruptcy), on January 12, 1998, the federal
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued SEC Staff Legal
Bulletin No. 5, which requires publicly-held companies to report
their progress toward solving their Y2K problems. On June 10,
1998, Steve Hock, president of Triaxsys Research in Missoula,
Montana, testified before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban
Affairs Committee that his company had examined the SEC filings
of America's 250 largest corporations. Mr. Hock told the
Senate that 114 of the 250 companies had filed no Y2K information
with the SEC. Of the 136 companies that HAVE filed Y2K
information, 101 reported their progress on the assessment phase
of the problem. Of these 101, 60% revealed that they have not
yet completed their assessments of the Y2K problem.
ref: http://www.senate.gov/~banking/98_06hrg/061098/witness/hock.htm
[Note: The assessment phase should take up 5% of the time used
in any Y2K remediation project (see notes below). Since I believe
companies making good progress would not tend to hide that progress,
I tend to suspect that (114+101=) 215 of the largest 250 corporations
in the US still have over 90% of their Y2K work to do yet. This
is only an assumption, but it is based on the best information
available. -- Tom]
Mr. Hock testified that 36 companies reported their estimated
Y2K
project costs and how much they had so far spent. The average
company reported having spent 21% of the expected total costs
of
Y2K fixes. Mr. Hock concluded, "[The] data shows remarkably
little progress by the largest US companies in addressing the
Year 2000 problem. Most of the work has been compressed into an
extremely tight window of time. Given the information technology
industry's long history of failure to complete large scale system
conversion projects on time, this is cause for serious
concern."
ref" http://www.senate.gov/~banking/98_06hrg/061098/witness/hock.htm
The New York Federal Reserve Bank has said that it will take more
than a year for a large corporation to test its computers for
Y2K
compliance AFTER all their software has been fixed. This
means all fixes must be completed by September or October of 1998
so testing can begin in time. But many large corporations are
still at the stage of assessing the problem, and it's now late
June.
ref: http://www.ny.frb.org/docs/bankinfo/circular/10937.html
How big is the task for a complex corporation? State Farm
Insurance -- a company that believes it is on top of the Y2K
problem -- began working on the problem in 1989 and found that
it
had 70 million lines of computer code to convert, 475,000 data
processing items, more than 2000 third-party software programs,
900 shared electronic files, plus miscellaneous telephone and
business equipment in 1550 corporate and regional service
facilities. State Farm still has 100 employees working "around
the clock" on nothing but Y2K.
ref: http://www.statefarm.com/about/year.htm
But even a forward-looking company like State Farm could be
harmed by this problem if its customers, suppliers, partners,
bankers, and regulators aren't compliant by the year 2000. As
Merrill Lynch says, "Even institutions that have fixed their
own
internal problem will feel the ripple effects from problems
occurring externally."
ref: <http://www.ml.com/woml/forum/millen.htm>.
A survey of small businesses by the National Federation of
Independent Businesses (NFIB) reported June 1 that 75% of small
businesses have done nothing about the Y2K problem. The NFIB
estimated that 330,000 small businesses will go bankrupt and
another 370,000 will be "temporarily crippled" by the
Y2K problem.
ref: http://www.amcity.com/sacramento/stories/060198/smallb2.html
[If the vast majority of large companies aren't through the assessment
phase of their remediation projects, and if 75% of small businesses
haven't even started Y2K remediation projects (and half of those
who know about Y2K don't plan to do anything, according to the
Wells Fargo survey cited by Clinton, above), isn't it reasonable
to conclude that a lot of these businesses are going to be in
trouble? And, to the extent we're dependent on them, wouldn't
we be in trouble, too? -- Tom]
The deadline for having everything fixed -- December 31, 1999
--
is just over 500 days away, and it is an unusual kind of deadline
because it cannot be ignored or extended. FORTUNE magazine
reported April 27, 1998, that, on average, large corporations
are
only 34% of the way through the job of making their systems
compliant.
ref: Gene Bylinsky, "Industry Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace,"
FORTUNE April 27, 1998, pgs. 163-180.
ref: http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980427/imt.html.
[So who does one believe? And how do we deal with the differences
among surveys and estimates? 34% is one of the most optimistic
estimates I've seen -- but what does being 34% of the way through
mean when there's one year left and State Farm has been working
on it for a decade and isn't done? -- Tom]
GAO reported June 10, 1998, that 24 government agencies are only
40% of the way toward their goal of Y2K compliance.
ref: Joel C. Willemssen, YEAR 2000 COMPUTING CRISIS; ACTIONS MUST
BE TAKEN NOW TO ADDRESS SLOW PACE OF FEDERAL PROGRESS
[GAO/T-AIMD-98-205] (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office,
June 10, 1998).
ref: http://www.gao.gov/y2kr.htm.
