Dorine, 8K was for press release yesterday. Nothing new that I could see. To get it, go to www.freeedgar.com....read on
RAVEL
The Philadelphia Inquirer Andrew Cassel Column
03:09:39, 22 May 1998
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By Andrew Cassel, The Philadelphia Inquirer Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News May 22--Were you suddenly beeperless the other day? Find yourself scrambling for greenbacks at the gas pump after the card reader went dead? Miss the second hour of "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio?
Pain in the neck, eh? And all because a single satellite went on the blink.
Who'd have suspected that a mishap 22,000 miles up would send thousands of cops, docs and real estate brokers scrambling to find a pay phone? Well, hold on to your transponder; as telecommunications blackouts go, this wasn't nothin' compared to the mess we'll see when the year-2000 bug hits in exactly one year and 223 days.
Or so it seems from talking to the increasingly nervous technicians, analysts and lawyers who warn that something as seemingly innocuous as a computer's inability to read a date could bring on a Godzilla-sized calamity.
I last discussed the Y2K (that's year-2000 to you civilians) in a column after CoreStates Financial Corp.'s chairman, Terry Larsen, cited it as a key reason he decided to sell the Philadelphia banking company to First Union Corp. Preparing CoreStates' computers to read "00" as 2000 instead of 1900 would have cost a bundle, Larsen said; First Union, by contrast, appeared to be already on top of the problem.
That column had an unexpected afterlife, sparking weeks of passionate colloquy on Internet bulletin boards and chat groups. Some took it as proof that the date glitch will indeed bring life as we know it to a halt, while others claimed it showed that things were, in fact, under control. (Computers a mess? No sweat -- just sell the company!)
But the ripples from my little pebble soon disappeared into what's become a roiling sea of predictions, warnings, forecasts and alarms regarding what may -- let's emphasize that, "may "-- happen when midnight rolls around on Dec. 31, 1999. Scenarios range from inconveniences on roughly the scale of Wednesday's beeper problems to a full-blown, gosh-amighty doomsday featuring simultaneous breakdowns in air-traffic control, telecommunications, electric power and other vital systems.
Bernie Sayers, a South Jersey computer consultant who has become an e-mail pen pal, tells me he's making plans for the year 2000 based on the belief that "the problem is much too complex and deep to solve in the time remaining... . I'm planning for long-term electrical outages, government infrastructure failure at all levels -- federal, state, city -- as well as financial collapse. The amount of money I have in a bank is very minimal... . I'm stocking up on non-hybrid seeds, tools, and I'm working on a wood-powered generator as well as researching alcohol production and engine modification."
If that sounds a little extreme, how about a recession? Ed Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, thinks there's a better-than-even chance we'll have one, as malfunctioning computers disrupt commerce all over the world. It won't be doomsday, Yardeni says, just a slowdown in production and economic growth at least as severe as the 1973-74 downturn that followed the first Arab oil embargo. Yardeni currently gives it a 60 percent probability.
On the other hand, it's clear that we've begun mobilizing to stave off Y2K chaos. Banks all over America are already scrambling to comply with regulators' demands that both they and the companies they have lent to prepare for Jan. 1, 2000. Insurers are putting similar pressure on their customers. Lawyers and accountants are demanding their clients write Y2K clauses into contracts and spell out the problems in financial statements.
If that's not the same as actually reprogramming computers to fix the problem, at least it puts it on everybody's agenda. There may never have been such a massive project in all of technological history. But then, no society has ever been so technologically advanced, or so intertwined.
----- Visit Philadelphia Online, the World Wide Web site of The Philadelphia Inquirer, at phillynews.com ----- (c) 1998, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
CSFN, FTU,
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