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Confessions of a Y2K denier

By Chris Abood - posted Tuesday, 14 August 2007


I have a confession to make. I was a Y2K denier. During the late 90s I was asked many times were all our computers going to stop on January 1, 2000. My answer was always no. The majority of computer systems would be unaffected. Some systems (known as legacy systems) would but are already undergoing remediation. To fix the problem was relatively simple.

However, the hype of fear continued. Planes were going to fall out of the sky and missiles would launch themselves. Today, we look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. There has been much comparison between Y2K and global warming of late, so can parallels be drawn and lessons learnt?

Back in the dim dark ages of computing (the 60s and 70s) when computers occupied an entire room and had the memory capacity of a walnut shell, programmers had to devise ways of optimising their code in order to efficiently work within the bounds of computer capacity at the time. One such optimising strategy was to store the year part of a date as two digits instead of four. So 1962 was stored as 62. This was before the wide spread use of serial dates (explained later) and abundant memory capacity.

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Early in the 90s it was realised that if the year 2000 was stored as 00, this could cause problems if your program engaged in date calculations, common among financial applications. For instance, if you wanted to know how long someone had been a member of your organisation, you would subtract the start year from the end year. If the start year was 1962 and the end year was 1980 then you would subtract 1962 from 1980. If the year were stored as 62 and 80 then there would be no problem. However, if the end year was 2000 and the year was stored as 00 you would get an incorrect figure.

The Year 2000 bug (aka Y2K) was perhaps the greatest swindle perpetrated by people purporting to be computer professionals.

I remember the meetings. “It has a date, it has a date. It has to be remediated, it has to be remediated”, the consultants would shout. “Well no, the program is unaffected by the ‘so called’ Y2K bug, the date that is used is for display purposes only and is stored in the database as a serial date” I would counter.

This was not what the consultants wanted to hear, for this meant that if they were unable to “remediate” the program, then they would not be able to charge four weeks worth of consultancy fees for work that should take no more than an hour.

After the meeting the consultants would get into the manager’s ear and tell them that if the program was not remediated and something went wrong on Y2K day, then it would be their head on the chopping block.

For quite some time before Y2K day, dates were stored in what is called a serial date (or more formally called a Julian date). A serial date is simply the number of days from a base date. For instance, the base date for Microsoft Excel is 0 January, 1900. So, 1 Jan 1900 serial number is 1 and 8 Jan 2007 serial number is 39090*.

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Once you know the base date and the serial date, then it is just a simple formula to find the date in the format you require. 1 Jan 1900 (serial date 1) was a Monday, so every 7 days from this date is a Monday (serial date 8, 15, 22 and so on). To calculate the day of the week from a serial date we would use the formula: serial date minus the integer (an integer is a whole number) part of the serial date divided by seven then multiplied by seven. So to find the day for 8 Jan 2007, the formula would be [39090 - Int (39090 ÷ 7) x 7] which is 2. In Excel, day 1 is Sunday**, so 8 Jan 2007 is a Monday. 1 Jan 2000 is just another serial number (36526).

So why did the manager believe the consultants, most of whom got their qualifications from reading Windows for Dummies as opposed to someone like me, a person with a bachelor and masters degree in information technology? Fear and a lack of understanding of information technologies.

But there was also something else that the managers had a vested interest in: scaring the politicians. For some time the Australian Taxation Office had argued that Y2K remediation was to be capitalised. In the 1998 budget, the Federal Government announced that Y2K remediation was an expense. This change in accounting of Y2K work turned out to be a blunder on the part of the Federal Government as it provided companies with an enormous tax advantage. All of a sudden, everything within a company was a Y2K project.

Computers that were scheduled to be replaced in two to three years time were all of a sudden found to be non Y2K compliant and immediately replaced. Forward planned system projects were immediately started upon. This created a lot of work and fuelled demand for ICT workers. Into the void stepped many “instant ICT professionals”, as there was money to be made “in them thar hills”.

Two other events also fuelled the ICT industry at this time, the introduction of the GST (all accounting systems had to be changed to cater for the new tax) and the Dot Com boom, the so-called “New Economy”. By 2001 it was all over. Y2K didn’t happen, GST was implemented smoothly and the Dot Com boom became the Dot Com crash (it was not a new economy, just a different, albeit more efficient means of distributing goods and services).

There were however, significant consequences for the ICT industry. With up to five years work completed in the space of a couple of years, there was no more demand for ICT workers. The industry went into melt down as companies tightened budgets and stopped ICT spending.

The result was a lot of unemployed ICT professionals, both real and purported. Many left the industry never to return. Young students were turned off studying ICT and choosing it as a career. Now that ICT spending has returned to normal, the industry is in the midst of a skills shortage. Many companies cannot get ICT workers and their businesses are suffering from systems in dire need of upgrades.

A good friend of mine who left the ICT industry to pursue a career in the health and fitness industry laughed at me when I said his ICT skills are in big demand. He is 45 who looks 30, never been fitter. He works his own hours and is earning more than ever. To him, he has the perfect life-work balance job. Why would he ever return?

A supposed date problem that was not fully understood by the public, and experts that were not listened to, as the moneymen moved in causing untold damage to the ICT industry and business in general: they are still feeling the pain. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned.

POSTSCRIPT: The Daily Planet, early edition, serial date 50327 (14 Oct 2037): Building workers excavating a site for a new shopping mall in down town Metropolis uncovered a metal hatch. Upon opening it, a family emerged. Their first words were, “Did the planet survive Y2K”. “What is Y2K”, the workers replied.

* If you type in the date 8 Jan 2007 into a cell in Excel, copy that cell then do a paste special values into another cell, you will be presented with the serial date. When dealing with dates it is always good practice to use the 8 Jan 2007 (dd mmm yyyy) format, as you will eliminate confusion. 08/01/2007 means 01 August 2007 in the USA.

** A bug in the Excel serial date calculation returns an incorrect day for the first two months of 1900. This is because 1900 was treated as leap year when it was not. The bug originated in Lotus 123 and Microsoft replicated the bug for compatibility reasons.

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About the Author

Chris Abood is a teacher and computer programmer. He has taught at TAFE and private RTOs, and has worked as a computer programmer mainly in banking and finance. He is concerned with the effects and use of technology within society. These opinions are his own.

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All articles by Chris Abood

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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