Why is this seemingly-simple problem so difficult? Merrill Lynch,
the financial management firm, says there are four reasons:
1. Pervasiveness. Computers that depend on dates are present in
every kind of technology -- manufacturing systems, medical
equipment, elevators, telephone switches, satellites, and even
automobiles.
2. Interdependence: Computers exchange information among
themselves. "A single uncorrected system can easily spread
corrupted data throughout an organization and even affect
external institutions," Merrill Lynch says.
3. Inconsistency: Computer languages do not store and use dates
in a consistent way. Dates are labeled, stored, and used in
different ways from program to program and even within a single
program. Therefore, identifying and correcting dates requires
close inspection of the computer code line by line.
4. Size: Most large corporations and government agencies use
thousands of programs containing millions of lines of computer
code. Each line of code must be inspected manually and, if
necessary, fixed.
ref: http://www.ml.com/woml/forum/millen.htm.
[These reasons are given for why it is so hard to find bad code,
correct it, and keep it clean. But some of these same factors
help make our entire socioeconomic system vulnerable to damage
if even a small amount of bad code doesn't get found and corrected.
For example, the manual switching systems on railroad lines have
been replaced with computerized systems. If a Y2K bug knocks a
few of them out -- or knocks out even just a few of the electrical
utilities upon which they depend -- we won't have manual overrides.
The railroad system could get very snarled very fast. That, in
turn, would result in a failure to deliver fuel to other power
plants, which would go down, causing railroad snarls in THEIR
areas, etc. That kind of interdependence could be quite problematic,
as the ripples spread... -- Tom]
There are additional reasons why this is a particularly difficult
problem.
** Many business computer programs that run on the largest
("mainframe") computers are written in an obsolete language
called COBOL. COBOL hasn't been taught for 10 years, so there
is
a distinct shortage of COBOL programmers.
ref: Gene Bylinsky, "Industry Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace,"
FORTUNE April 27, 1998, pgs. 163-180. Available on the web:
<http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980427/imt.html.
and ref: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "Older Programmers May Fix
Future,"
WASHINGTON POST March 2, 1997, pg. A1.
ref:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/frompost/features/mar97/2000.htm.
** Indeed, there is a shortage of all programmers to work on Y2K
problems. Swiss Re (a firm that insures insurance companies
against major losses) says, "A total of well over three million
programmers would be needed to solve the millenium [date] problem
in the US. In actual fact there are only around two million of
them at present."
ref: <http://www.swissre.com/download/public/millen-e.pdf.
** When computer code is re-written, new errors are introduced
at
an average rate of one new error in every 14 lines of re-written
code. Thus even "Y2K compliant" code may not work right
when the
time comes.
ref: Gene Bylinsky, "Industry Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace,"
FORTUNE April 27, 1998, pgs. 163-180.
ref: http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980427/imt.html.
Year 2000 expert Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for
a company to have more than 10,000,000 lines of code -- the IRS,
for instance, has at least eighty million lines. The Social Security
Administration began working on its thirty million lines of code
in 1991. After five years of work, in June, 1996, four hundred
programmers had fixed only six million lines. The IRS has 88,000
programs on 80 mainframe computers to debug. By the end of last
year they had cleaned up 2,000 programs.
ref: The Washington Post, "If Computer Geeks
Desert, IRS Codes Will Be ciphers," December 24, 1997
In a stark warning about the Year 2000 computer glitch threat,
Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre cited a need to calm Russian
nuclear forces in particular if the "bug" caused their
computers to crash, as many systems may fail worldwide. He told
the Senate Armed Services Committee that cash-strapped Russian
forces were relying more and more on nuclear weapons "as
a safeguard for their national security." "And their
early warning system is fragile," he said. Such systems [are]
heavily reliant on computers to mesh data from satellites, radars
and other sensors... He said Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered
plans drawn up for sharing early warning information so "we
don't enter into a nightmare condition where everybody is all
of a sudden uncertain, and their screens go blank." He said
Asian countries and nations of the old Soviet bloc were lagging
the most in rewriting old computer code to cope with the date
switch [and that] Russian forces lacked a program to deal with
the so-called Y2K problem.... Calling the Y2K glitch the electronic
equivalent of El Nino weather pattern, Hamre said: "This
is going to have implications in the world and in American society
we can't even comprehend." "I will be first to say we're
not going to be without some nasty surprises," he said. --
Jim Wolf, "U.S. fears 2000 bug could spook Russian forces"
(Reuters, June 8, 1998)
The city of New York awoke to the magnitude of this problem last
September. The governor of New York State banned all nonessential
IT [information technology] projects to minimize the disruption
caused by the year 2000 bomb after reading a detailed report that
forecasts the millennium will throw New York City into chaos,
with power supplies, schools, hospitals, transport, and the finance
sector likely to suffer severe disruption. Compounding the city's
Y2K risks is the recent departure of the head of its year 2000
project to a job in the private sector.
