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  the Software View: What, me worrY2K? or How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Year-2000 problem. (Part II)

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WHAT, ME WORRY2K?

One approach is to ignore all thoughts about the consequences - to stay focused on the code on your desk. This isn't that difficult to do, since programmers get high rewards for spending large amounts of time in front of a computer workstation, where they're expected to maintain a very deep and narrow sort of concentration. One systems programmer has barely looked over the top of his cubicle for thirty years. He's spent half that time working in the Federal Reserve System, backbone of the world banking order that everyone fears will collapse come the millennium. But until he joined the Fed's Year-2000 problem project, he had never much considered the real-world effects of his work. "I read an article about how the Federal Reserve would crash everything if it went bad," said the man I will call John Dough, who agreed to talk only on condition of anonymity. "It was the first time in my life that I understood everything the that Federal Reserve did." He had taken a rare look up and down the money supply chain; the job of fixing the Year-2000 problem in the context of an enormous, linked economic machine was now a task that stretched out in all directions far beyond his control. It scared him. "I discovered we were kind of important," he said uneasily.

If you can't stay focused on your code, another approach is to develop an odd sort of fatalism, a dark, defensive humor in the face of all the things you know will go wrong. Making fun of bugs is almost a sign of sophistication. It shows that you know your way around a real system, that you will not shy back when things really start to fall apart. A software engineer at a Baby Bell likes to tell people how everyone in the company was amazed to pick up a handset and actually get a dial tone. It was almost a brag: "Ha ha, my system is so screwed up you won't believe it."

Now here comes a problem that's no joke. Technical people can't help hearing about the extreme consequences that will come down on the world if they do not find all the places the Year-2000 problem is hiding. And they simultaneously know that it is impossible to find all the problems in any system, let alone in ones being used long beyond their useful life spans. Programmers feel under siege, caught between the long-standing knowledge of error and fragility they have learned to live with, and the sudden, unrealistic pressure to fix everything.

"The Year-2000 problem is a sort of perverse payback from the universe for all the hasty and incomplete development efforts over the last ten years," said the Y2K testing manager for a midsize brokerage. Also speaking on condition of anonymity, Raid Orkin (also a pseudonym) said it like an I-told-you-so, a chance for him to get back at every programmer and programming manager who ever sent him junky software.

Orkin is a tall, impeccably groomed young man whose entire workday consists of looking for bugs. He is in QA, quality assurance, the place where glitches are brought to light, kept on lists, managed, prioritized, and juggled - a complete department devoted to bugs. He has the tester's crisp manner, the precision of the quality seeker, in whom a certain amount of obsessive fussiness is a very good thing. Since Orkin does not write code, and can not just concentrate on the program on his desk, he has no alternative but to affect a jaunty, fake cheer in the face of everything that can go wrong. "We have systems that have been developed in, shall we say, an 'uncontrolled' manner," he said.

The systems he is responsible for testing are classic journeys through time: new systems on Linux with graphical user interfaces, Unix relational databases on the sturdy client-server systems of the late 1980's, command-line interfaces that were in vogue in the late 1970's and early 1980's, all the way back to an IBM mid-range computer running programs "that nobody thinks about," said Orkin, but "have to run or we are in trouble."

Orkin's team is doing what they call "clean management": testing everything for Y2K problems, whether or not they suspect it has a date-related problem. In the course of it, as they go backward in time, they are coming across systems that have never been formally tested. "There was a day when things did not go through QA," said Orkin, as if he were talking about another century. All this time, the untested systems have been out there, problems waiting to happen. "We find all sorts of functional bugs," he said affably. "Not Y2K. Just big old bugs."

Orkin had all the complaints testers always have. Missing source code. No documentation. Third-party software vendors who will not give them information. Not enough people who know how the systems were put together. Users who will not take the time to explain how they work with the system. And what he calls the "ominous task" of fixing one of the oldest, least documented systems - the crucial trade-clearing system running on the IBM machines. "If one of the mid-range computers goes down for a day, we are out of business without our backups," he said.

Still, quality assurance is the one place where the muddled side of computing is obvious, predominant, and inescapable. Orkin, as a good QA guy, is mostly inured to it all. "Come the Year-2000, a couple of systems will fail," he said nonchalantly. "But that is what happens with any implementation. It is the same thing we've been doing for years."

