9-9-99 – Reasons to be cheerful, or not

1999-09-10

Last Thursday came, with neither bang nor whimper. The press have jumped on the single reported event, namely a spreadsheet application being run in Tasmania. So – was that it?

I still remember the weeks leading up to the start of 1984. The sense of foreboding, that Big Brother really would set up shop and start rewriting history, was everywhere. Funnily enough, the feeling continued way into the years which followed, whilst at the same time there was a sense of loss, at disasters failing to happen. Last Thursday was like that – it came and it went, with very little to show, leaving the more paranoid amongst us wondering whether we were robbed.

Okay, nothing happened. We should still be vigilant, but then so should we always be – a crash is a crash, after all. The debate centred largely around whether there really was an issue – after all, argued some, September 9, 1999 can be written in such a variety of ways. Maybe they were right or maybe they got lucky, but who cares? No big bang, no domino effect, cause to celebrate or at the very least get a decent night’s sleep.

Now then, let’s get on with the real issue. 9-9-99 enabled plenty of companies and government agencies to test out their Y2K readiness plans (the results of which served to fill the press column inches reserved for any computer failures). Most plans succeeded, some failed (notably in the US Coast Guard – what is it about coast guards and dates?). The 9-9-99 problem may turn out to be fictional, but Y2K will not.

We know several things about Y2K as a fact: the first is that it is a real problem that some computer systems use two digits to store the date rather than four. We also know that substantial money has been spent trying to resolve the problems that it might cause. Most importantly, we know from our own sources that a number of so-called “compliant” systems, when retested, have reported an average of 30 non-compliance errors per 1,000,000 lines of code, most of which result in incorrect data being written to the disk. This isn’t the result of an over-active imagination or a news shortage, it’s there in black and white.

In the words of Tom Hanks, “We have a problem.” The only thing we do not know about Y2K is how big the impact will be.

(First published 10 September 1999)