To be sure, the most spectacular of the predicted disasters–ranging from elevators that refuse to budge from the lobby, to malfunctioning air-traffic-control systems, all the way to the unintended launch of a nuclear missile–failed to materialize. Essential services were maintained throughout the developed–and even the developing–world, as far as anyone could tell in the first hours of the new year. But other, subtler flaws may yet lurk in the interstices of banks, insurance companies, utilities, transportation services and government agencies. Some glitches were expected to start showing up this week, as business as usual resumed around the world; others may become apparent only as thecalendar progresses through a year’s worth of billing cycles, interest periods and payment deadlines. Some of the relief that people felt on hearing a dial tone Saturday morning will undoubtedly dissipate if they get a bill for a hundred years’ worth of phone service. “What you might get over a period of days or weeks is some degradation of quality,” says Bruce McConnell, director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center. “It’s going to gum up the works with annoying inconveniences.”
A minority of experts thought that the dangers went beyond inconvenience. Ed Yardeni, chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and a leading Y2K bear, warned about the possibility of a recession if computer glitches in foreign countries held up imports of raw materials or other goods. “Nobody really knows where the weak links are,” Yardeni said last week. “But we’re all going to find out together.” At a mostly upbeat New Year’s Day press briefing, John A. Koskinen, Washington’s chief Y2k troubleshooter, said that among the five leading oil exporters to the United States, Canada and Mexico seemed secure. That left Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. “Are we satisfied that all of those other countries are now out of the woods?” Koskinen said. “The answer is no.”
In general, small businesses, with fewer resources, are more at risk from computer screwups than giant corporations. Most people, of course, will survive a meltdown of their dry cleaners’ data-processing software; unfortunately, though, most health-care providers are small businesses, as these things are reckoned. Chronically strapped for cash, the industry was among the last to tackle Y2K problems. Even before the end of last year, 10 percent of 2,000 health-care companies surveyed said they had experienced Y2K-related failures. Without centralized coordination like that in banking, there’s little sense of how well the health-care industry has prepared. Some experts also fret that it remains vulnerable to the supply-chain problem. “There are a lot of steps in getting something from the rain forest into somebody’s bloodstream,” says Joel Ackerman, executive director of Rx2000, an information clearinghouse for the health-care industry. Any bumps along the way, he says, and we may not know until shortages show up in the second half of the year.
And even as the world awaits problems caused by Y2K bugs that went unfixed, it will confront a whole new category of problems resulting from programs that were fixed. “For every thousand changes you make to a computer system, you get eight new problems,” says Peter de Jager, a prominent Canadian consultant who was one of the first to sound the Y2K alarm. “If every company and government agency has just a few problems, that still means millions of problems. The notion that all the work ends Jan. 1 is bogus.” Newly written computer code is only as good as the procedures for testing it; in the wrong place, one untested line of code can have a ripple effect, not just in the program that contains it, but in all the programs that interact with it.
De Jager’s comments, as it happens, were meant to reassure programmers who shared in the largesse of the $500 billion Y2K-repair industry and may now be worrying about where their next bag of Doritos is to come from. Luckily for them, the vast worldwide effort to keep computers on track past the end of 1999 meant that a lot of other important programming work got shelved over the last year or two. Innovations such as “decimalization” of the stock exchanges–quoting prices in dollars and cents, rather than fractions–will keep programmers busy, and computer users on the alert for bugs, for years to come.
In fact, the next big test for computers will come in just two months, on Feb. 29, 2000–a date that many programs, alas, may not know exists. This so-called leap-year bug results from a peculiarity of the Gregorian calendar, which inserts an extra day at the end of February every four years, omits it on years that end a century, but puts it back in when the year is divisible by 400. Programmers who knew the secondof these rules but not the third would have instructed their computers, erroneously, that 2000 is not a leap year. This could result in all kinds of problems if the computer happens to be, say, keeping track of an oil tanker expected to arrive in port on the day after Feb. 28. “We worked with 300 companies, and every single company had some leap-year problems,” says Nigel Martin-Jones, executive vice president of the high-tech consulting firm Data Dimensions.
No one is making the same kinds of apocalyptic predictions about Feb. 29 that were bandied about in the weeks leading up to Jan. 1. But anyone still holed up with his diesel generator this week might just want to keep his tank full for another couple of months.
