Computers in the year 2000

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