UK Daily Telegraph: 'mechanical franking machines roll over from "99" to "--"'
'it's the kind of problem that requires replacement parts'
'Millennium meltdown
telegraph.co.uk
Most press coverage of the Year 2000 problem has focused on computers - the fact that older software uses two digits to designate the year instead of four so that the computer can't tell the difference between 1900 and 2000, or that some database software uses "00" in the date field to mark records for deletion. What has taken longer to understand is how much more pervasive and difficult the problem really is, because all kinds of system have embedded, date-sensitive electronic devices.
People who don't own computers still own cars - and today's cars have as many as 30 embedded computers, several of which may keep internal date-stamped maintenance logs.
RISKS has been reporting Year 2000 errors ever since 1994: credit card readers that choke on post-'99 expiry dates, a Freecell player getting stuck on a single game when his system date was accidentally changed to 2097 (the random-number generator that picks the games uses a date-time function), and the British library whose card, expiring in '00, was rejected by the checkout system.
"I worked on an infusion pump in 1984-1985 for patient-controlled analgesia," says Bruce Koball, a specialist in embedded systems, "and the one that I worked on used a special time-date chip that had a two-digital year field." In such a device, which is designed to give patients control over their pain medication, the time-date chip ensures that a patient can't overdose. Depending how the device interprets the information it gets from the chip, it could refuse the patient any pain relief. Fix it? The manufacturer may be out of business; or the controlling firmware may be embedded in obsolete chips with no diagram.
Some purely mechanical problems are also only now being discovered. Susan Thomas, director of Unisys's Team2000, discovered that Unisys's 300 Pitney-Bowes mechanical franking machines roll over from "99" to "--". You can't, as Thomas points out in presentations, download a software fix from India; it's the kind of problem that requires replacement parts, which have to be manufactured and deployed. This and other non-computer-related problems affect whole supply chains; Thomas has found thousands of valves and flow control devices, all controlled by microprocessors, in oil's path from ground to your car.
This is the kind of problem that a half-day conference held at the Institute of Civil Engineers earlier this month was convened to examine. Lynn Craig, speaking for the Federation of Small Businesses, warned that the 80 per cent of British businesses made up of two to nine people should think through the consequences for their businesses if any of their key suppliers fails - she includes water, electricity, food, banking, communications, and media. |
