50 years of work ahead!! 400,000 SHARES traded to-day, is the glass half empty or half full.I suspect it is half full,as the following appears to indicate. The European Union's conversion to the new euro currency starting in a few months; the rollover of the date system in Global Positioning System satellites; America's surfeit of telephones for home and office, voice and data, threatening the possibility that the nation could run out of phone numbers; and ditto Social Security numbers, which are not used again when people die, big problems!
Capers Jones, chief scientist at Artemis Management Systems Inc. and founder of Software Productivity Research, which analyzes software development and planning warns.
Starting next year, date and data corrections will dominate the software industry, said Jones, and the repairs will cost $5 trillion over the years 1999 to 2050. He predicted these problems, along with Y2K, will damage the software industry for a generation.
“The best we can hope for is a quick recovery,” he said.
Euro Transition Looms
The European Monetary Union will begin its conversion to the euro currency Jan. 1, 1999, and union countries are scheduled to phase out national currencies in 2004.
The euro conversion is the second largest software challenge in the world behind the Y2K problem, said Jones, and it's more sophisticated. Instead of changing every date in a computer system with a single deadline looming, computer systems have to be able to handle the different ways the 11 union countries change over. Further complicating the problem are individual companies that may convert completely to conducting business in euros, or they may continue to track their national currency while simultaneously using the euro.
Ed Severs, chief operating officer for ADPAC Inc., one of the older companies designing mainframe computer systems, said there aren't enough programmers to finish both the euro conversion and the Y2K fix.
Just Change 10 Million Apps
Jones said about 10 million programs, ranging from Microsoft's spreadsheet software, Excel, to specialized financial tracking software, would have to be modified to handle the euro conversion.
France and Germany, said Gary Fisher, a computer scientist at Information Technology Laboratory at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, are putting all their resources into converting to the euro instead of Y2K. “They're in a fix, I think,” he said. “They're going to be fighting fires everywhere.”
The euro conversion could cost between $150 billion and $400 billion spread among the 11 union countries, said Severs. Jones agreed and said 70 percent of the cost likely would be borne by the union countries, with the rest falling on companies around the world that deal with the union and track European currencies.
“If you're a financial institution (doing business in Europe), you're going to spend between three and five times what you did on Y2K,” said Severs.
GPS Reset has Wide Impact
In the period between the euro conversion and Jan. 1, 2000, the belt of 24 satellites making up the Global Positioning System is programmed to reset its date system. This could cause problems in navigation and power plants, and even in the calculation of interest for international financial transactions.
The network, run by the Defense Department, allows anyone with a GPS receiver to pinpoint their position on the Earth to within about 330 feet. The satellites keep track of dates by measuring the number of weeks elapsed since Jan. 5, 1980. Every 1,024 weeks, the timer resets to zero; that will occur at midnight Aug. 21, 1999.
The satellites use the elapsed week count to account for variations in the earth's orbit and rotation. That's why civilian Earth-based receivers, not programmed to handle the rollover, could have problems determining the location, Fisher said.
“The receivers are going to have to become compliant, either through a new chip or new software,” said Fisher. “And the satellites that have the problems will have to be replaced.”
Loss in Synchronicity
GPS dates also are used to synchronize some electrical power plants and large international transfers of funds. Jones worries that the rollover might cause some plants to quit working, and interest payments on the transfers could be thrown off.
For instance, if it takes a second to transfer $1 billion between two banks in different countries, the interest could be a few hundred dollars. But if one of the banks, relying on the GPS satellites, hasn't planned for the date rollover, its computers could think the transfer took 20 years. The interest could be off by trillions of dollars in that case.
Because the rollover's timing, computer systems handling large financial systems will need to be checked for euro, GPS date and Y2K compliance all at the same time.
“It's in the international standards, so it shouldn't be a surprise,” said Jones. “But Year 2000 should have been obvious, too.”
Knowing the Code Not Enough
Last year, Arkansas gained a new area code after decades of a single code. In January this year, western Massachusetts gained a new one as well. And new area codes seem to pop up weekly in the Bay area, ground zero for the use of multiple phone lines in the home.
Usually, a new area code is a minor annoyance, necessitating minor costs in reprinting stationery and business cards. But in about 10 years, the number of phone lines needed will exceed the capacity of a three-digit area code with a seven digit phone number. Jones suggests a five digit area code and a nine-digit phone number to allow up for to a trillion individual phone lines—enough for several phone numbers for every person on the planet.
Problem solved? Nope. Millions of software applications in the United States can handle only three-figure area code and seven-figure phone number. To upgrade them all will be cumbersome and expensive.
Any lengthening of the phone number probably won't be a problem for telecommunications and directory companies, Jones said, but large private and corporate phone lists will have to be updated. This could be a problem if the program is configured to accept only the current format.
Jones estimates about 25 million software applications will need to be fixed.
Forget Money, U.S. Out of Digits
And if all that wasn't enough, the United States might run out of Social Security numbers.
Numbers assigned to U.S. citizens are not reused once someone dies. The current nine-digit system provides a maximum of about 1 billion numbers. Since 1936, when the first number was issued, more than 381 million numbers have been assigned, with about 6 million new ones issued each year.
It's easy to add a digit, but thousands of computer programs that expect nine-digit numbers will have to be modified. Cost? Equal that of the Y2K bug in the United States, Jones figures.
The grandchildren of today's programmers will be solving that one, when the current numbers run out around 2075.
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