The 'Year 2000' crisis

Only trained computer programmers or the otherwise technically astute can truly appreciate the severity of the coming "Year 2000" computer crisis. Everyone else is stuck weighing the credibility of various estimates and estimators and looking for clues. But the clues are beginning to suggest an event that, however serious, is at least being taken seriously.

The U.S. Senate last week announced the formation of a select committee to track Year 2000 (or "Y2K") compliance efforts across the government. The House has been holding hearings for more than a year. The president has created a White House council on the problem and authorized government agencies to work with outside institutions on their plans for "Y2K compliance." A worldwide "virtual conference" on the topic is slated for June.

As for the dimensions of the problem, no one, even now, has a clear idea what will happen when the "99" in two-digit date fields turns over to 00. Some people still think air traffic computers will shut down. Social Security checks will not be issued, credit checks and shipping routes will go haywire, and world financial systems will splinter (especially if they are connecting to noncompliant networks in places such as Asia, which has been distracted by its recent crises.)

Will any of this really happen? The consensus so far is that most companies and industries have attacked the problem but are moving too slowly. The first official U.S. estimate, from the Federal Reserve, says the updating cost will cost U.S. businesses around $50 billion.

Some see the millennium bug not as a onetime event that will happen at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, but as a continual avalanche affecting organizations and their interaction from the time they begin spending money to prepare until long after the deadline is past.

The snowball effect is visible in another way, too, perhaps best illustrated by the warning appended to the government's site for its conference: "Please note that the purpose of this conference is not to advertise or promote specific Y2K products." A looming presumed catastrophe is an open invitation for entrepreneurs, consultants, marketers and charlatans of all kinds.

As forests of new bureaucracies spring up, it is important to keep in mind that it will be programmers alone, not councils and planning reams and flow charts, who can find the Year 2000 bugs in miles of old computer code.

-- The Washington Post