ref: http://www.computerweekly.co.uk/news/ll_9_97
The anticipated problems extend far beyond U.S. shores. In February,
the Bangkok Post reported that Phillip Dodd, a Unysis
Y2K expert, expects that upward of 70% of the businesses in Asia
will fail outright or experience severe hardship because of Y2K.
The Central Intelligence Agency supports this with their own analysis:
"We're concerned about the potential disruption of power
grids, telecommunications and banking services, among other possible
fallout, especially in countries already torn by political tensions."
ref: Reuters: "CIA: Year 2000 to hit basic services: Agency
warns that many nations aren't ready for disruption," Jim
Wolf, May 7, 1998
"After investing person-decades, Motorola and Digital Equipment
Corporation have concluded that it is cheaper to let some of their
manufacturing facilities fail than to begin the analysis, much
less the repair, much less the testing required to address the
problem [of their embedded systems]. The electric utilities do
not have this option. The water, food and transportation systems
do not have this option. There are rare examples, Sallie Mae Corporation
to name one, that have spent billions to build entirely Y2K compliant
buildings so that they will be able to function next century...
When one ponders the implications, for some, a numbness sets in....
The Wyoming Legislature voted in March 1998 to spend no dollars
to STUDY the Y2K issue."
ref: "Embedded Systems and the Year 2000 Problem" (23
March 1998) by Mark A. Frautschi frautschi@jhu.edu,
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University
Electronics engineer Harlan Smith is a leading member of Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility's Y2K Working Group. He
has 36 years experience working on complex radar systems in the
military, General Electric and Texas Instruments -- systems with
tens of thousands of embedded chips. He describes the five steps
needed in any Y2K Remediation plan, and the percentage of the
total schedule time needed, on average, to complete each step.
Inventory and Initial Assessment: (5 percent)
Impact Assessment and Conversion Planning: (20 percent)
Systems Conversion: (20 percent)
Unit and System Testing: (45 percent)
Implementation and Business Partner Links: (10 percent)
This should be followed by at least six months (and preferably
a year) of full operational testing to "wring the bugs out."
If the minimum six months testing time is allowed, any
company starting in mid-1998 would have a year (52 weeks) to complete
the five steps. The initial assessment stage would then have to
be done in 2-3 weeks. Since most companies, large and small, haven't
even finished this first step, an objective observer would have
to conclude that many won't complete their task before the immovable
deadline. Wouldn't it make sense to start investing resources
in contingency preparations?
ref: http://www.cips.ca/papers/y2k/paper/checklist2.htm
In 1995 Peter de Jager predicted difficulties with last-minute
fixes as systems started to go down: "How fast can you install
a new system when the entire company is a) screaming at you? and
b) Blaming you? and c) the old system is dead and dead computers
leave no audit trails. How stable will your project team be ...
when the company down the street is in the same predicament and
offers huge 'incentives' to your staff to jump ship and help them?"
(Quoted in "The Year 2000 Frequently Asked Questions,"
Version 2.3 - May 5, 1998, from de Jager's website http://www.year2000.com/)
In Australia, when engineers simulated tests of the water storage
facility at Coff's Harbour, they discovered that the system that
regulates purification of the water would have dumped all the
purification chemicals into the water on 1/1/2000 causing a mix
toxic enough to kill the entire population of it's supply area.