For Orkin, it is no big deal that supposedly Y2K-compliant programs will be put into users' hands without thorough testing. He is comfortable with the idea that things can go very, very wrong and still not bring about the end of the world. Said Orkin with a shrug, "It's just a big user test."

The millennium bug is not unique - human fallibility lives inside every system. The only thing about Y2K that was really bothering Raid Orkin was the programmers. There is a classic animosity between programmer and tester - after all, the tester's role in life is to find everything the programmer did wrong. But Y2K and its real-world time pressures seem to have escalated the conflict. Orkin thought that QA would manage - "it won't be pretty but we'll do it" - but no thanks to the programmers who developed the applications. "The application folks are never there," said Orkin, deeply annoyed. "We're not getting analysis from the developers - it's really absurd."

The source of the hostility is documentation: Programmers are supposed to make a record of the code they've written. Documentation is how QA people know what the system is supposed to do, and therefore how to test it. But programmers hate to write documentation, and so they simply avoid doing it. "The turnover is high," said Orkin, "or the programmers who have been here a long time get promoted. They don't want to go back to this project they wrote 10 years ago - and get punished for not documenting it."

Programmers have fun and leave us to clean up their messes, is Orkin's attitude. They want to go off to new programs, new challenges, and the really annoying thing is, they can. "They say, 'I want to do something new,'" said Orkin, truly angry now, "and they get away with it."

"No more programmers working without adult supervision!"

This was declaimed by Ed Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche Bank Securities, before a crowded hotel ballroom. On the opening day of the Year 2000 Symposium, August 10, 1998 (with cameras from 60 Minutes rolling), Yardeni explained how the millennium bug would bring about a world recession on the order of the 1973-74 downturn, and this would occur because the world's systems "were put together over 30 to 40 years without any adult supervision whatsoever." Blame the programmers. The mood at the conference was like that of a spurned lover: All those coddled boys in T-shirts and cool eyewear, formerly fetishized for their adolescent ways, have betrayed us.

It has become popular wisdom to say that Y2K is the result of "shortsightedness." It's a theme that has been taken up as a near moral issue, as if the people who created the faulty systems were somehow derelict as human beings.

In fact, some of the most successful and long-lived technologies suffer from extreme shortsightedness. The design of the original IBM PC, for example, assumed there would never be more than one user, who would never be running more than one program at a time, which would never see more than 256K of memory. The original Internet protocol, IP, limited the number of server addresses it could handle to what seemed a very large number at the time, never imagining the explosive growth of the Web.

One COBOL program had been running for more than 15 years. It was written before the great inflation of the late 1970's. By 1981, the million-dollar figure in all dollar amounts was too large for the program's internal storage format, and so multiple millions of dollars simply disappeared without a trace.

We are surrounded by shortsighted systems. Right at this moment, some other program is surely about to burst the bounds of its format for money or number of shares traded or count of items sold. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped 10,000, the price of gas has topped $9.99, the systems we're renovating now may live long enough to need renovation again. Some system designer, reacting to the scarce computer resource of our day - not memory but bandwidth - is specifying a piece of code that we will one day look back upon as folly.

POWERLESS: THE ELECTRIC SLIDE

Jacques Leslie writes, "What will happen at 00:00:01 on January 1, 2000? Try deadly, black, and very, very cold. We are all hostages to electricity - and preparing for a sweeping blackout has become "the linchpin issue" of the Year-2000 problem. If the United States of America goes without power for more than a couple of weeks, what will be the effects? It may become the most destructive recorded event in U.S. history, and produce the highest insurance loss of any American disaster. It will generate millions of insurance claims, the most of any episode in the annals of insurance. A fifth of the national labor force will be prevented from getting to work for several days. Millions of people will take refuge in shelters. The official death toll will be slight, but those numbers will understate the Year-2000 problem's effects. Hundreds of ill and elderly people, weakened by their extended stays in shelters where the flu will become epidemic, will die weeks or months later, succumbing to ailments they might otherwise overcome. The United States of America's water supply, reliant on electricity for filtration, will come close to running dry. Thousands of dairy farms will lose the capacity to milk their cows mechanically, and even where cows can be milked by hand or with generator power, the milk will not be delivered to production plants.

