Horn: Y2K will be campaign issue
By MIKE BILLINGTON
WASHINGTON, September 18 (UPI) Rep. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., has been a lone voice in a governmental cyber-wilderness when it comes to the so-called Year 2000 problem.
For three years he has asked, chastized, urged, begged, and pleaded in an effort to get government officials from the White House to the lowliest federal agencies to take seriously the threat that computer networks worldwide could crash on Jan. 1, 2000.
He had little success until February when President Clinton told a national television audience that Americans must take the Year 2000 problem also known by its abbreviation Y2K seriously and work to upgrade their computers in order to keep them from crashing.
That is about to change, however, Horn said. The GOP leadership has urged Republicans to make Y2K a campaign issue this fall, he said.
Horn said that will be an important step in raising public awareness about the issue, which some experts say will result in everything from frozen bank accounts, major disruptions in transportation networks, and problems in a hospital's ability to deliver health care to the inability of fire engines to raise computer-assisted, high-rise ladders.
Every one of the 535 seats in the House of Representatives is up for election in November. In addition, voters will cast ballots in 34 Senate races.
Horn said he expects most Republicans seeking office to follow the leadership's request to make Y2K a campaign issue.
Experts say the world's computers may crash on Jan. 1, 2000, because their microchips will be unable to correctly process the date. To save space on computer hard drives, in 1967 programmers decided to abbreviate the dates that computers use. Instead of reading the date as 1/1/2000, computers will read it as 1/1/00.
And that's the problem, experts say, because computers will be unable to tell whether that date stands for 1900 or 2000. As a result, computers that have not been upgraded to correctly process that date will simply shut down.
The White House has given federal agencies until March to fix the problem in their most critical computers.
Even if that is done, however, the Y2K problem will still have a serious impact on the global computer network, said Joe Firmage, chief executive officer of the Internet company USWeb. Relatively few businesses and very few foreign governments will have readied their computer systems by Jan. 1, 2000, he said. As a result, their computers will crash. In turn, that will cause problems around the world even for government agencies and private companies whose computers have been upgraded. |
