‘Millennium Bug’ Battle A Case Of Too Little, Too Late

By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Washington Times, 02 April 1998

Y2K = $50 billion for USG.

That is the latest expert estimate of what it will cost the federal government to defuse the
millennium computer bomb. Contained in a report by one of the government’s leading
consultants on the year-2000 problem, known informally as Y2K, the figure is 10 times larger
than the most recent estimate of the Office of Management and Budget to fix the “chrono-crash” –
$4.7 billion.

And the White House has yet to learn about the vanishing budget surplus.

Speaking on the condition that his name not be used, one of the top five consulting experts
advising the government on remedial measures told The Washington Times that less than half of
the federal agencies would be ready by the deadline of one second past midnight Dec. 31, 1999.

At the present rate, this expert said, the Department of Energy will have completed the fix in
2019
and the Defense Department in 2012.

Howard Rubin of City University of New York is one of the leading experts on the year-2000
problem and a consultant to the country’s largest financial institutions.

“The government doesn’t have a clue,” he said. “I have told Vice President Gore that the
2000
election will turn on whatever disasters the [year-2000] crisis brings. To appear passive now is a
recipe for defeat.”

Triage to give mission-critical systems top priority has become the norm. With the world’s
largest
payroll and an arsenal of air, land and sea weapons systems dependent on computers, the
Pentagon will have spent more than $10 billion by the end of next year. The Pacific command
alone is costing $1 billion – all unplanned, out-of-budget expenditures.

On the first day of 2000, uncorrected computer programs will go back 100 years to Jan. 1,
1900.
When computers were first used in commercial applications, microprocessing capacities were
limited and the first two digits of a year were skipped to save space.

Year-2000 experts were once dismissed as prophets of doom and gloom. Government and
business leaders assumed, mistakenly, that a computer geek would come up with a silver bullet.

But the doomsayers have been proven right. There are no shortcuts, only countless hours of
highly skilled manual labor going through billions of lines of computer code to correct the dates
that are found on almost every piece of electronic equipment.

Seventy-seven percent of Fortune 500 companies underestimated the dimensions and the cost
of
the problem.

Top U.S. corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars each to fix it – and software
engineers and programmers are still working in three shifts round the clock to beat the
century’s-end deadline – only to discover the “connectivity” problem.

In today’s seamless global electronic environment, those who have secured their systems will
still
be connected to systems whose operators either did not allocate sufficient resources to correct
them or assumed that something as simple as two missing digits was bound to find a software
solution. Even those who have done the work in time will find as they recover from millennium
celebrations that their suppliers and customers’ systems have crashed.

Most companies have tripled their estimated year-2000 costs in recent months. With acute
shortages of software programmers, companies have been raiding one another’s experts and
offering six-figure salaries to the fixers.

Every facet of modern life will be affected – stock markets, banks, utilities,
telecommunications,
public transportation, and the entire industrial plant throughout much of the developed and
developing worlds. Computers do everything from monitoring heartbeats to printing payroll
checks and approving credit card purchases. They land planes and track financial investments.

Peter de Jager, a top Canadian software specialist, was one of the early Judgment Day
prophets in
the early 1990s. Today, consultants under contract to the federal government agree with him that
some 5 percent of U.S. companies and 20 percent of the rest of the world’s businesses will go
bankrupt in 2000.

Speaking at a recent investment conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. de Jager said, “Resources
are
finite as everyone has the same deadline. There are 340,000 qualified people in the world to do
the work. A fixed deadline is an oxymoron in the [information technology] industry. . . . The
deadline is actually nine months away, not 21 months, as systems have to be given exhaustive
tests.”

According to a recent survey on the year-2000 problem, one out of two Fortune 500
companies
does not yet have a detailed plan in place. Any company that begins processing its lines of code
this week cannot physically complete the task by midnight Dec. 31, 1999.

“The Seven Pillars of the Computer Apocalypse” is a conceptual framework that is part of
“Y2K
Tool,” put out by the Virtual Dynamics Corp. Besides business failures, vanishing investment
records and grounded airlines, it sees jammed elevators in high-rise buildings, gas pumps that
don’t pump, and bank machines that reject personal identification numbers.

Despite its problems, the United States is far ahead of most other countries in confronting the
problem. The United Kingdom has taken a few steps, the rest of the developed world fewer still,
the developing world almost none at all.

Thailand, for instance, has yet to conduct a potential damage assessment, let alone budget
funds
for repairs. Bangkok officials were horrified to discover in a random test that all the country’s
criminal records would have been expunged.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced this week that his government would spend
$160
million to help train some 20,000 “bug busters” to help companies correct the problem. Fifteen
percent of Britain’s microchip-controlled assembly lines failed the test of coping beyond 1999.

One of the British retail giants, Marks & Spencer, ditched the chain’s entire stock of
corned beef
because all crates and individual cans had been bar-coded with an “02” sell-by date. The
computers read that as 96-year-old corned beef.

Mr. Rubin said, “At least Blair appears to understand there is a crisis, but, like our own
government, they are clueless. The amount budgeted is pitifully inadequate, and there isn’t
enough time left to head off the crisis if you start today.”

Total estimated worldwide costs have jumped from $600 billion to $1 trillion to $6 trillion in
less
than a year.

Locally, Montgomery County’s costs are put at $50 million. The District, say the wags, is not
listed because its computers are down more frequently than up.