We must become aware of one overriding lesson: our dependence upon electricity makes us even more vulnerable than we will ever imagine. The Year-2000 problem will demonstrate that we are all now hostages to electricity. Whatever the Year-2000 problem crisis turns out to be, it is already unprecedented: We have never before anticipated the simultaneous break-down of a significant fraction of the world's machinery. True, it is possible that nothing will happen, that at midnight on January 1, 2000, the only thing that will drop besides the Times Square ball will be the jaws of litigators and survivalist salesmen who counted on chaos to generate even more business. Or maybe, just maybe, a lot of things - say, most things - will fall apart. Contrary to what the Social Security Administration has promised, pensioners in the United States of America will not get their Social Security checks after all, but that will not matter much, because we will not have a financial system that knows what to do with checks.

The truth is likely to fall between these two extremes. We may not glide into the new millennium, but we will not be destroyed by it, either. Across the spectrum of Year-2000 problem mavens, from debunkers to doomsayers, a rare point of agreement is that the electricity system is at the core of the problem. One disturbing scenario is that the massive electricity power outages will crop up all over the world, all at once: We will all find out that we are hostages to electricity.

This is not just a fringe notion. Victor W. Porlier, a former chief of information-systems development for the U.S. Agency for International Development (not exactly an extremist group) and the author of Y2K: An Action Plan to Protect Yourself, Your Family, Your Assets, and Your Community on January 1, 2000, calls the electrical system "the linchpin issue." Even the sober American Red Cross is advising citizens to prepare for an electricity power outage by stocking a week's worth of disaster supplies and keeping extra cash on hand in case automated teller machines do not work.

The idea of a sweeping blackout arises from the close relationship between electricity capacity and demand. If the Year-2000 problem forces a small fraction of electricity utilities out of service, the thinking goes, then the result could be a cascading electricity power outage spreading over a wide area. Remedies are complicated by the fact that the Year-2000 problem - the programming convention of indicating the year in two digits instead of four - is not just written into software, but it is also encoded in many of the billion-plus computer chips in world-wide circulation. Such embedded systems perform critical functions in electricity utility operations, including generation and delivery of power.

It makes sense, therefore, to assess the likelihood of a Year-2000 problem induced breakdown in the power grid and system, but even specialists in the field do not display much clarity on the topic. While the United States of America may be able to ride out its Year-2000 problems, other countries almost certainly will face more severe consequences. Nations that export oil to our country might just disappear off the technological map.

Power companies in the United States of America are far behind in the Year-2000 problem remediation. In addition, power plants are starting to face shortages of Year-2000 ready replacement parts, including embedded systems. As the Year-2000 approaches, the shortage is likely to deepen. Fossil-fuel-fired generating plants, which provide sixty-nine percent of the nation's energy supply, may run short of coal and/or petroleum if, as seems plausible, the transportation sector experiences its own Year-2000 problems. To pre-empt any possibility of nuclear catastrophe, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may deactivate some of the nation's 103 operating nuclear reactors for failure to show Year-2000 problem compliance.

All of this is likely to strain the power industry's capacity. The result will not be a vast blackout on January 1, but rather brownouts and rolling blackouts that start in mid-January, perhaps building to a peak during the summer, when power demand is high and Year-2000 problem snafus have accumulated. The worst impact might be economic, with industry slowing down because of power rationing. Overall, it is a disturbing scenario, but not an apocalyptic one. Perhaps, more to the point, it is nothing more than informed speculation.

In the end, we are left with only our gut feelings, the rough sum of our level of trust in experts and institutions, our temperament, and perhaps the bent and vividness of our imagination. If, in its stunning lack of predictability, the Year-2000 problem gives rise to plausible, but unverifiable scenarios, then perhaps we should try consulting the past: What really happens when the lights go out?

People will understand the Year-2000 problem's impact only gradually. Most other disasters - earthquakes, tornadoes, fires - strike suddenly, but the Year-2000 problem will take a few days to reach a crescendo, and then its main effect, the electricity power outage, will linger for weeks and/or months. Coping with it will thus require a marathoner's skills, not a sprinter's.

To be continued ...

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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