Programmers test different solutions to the millenium problem

Bloomberg Business News

LANHAM, MD. -- The people of storm-plagued northern California can thank Myrian Myer and her solution to the year 2000 computer glitch when they renew their flood-insurance policies.

Myer, an information services manager at Computer Sciences Corp., faced a New Year's Eve deadline to fix a bug in Federal Emergency Management Agency software. Many flood policies have a three-year lifespan, and unless agency computers could read renewal dates of Jan. 1, 2000, and later, residents of California and other flood- prone states would be up a creek on Jan. 1, 1997. "We had to change the dates in every single one of our files and in every single one of our programs," Myer said. Myer's not alone. Most software reads years as two-digit numbers, assuming "97" means 1997. On Jan. 1, 2000 -- 01-01-00 in programming language -- many corporate and government computers will malfunction when they read "00" and translate it as 1900. The bug could create a host of problems. For instance, bank software computing the interest on a 1998 deposit would subtract 98 from 00 and turn the two-year deposit into a 98-year loan, where the depositor owes the bank money. Other systems may simply crash, bringing businesses to a halt and even jeopardizing the operations of devices that use software- enabled chips -- from VCRs to cars to traffic lights. The glitch, which has generated wide media attention and estimates of as much as $600 billion to correct, was actually fairly simple to solve -- albeit painstaking, Myer said. For more than eight months, she and six full-time staffers reviewed, converted and tested more than 1 million lines of computer code -- or about 2.63 miles worth of instructions. "There wasn't really any software out there that helped us in any way," she said. Myer's experience represents the crux of the year 2000 problem.The good news -- it can be fixed. The bad -- every solution has its drawbacks: there's no silver bullet. That's the challenge facing MatriDigm Corp., Data Dimensions Inc., TSR Inc., Zitel Corp. and other companies working on software and consulting services to tackle the issue. Investors have bid up the shares of these companies as the time to the millennium's immutable deadline ticks away. "You either do it or you're dead," said Joseph Payne, a database software analyst at Kaufman Bros. LP. The glitch exists because computer programmers in the 1960s and 1970s -- and some even today -- used only two digits to mark the year in dates. This shorthand reduced tedious data entry and preserved expensive electronic storage space. Programmers also thought the computers and software they were working on would be long gone by the next century. "We thought all our programs would be obsolete," said Robert Staneart, a former programmer and now president of O'Brother Software Inc. in Richmond, Va. The demand has prompted a variety of possible fixes, none of them perfect. "There is no such item" as a speedy, complete solution, Staneart said. One idea, often referred to as a "sliding window" approach, calls for the computer to add a fixed number (say, 35) to every year. The software can still only distinguish 100 given years, but now those years can range from 1935 to 2035 -- shifting the deadline off enough to get the problem out of sight for a while. "You're going to spend your money (now) and eventually you'll have to spend it again, so you're going to get hit twice on cost," Staneart said. Another idea is to use "bit twiddling" to compress four bits of data -- the four digits that make up a year -- into the space of two. MatriDigm's MAP2000 uses this approach. Like the sliding window, bit twiddling has the disadvantage of forcing a computer to perform additional instructions, slowing down overall performance. Switching years over to a four-digit format, the most straightforward and thorough approach, is actually the least popular. "Ninety percent of our clients go with a window solution," said Susan Thomas, the worldwide director for Team 2000 at Unisys Corp. "The cost is as much as 50 percent higher" to convert years to four digits, the so-called "field expansion" route. Making matters worse is the fact that many companies create their own programs for chores such as accounts payable and inventory. The different applications use unique code and instructions, created on the individual programmer's whim. "We found one guy who named each month after his 12 former girlfriends," said Ken Titow, president of MatriDigm. "The code instructions would say, `If Jane is greater than Mary and Sally is less than 12,' perform function X.'" This complexity is expected to fuel a huge demand for programmers, particularly those familiar with Cobol, the language used on International Business Machines Corp. mainframes. "It'll be like trying to buy a sandbag during a flood," Staneart said. "Even if you're willing to pay $1,000 for it, you're not going to get one if they aren't around." That demand continues to boost optimism for year 2000 stocks, although skeptics wonder how a company that must finish its core business before a specified date will have value in the long run. "After the year 2000, what do you have? Nothing," said Brian Dunahy, a retail investor who sold short 100 shares of Zitel, which owns a 33 percent stake in MatriDigm. Regardless of whether MatriDigm and its peers make money solving the Year 2000 bug, Myer and her team showed it can be done. "There were really no problems," she said.

Copyright 1997
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.