- - - - - - - - - -

A L S O__T O D A Y

"Myst" partnership is riven
By Karlin Lillington
Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers who created the world's most popular computer games, go their separate ways
(03/02/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Is your computer ready for the year 2000? Discuss the millennium bug in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Talking 'bout my "Net generation"
By Andrew Leonard
Review of Don Tapscott's book "Growing Up Digital."
(02/27/98)

Hatch vs. Gates
By Marcia Stepanek
Senator says Microsoft demanded more sympathetic voices at next week's hearing -- or Bill Gates wouldn't show
(02/26/98)

A doctorate in "Doom"
By Moira Muldoon
For students at the world's first video game university, it's all math and little play
(02/25/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
The case of the hijacked haiku
(02/24/98)

Schools of hard knocks
By Andrew Leonard
"Lock ups" for "defiant teens" use questionable tactics -- on the Web and off
(02/23/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

- - - - - - - - - -

a glitch in time____

BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | It could be the electricity that goes first -- the national power grid brought down by confused microchips. It could be the banks, brought to their knees by befuddled bookkeeping programs that think they've been flung backwards in time by a century. Or maybe it will be the telephone system. Or the stock markets. Government agencies like the IRS. Trains, planes, even some automobiles.

Whatever the order of our going, when the clocks on millions upon millions of computers and digital systems click over to "2000" at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, we all may go down together.

That, at least, is the pessimistic warning from software management expert Edward Yourdon. There are lots of opinions out there about the so-called "millennium bug" or year 2000 crisis; no one knows for sure what will happen when parts of our vast electronic grid wake up on the morning of New Year's Day, 2000, and can't remember what day it is. But the warning voices are getting louder: Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress, "Inevitable difficulties are going to emerge. You could end up with ... a very large problem." In the face of such uncertainty, Yourdon's new book, "Time Bomb 2000" (Prentice Hall, 416 pages), argues for caution -- and prescribes some doses of healthy fear.

Don't relax and think, "They'll have it fixed in time," and don't trust the executives and functionaries out there who blandly reassure you that they have the situation under control, Yourdon warns: Unless they can provide written assurances that their systems are "Year 2000 compliant," they are probably simply crossing their fingers. Most companies and institutions got a slow start on the mammoth project of updating all their old software and systems to think of years in four digits rather than two -- and in many cases it's already too late to finish in time.

Software projects are notorious for running overtime -- but the calendar won't wait. And throwing hordes of programmers at the problem at the last minute is likely to be worse than useless. Rushing a software project, the saying goes, is like rushing a pregnancy -- you can't make a baby in one month by putting nine women on the job.

But the real kicker of Yourdon's argument lies in his notion of "ripple effects." Even if your employer, bank, insurance company and electric utility all have their acts together, significant numbers of companies and institutions won't. It will do you no good to shop at a "year 2000 compliant" supermarket if its distributors' computers have gone kaput and the shelves are bare. A company may fix every line of software code on its mainframe computer systems, only to be hobbled by bad code in "embedded systems" -- chips that control mundane stuff like elevators and security systems and factory machinery. Even if only a small percentage of companies get into trouble, in today's economy we're all connected -- and just a few percentage points of year 2000 trouble could spell recession or worse.

Yourdon's previous books -- like "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" and "Death March" -- were aimed at professional programmers. But "Time Bomb 2000," which Yourdon co-authored with his daughter Jennifer, is written for the general public. It provides the reader with exhaustive scenario-planning and survival advice based on the prospects of a "two-day failure," "one-month failure," "one-year failure" and "10-year failure." While the book doesn't outright predict "a moderate, serious or devastating collapse of the nation's socio-economic system," it's chilling that it even brings up the possibility. Even if the worst-case scenarios never come to pass, Yourdon argues, "It's better to be terrified now." He has acted on his own advice, trading in a New York City home for one in New Mexico -- on the theory that Manhattan will be the worst place in the world to be in the event that our economic infrastructure collapses.

Yourdon -- a congenial and methodical man who seems genuinely distressed about the bad news he's bearing -- spoke to me last week at the Salon offices. We've all grown jaded about books that tell us the sky is falling, but given the range of Yourdon's experience and the persuasiveness of his arguments, he may be one Jeremiah worth heeding.

What made you write "Time Bomb 2000"?

I've been a consultant for 30-odd years, and I'm accustomed to seeing large projects that have collapsed. You walk in, you see an organization that's launching this Mongolian horde project and, as an outsider, you can smell death in the air right away. You know they're doomed -- they won't admit it, they may not even know it, but it's obvious. And I'd say, well, that's OK, I'll collect my consulting fee, I'll make sure that I'm not standing anywhere near this thing when it goes under. And you move on.

But about a year and a half ago I woke up one morning and thought, uh-oh, this one is different. Because it's everything -- it's every insurance company and every utility company. And if they all go down, and they're all interconnected, then my family goes down with it. That's what got me going.

Typically, I would come home from a lot of work assignments and say to my wife, "You won't believe what those guys at company X did!" And my wife is actually very computer literate, so she would understand technically what I was saying. But her answer always was, "Who cares? What's this got to do with me?" Nothing whatsoever. Here, it does matter. That was kind of an epiphany for me.

Is the situation really as bad as you make it out in "Time Bomb 2000"?

We took a pretty neutral position, relatively speaking. Personally, I think it's worse than what we laid out, writing last summer. Things have gotten worse in the last six months.

If you see any of the informal surveys on any of the newsgroups -- like comp.software.year2000 -- they're pretty pessimistic. The last one I saw asked for your assessment of how bad it could be on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is no big deal and 5 is, you know, the end of Western civilization. And they're usually in the range of 3 and a half to 4. Serious stuff is going to happen. These are people who are directly involved in year 2000 projects and are beginning to see that, gee, this stuff is taking forever, and they're not really getting the support from senior management that they desperately need.

There are two groups of computer-literate people: people that are directly involved in year 2000 projects and everybody else -- including the Internet people, and the Java people, and the client-server people. And people in the latter category are often oblivious. "Oh, it's a few COBOL programs, who cares?" Or they'll say, "Well, my Macintosh is compliant, nyah nyah nyah."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

N E X T_P A G E | Is anyone safe?