Have millennium bug fears been blown out of proportion?

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): In the history of the press, has there ever been a topic so widely, continuously and vigorously reported as the millennium bug? Obviously not.

The bug, which is unlike the program glitch that we usually encounter in the initial releases of software products such as Windows 98 or Office 97, has been around since the 1960s. At that time, when computers were beginning to find their way into real uses in business and industry, computer programmers tried to save resources by using only the last two digits of the year in their programs. So, for example, the year 1964 was recorded in the program data as 64. The century digits of 19 were not included, because if they had been included the programmers would have had to provide four slots for the date instead of just two.

That would have cost additional for data storage space, and at that time storage was very expensive. The approach also made sense, because the year 2000 was still a long way away. At least, that was how those programmers saw it.

Quite early on, some people had voiced concern that this practice would create a problem when the century turned from 19 to 20. How should the computer interpret the two digits 00?

Would it be the year 2000 or 1900, or even 2100? In any computer application where the date is used to calculate many things, this inability to interpret the correct year would cause a problem. Would your age be "minus 54" or "plus 46" when the clock turns to 12:01 a.m. on Jan 1, 2000? Would your bank have to pay you interest on your savings, or would you have to pay it because the records in your savings account appear to be 100 years too early?

One of the first people to blow the whistle was Peter de Jager. He wrote a seminal article on the millennium bug, also popularly known as the Y2K bug, in ComputerWorld in 1993. He has also written a book on this issue, titled Managing 00: Surviving the Year 2000 Computing Crisis. He has also produced two videocassettes dealing with the problem. Today he is still very actively involved in reminding the U.S. Congress, industry and the public at large of the potential hazard that this programming bug may cause humankind. Potential, because nobody knows what exactly is going to happen.

Still, for some time there were only lukewarm responses to de Jager's warning. It was when the Gartner Group, a research company that specializes in the computer industry, estimated that efforts to eradicate the millennium bug would create a US$300 billion to $600 billion industry that the issue suddenly started to pick up momentum. Obviously, a great number of entrepreneurs all over the world immediately saw the tremendous business potential in this and they wanted to have a slice of the cake. Offering their services, they joined the millennium bug bandwagon, and started trumpeting doomsday scenarios to create public hysteria. Hence, the sad story of the millennium bug started long before the year 2000 approached.

It is sad, because the issue tends to be blown out of proportion. Newspaper and magazine articles describe the situation on Jan. 1, 2000 as follows: elevators will ascend and descend randomly; cars on the street will ram into one another because their electronic control systems will malfunction; hospitals will be deep comas because there will be no electricity; and ATMs will spew cash even before you insert your card into the slot. Well, at least it would be a nice way to celebrate the new year.

Today, it has become hard to distinguish what is likely and what is unlikely to happen after that Ultimate Midnight. Some people religiously believe that it will be the end of the world as we know it. Others suggest that you withdraw all your money from your bank and stockpile just before the end of this year. Predictions have become so gloomy that, ironically, Peter de Jager himself, as quoted in the Jan. 19, 1999 issue of Forbes Global, said, "My biggest fear is the media will ramp up the Y2K threat so highly that people will panic and cause a run on banks. Don't listen to the lunatics who tell you to head to a cabin in the woods with a year's worth of food."

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to take the problem too lightly, as we Indonesians seem to be doing at the moment. The bug exists not only in computer programs, but also in the embedded microchips that control so many things that we use, from pacemakers to elevators, from subway trains to satellites, from PCs to nuclear reactors. These microchips have computer programs inscribed in them, and only the Lord knows how many billions of these chips are in use in the world today.

How do these embedded chips pose threats? The keywords are "memory date". If the chips are also used to keep track of time, they may cause systems to malfunction. Suppose the electronic control of a power plant in our electricity grid says that if generator No. 11 has not undergone maintenance for 12 months, it has to be shut down, then we may have a blackout (is it really surprising, then, that some people plan to buy their own generators?).

And what about the nuclear submarines sitting on the bottom of the ocean? They have electronic control systems too. The Russians recently declared that the computers that control their nuclear weapons do not use the memory date function, but what about nuclear plants in other parts of the world?

The embedded chips -- microprocessors that have programs in them -- are actually more problematic than the computer programs written in COBOL, for example, because they are so much harder to track down. And the overall situation becomes even more frightening if we realize that the millennium bug has some unique characteristics: First, the deadline is nonnegotiable. It will arrive on Dec. 31, 1999, whether we like it or not. Second, nobody has any experience in dealing with the problem. We will know the impact only after the fact, and this also means that nobody knows how big the task of tackling the bug problem is. Third, we all share the same deadline, which means that we will have to compete for resources necessary to tackle the problem.

We still have a little more than eight months to go. Can we make sure that, for example, state-owned electricity company PLN will be Y2K-compliant by the end of the year so that there will no nationwide Madura-like catastrophe on Jan. 1, 2000? And will our beloved PT Telkom be able to continue providing telephone services from that date onward? We still have no idea.

On the brighter side, you have more than eight months to do really good things to fellow human beings in an attempt to atone for any bad things you may have done in the past. Because nobody really knows what is going to happen to the world as we know it on the morning of Jan 1, 2000.