The Y2K Neighborhood

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While those in the burgeoning Y2K surveillence industry have different views about how bad it will be, all agree that it is a problem. The staggering sum of money being poured into managing it is proof enough of that. By some estimates, Y2K remediation efforts are currently costing the U.S. as much as national defense.

What Is This Thing?

On the one hand Y2K is as simple to understand as a broken clock. On the other, it's as complex as the interconnectedness of life itself. Computers are machines that do mathematics--they add, subtract, multiply, divide. That's it. All of the millions of dazzling services they provide are based on those four functions. Registering time is an essential part of many of those functions, and so Y2K is about time. It's also about that most human of acts: a mistake. Just an innocent mistake, accidentally designed into these machines to which civilization has been entrusted.

Early programmers, products of a culture that understands The Summer of '42 to be a love story set in 1942, simply used this common shorthand. Without thinking, they abbreviated the long past and future--the concept of millennium and century--out of the computer's database. That left only the truncated digits of a decade. This was erroneously programmed into billions of lines of computer code in mainframes. The shorthand contaminates many PCs, and infects an unknown but significant percentage of the world's 20 billion to 70 billion microchips. The latter are tiny computers the size of a fingernail, 'embedded,' as they say, in the world's computer systems. That means they're part of the warp and weave of the Earth's economic and social systems, too. Regulating the pulse of life, they control the function of devices ranging from nuclear missiles to wristwatches to traffic lights to offshore oil platforms. (The average offshore rig has 10,000 embedded systems, some under water, some encased in concrete.) By one estimate, if only five of every 10,000 microchips failed because of Y2K, the result could be 12.5 million to 35 million critical computer failures worldwide.

On September 10, 1998, when Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), chairman of the technology subcommittee for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, issued the federal government one of his periodic report cards on its management of Y2K, anachronistic embedded systems were much on his mind. He noted that water pumps on the fire trucks of Baton Rouge, La., aren't affected by the year 2000 problem. It's just that the truck ladders won't work without Y2K repairs. Horn gave the government a 'D' for effort.Even so, Y2K really isn't a complicated problem. It's just a big simple problem. Lord explains it this way: 'If I gave you a shoebox full of marbles on Wednesday with a cloth and a can of polish and asked you to polish all the marbles by Saturday, you wouldn't have any difficulty. Now imagine the same assignment, but instead of a shoebox, the Grand Canyon filled to the brim with marbles. That's Y2K. It's a simple problem of overwhelming magnitude.'

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