This is no minor problem. For starters, experts predict that without major adjustments more than 30 percent of the computer systems in the United States may simply crash and not work at all. Worse, every routine computer transaction or calculation that depends on a date could go haywire. Drivers’ licenses could be a century expired. The Social Security Administration could think 25-year-olds are 75, and 75-year-olds are 25.
The good news is, not all computers will be affected by the bug. Most newer Pentium models use four-digit years. But 80 percent of governments and corporations around the world still use older machines. And most of them are far from solving the problem. A 1996 congressional survey of top federal agencies found that only nine of 24 had given it any thought. “Many agencies with direct responsibilities for furnishing services to the public, such as the Departments of Labor, Veterans Affairs, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had only minimal year-2000 initiatives underway,” the report warned. Even computer-dependent NASA had no idea what to do.
The only sure solution is for programmers to comb through the millions of lines of programming language in each computer and correct the errant two-digit years–a painstaking task that some estimate may cost $600 billion worldwide. And that’s assuming the job could be completed in time. “If I could change one line of code every second,” says Peter de Jager, an expert on the problem, “it would take me the next 14 years working eight hours a day, five days a week, to fix all the lines of code” in just one small company’s computer system.
Software companies know there’s a fortune to be made with a bug exterminator. Already IBM, Data Dimensions, Viasoft and others are in the hunt. But locating all the various references to dates and years is no easy task. Aug. 11, 1954, for example, may appear as 11 August 1954, or 8-11-54, or 8/11/54, or even 11.8.54. Miss just a few, and the ripple effect could still bring on a computer crash. The most optimistic analysts expect that, using a program that can automatically search software, 70 percent of computer systems could potentially be debugged, if the work begins now.
We may not have to wait until 2000 for the meltdown to begin. At one state prison, the bug made computers miscalculate the sentences of several inmates who were then released. Some credit cards have been refused at stores and restaurants when their “00” expiration dates confused computers. And in several states truckers have found their interstate licenses canceled when computers couldn’t handle renewal applications with dates past the millennium.
Perhaps nobody has more reason to fear the M-bug than Al Gore. The vice president, who takes pride in his computer skills, has a personal interest in finding a way to minimize the damage. Gore could take the blame if the doomsday scenario plays itself out right in the middle of his expected run for the White House. As Hunter College computer scientist Howard Ruben pointedly told Gore at a meeting last summer, “Just think about trying to get elected president in 2000 if the government is starting to collapse.”
