Computers in the year 2000

I read with interest Mr Alex Wolvesperges' recent letter to The Jakarta Post (May 27, 1995) regarding the year 2000, as it applies to computer technology.

First, I would like to note that perhaps if Mr Wolvesperges is using original copies of Lotus, Excel or Quattro Pro, he may not have had the problems he mentioned with the century or February dates; just a thought (as well as a joke).

I did not read the article Mr Wolvesperges referred to in his letter, but if the article stated that the world's big computer systems would get hung up on Dec. 31, 1999 because they couldn't read a four digit date, then the article was wrong. The problem is that so much software has been written that uses the two digit year in date computations and using "00" in those computations will lead to incorrect results. It will be tedious and time consuming to modify; who wants to sit around and change hundreds of computer programs just to change a two digit year to a four digit year? Not very many programmers.

Let me give you a "real world" example of the kind of problems this can cause: I have recently developed an automated system which will, in part, allow international lenders to recoup their investment in the agricultural sector, regarding rubber and coconut plantings. These loans were made over many years with the payback beginning over different years, as well with the calculations for interest rates and payback periods variable depending upon the type of loan.

It is quite complex, and to keep from getting too technical, let me just say that it was discovered during installation of the system that loans made in 1994 would begin payback in 2000. This was fine except that I had used the two digit year in the calculations and when the computer used the "00" in a computation, the results were, to say the least, incorrect.

As this was a dBASE 5 developed system, the fix was not difficult because the database engine allows the user to turn off or on the "century" format of the date. After turning on the century format, I then discovered that the "00" dates had been changed to "1900." I guess dBASE isn't smart enough to realize we are closer to 2000 than 1990. This led to modifying the date lookup table. That was the easy part and I didn't even have to modify the software, now all I have to figure out how to get these modifications to 12 different provinces located from Maluku to Aceh.

This is just one small automated system; if we compound this process by several hundred or thousand times, we can understand why some computer systems, if not modified, won't crash or hang up at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, but will start to give us some mighty strange results. Let us not forget that this is the first turnover of the century during the computer revolution and we will have problems.

JOHN R. FENTON

Jakarta