(Note: see Is the Coff's Harbor
Y2K incident real?)
http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/1452
Also in Australia, a giant manufacturer's Y2K remediation team
rolled their "corrected" computers forward to January
7, 2000 for what they expected would be a 6-hour test run of their
work. Twelve programmers had worked diligently for nine months
on a $3 million contract to get to this point. What happened stunned
them. "Within minutes, 750 programs had fallen over. One
of the few programs to continue running was invoicing, but it
was producing invoices for the 43rd day of the 14th month. As
the job finally ground to a halt, a silence hung over the room
as everyone stared vacantly into the terminal...." Luckily
for the company, this was only a test. The extremely obscure bug
that caused the problem was duly found and corrected. But the
team calculated that it would have taken a month to find that
bug, if they'd been working in a live operating environment. To
actually fix the bug would have taken six months. Even now, the
team will not promise their client that no further bugs will crop
up in the year 2000. The experience did, however, provide the
company with a powerful wake-up call. The Y2K team's project manager
noted that "until something like this happens, they don't
understand what Y2K can do to them."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/extras/007/4051126.htm
Back here in the US, Chrysler shut down it's Sterling Heights
Assembly plant last year to test its Y2K fixes. They set all the
clocks in the plant to 12/31/99. They expected to find a few computer
glitches p; but they were unprepared for what actually happened:
The security system shut down and wouldn't let anybody in or out
of the plant. And they couldn't have paid people because the time
clock systems didn't work.
http://www.auto.com/industry/qbug23.htm
General Motors conducted similar experiments and their CIO,
Ralph Szygenda stated that "at each one of our factories
there are catastrophic problems. Amazingly enough, machines on
the factory floor are far more sensitive to incorrect dates then
we ever anticipated. When we tested robotic devices for transition
into the year 2000, for example, they just froze and stopped operating."
And it isn't just that we might not have new cars: An executive
of a company that makes a volatile gas told Y2K expert Peter de
Jager that an embedded chip had failed when the date was moved
forward in a test. In real life, that chip failing would have
shut off a valve that would have shut down the cooling system.
A cooling system shutdown, the executive said, would have caused
an explosion.
(from an article by Virginia Hick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
Nov. 19, 1997, p. C8)
Perhaps now you can appreciate why I'm worried that so many companies
have barely begun the first steps of remediation. They're going
to need all the time they can get for their "step five"
testing and final debugging.
What do those on the Y2K front lines think of all this? The Washington
D.C. Year 2000 Group is made up of individuals dealing with Year
2000 issues in their respective government agencies and private
organizations as workers, technical managers, high-level managers,
consultants, vendors, lawmakers, and so on.. 229 of them responded
to an email poll asking them to estimate the impact of the Y2K
bug on a scale of 0-10:
0 No real impact
1 Local impact for some enterprises
2 Significant impact for many enterprises
3 Significant market adjustment (20%+ drop); some bankruptcies
4 Economic slowdown; rise in unemployment; isolated social incidents
5 Mild recession; isolated supply/infrastructure problems; runs
on banks
6 Strong recession; local social disruptions; many bankruptcies
7 Political crises; regional supply/infrastructure problems, disruptions
8 Depression; infrastructure crippled; markets collapse; local
martial law
9 Supply/infrastructure collapse; widespread disruptions, martial
law
10 Collapse of US government; possible famine
Note: "Social incidents" and "disruptions"
have to do with demonstrations, work stoppages, strikes, organized
vandalism, looting, and riots. "Supply/infrastructure problems"
have to do with food shortages, fuel/heating oil shortages, disruptions
in public utilities (power, gas, telecom), disruptions in transportation
(airlines, trucking), and so on.
Partial results of the survey were published in Newsweek
May 4, 1998, p. 62. Full results are available at http://www.bfwa.com/bwebster/y2k
. Here's the summary made by the surveyor, Bruce Webster:
84% believe that it will trigger at least a 20%+ drop in the stock
market -over 1800 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average,
given its current levels- and some business bankruptcies.
Two-thirds (66%) believe that it will cause at least an economic
slowdown, a rise in unemployment, and some isolated social incidents.
Over half (56%) believe that it will at the least result in a
mild recession, isolated infrastructure and supply problems, and
some runs on banks.
One-third (34%) believe that it will at the least result in a
strong recession, local social disruptions, and many business
bankruptcies.
One-fourth (26%) believe that in additional to all the above,
the Y2K problem will at least result in political crises within
the United States, regional supply and infrastructure disruptions,
and regional social disruptions.
One-tenth (10%) believe at least that the United States will suffer
another depression (or worse), that financial markets will collapse,
that the national infrastructure will be crippled, and that martial
law will be declared in some local areas.
(which you can drop if you are copying this to pass along...)
The Dream of a Technical Fix for Y2K
A Big Grocer's Y2K Nightmare