No easy way to kill the US$1 trillion bug
South China Morning Post
Tue, Oct 07 1997
In recent years, Hollywood and popular science fiction writers have contributed to several myths about computers. One of these concerns the ability of gifted teenage boys (they are always boys) to solve computer problems that have teams of adults stumped.
This fallacy was wonderfully evident recently when several journalists, most notably those at CNN, were taken in by a story that a 14-year-old boy in New Zealand had "solved the year 2000 problem", or the Y2K as it is called. This "Millennium Bug" is the problem that many computers will face when the date changes from 1999 to 2000.
The report was immediately suspect because no details were given. From what was shown on television, it looked as if the boy was sitting behind a DOS machine. Whatever he was doing, he did not solve the Y2K problem. The reason for that is quite simple: it is not solvable with a single "fix".
How could something as simple as a date change throw the world into a problem that will cost, by some estimates, US$1 trillion to fix? The problem mainly concerns mainframe computers and programs created in the Cobol programming language, a favourite of business users, both 30 years ago and today.
The enormity of the Y2K problem comes partly from the fact that much of the source code - a file written by the computer programmers which is needed to alter the way the program works - has gone and many of the programmers are dead. No one will be able to bring the code or the people back.
Bob Carlston, alliance and marketing manager for Oracle in Hong Kong, said: "If you look at the possibilities, it could go several ways. You could talk to 10 different people who know what is going on and you will get 10 different answers."
Herein lies the biggest problem: nobody really knows what will happen; it is mostly speculation.
"No one has done a definitive study," said Mr Carlston. "No one quite knows where all the programs are. Some of them are in elevators and telephone switching systems, some in traffic lights. Most of them, however, are in banking and financial institutions."
What can be done? According to Mr Carlston, there are two choices: do nothing or correct the problem. If the code is missing, it will be necessary to re-write everything.
Those who would choose to do nothing fall into three categories, he says. Those who are close to retirement will leave it for the next chap to solve. Some will quit just in time and go to a different job. Others, who really understand the problem, will put themselves forward as "expert witnesses".
This last may sound comical, but one must remember that in America the lawyers are already salivating at the prospects of earning millions - possibly billions - of dollars from the law suits resulting from the Y2K problem.
Correcting the problem - provided you have the source code, of course - or completely redoing the system are the only answers for those who are concerned about what will happen.
"Some systems, if they give you wrong information, will be a minor irritant. Others will put you out of business," Mr Carlston said.
In the language of computer programming, this is a non-trivial task. The biggest danger is with older, IBM mainframe computers.
Firms such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard are trying to tell people now is the time to move to Unix and client/server systems.
Although this is to some extent self-serving, the new model of the Internet - along with the intranets and extranets - is helping to push companies in this direction.
Software today is written in such a way that potential Y2K problems can be avoided in the future. But the future, of course, will bring problems that today's software did not account for.
On a recent visit to Hong Kong, Eric Schmidt, the 14-year veteran of Sun Microsystems who recently left the position of chief technology officer at Sun to take up the job of chief executive officer at Novell, said he had a special plan for the night of December 31, 1999: "I am not going to be in an elevator or a plane. I think I will sit home and read a book." |
