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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Personal Contingency Planning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (139)	4/20/1998 3:39:00 PM
From: Christine Traut	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 888

Just had a conversation with a friend doing Y2K testing for an east coast systems integrator. Every professional IT person that I know (and I know a lot of them) is extremely concerned about Y2K. In fact, the smarter and more experienced they are, the more concerned they are. While I think that there is some merit to having people crying 'it's all hype' around here, I find it fascinating that we continue to argue on whether Y2K is or is not 'real'. The people who are closest to the problem know that it is real. On the GM and Honeywell examples, let me see if I can explain why there are some embedded chips (don't know how many) that will indeed fail at the stroke of midnight on 12/31/99. And not before. Interval sampling process control chips (and Honeywell is a huge producer here) control things like thermostats and drug administration machines. They do two calculations. First, they measure something - like temperature. Then they note the date at some preprogrammed interval and compute change over time. Your thermostat doesn't care what the temperature is - just whether it has changed beyond some preset range. Then it turns on (or turns off) the heating/cooling system. Some of you will be ahead of me here. The date/time stamping on many of these chips incorporates the year. Depending on the placement of the year in the time stamp and the interval calculation, some of these chips start dividing by zero when we hit the year 2000. They give a reading of 'no fluctuation' and the furnace turns off, the drugs stop dripping, whatever. And the situation does not self correct. I think of Y2K as a systemic failure to correctly use dates in program logic. It is not one problem. It is a class of problems. It exists in software. It exists in hardware. It exists in silicon. And it will certainly cause fear and concern, if not widespread disruption. Will the media hype this? What doesn't the media hype? Should people be concerned? I sure think so.