PREPARING FOR Y2K...
Millennium fever, as much as anything, fuels the panic over Y2K. Just as the Book of Revelation loosed apocalyptic visions on 10th-century Europe, Y2K has given today's society its own doomsday. But 2000 is not alone as a drop-dead date for computing systems. The bugs listed here arise from myopic attempts to take shortcuts, cut typing time, or avoid arguments. Too bad most of the coders won't be around to see the results of their handiwork.
January 1, 1999
Y2K Junior
In a kind of preview of Y2K, programs that use "99" as a sentinel value (for example, to indicate that no year value was available for a given database entry) start treating everyday dates as special cases. Fortunately, the only vulnerable are the few companies that have not yet begun a Y2K audit or that chose another set of numbers.
August 22, 1999
GPS Rollover
GPS software rolls over its week counter for the first time. GPS satellites in geosynchronous orbit measure time in weeks; every 1,024 weeks (about 19 years, eight months), this value changes from 1,023 to 0. With the system dating from January 5, 1980, the roll-over has never been tested live before. Bugs in international-funds transfer programs that use GPS dates could cause 20-year errors in calculating interest rates.
September 9, 1999
End-of-File Bug (Part 1)
Programs that use "9999" as an end-of-file marker may mistake the date 9/9/99 as an end of file, or vice versa. But by this time, Y2K-type failures will already be frequent news, occurring whenever business contracts, drug prescriptions, travel arrangements, and other critical transactions involving future dates venture into the no-man's-land of 00.
January 1, 2000
The Big One
Even if 85 percent of all Y2K-prone applications are fixed, about 1.7 million will still fail next New Year's Day. Jason Matusow, strategy manager for Microsoft's Y2K effort, has deployed hundreds of "the people closest to the code" to test and debug the company's wares and minimize the impact. But most institutions won't have this luxury: The programmers who wrote their code have long since moved on to other projects.
September 8, 2001
End-of-File Bug (Part 2)
One last wave of circa-2000 problems comes when some Unix programs using "999,999,999" as an end-of-file marker confuse the data with the date - 999,999,999 seconds since January 1, 1970, as Unix timekeeping goes.
2000-2025
Phone-Number Fallout
The explosion in devices requiring new phone connections - cellular and other wireless telephones, pagers, and fax machines - is eating up the supply of available numbers in North America's 10-digit scheme. Instituting a new system - such as four-digit area codes - will break databases and other software based on the 10-digit scheme and make millions of cell phones and PDAs with fixed formats obsolete.
January 19, 2038
Unix End of Time
Nearly 40 years from now, Unix systems hit their own date overflow bug when the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, exceeds a 32-bit storage value. "Keep some perspective," advises Unix and C architect Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. "It's 40 years from now. Forty years ago there were no commercial computers at all."
Circa 2050
Social Insecurity
A billion Social Security numbers seems adequate for a nation the size of the United States (population 270 million). But think of the ubiquity of Social Security numbers as identifiers. Unless the numbers are recycled - an option under consideration - the addition of digits or other changes in the system will need to be reflected not only in software, but in databases stretching back to the dawn of computing.
January 1, 10,000
Y10K
In 10,000, software with four-digit year fields will think the year is AD 0000. Seem unlikely? Remember that most Y2K issues were known to developers even as they wrote their flawed code. Bright spot: Given the stiff consulting rates charged in the 1990s by masters of obsolete programming languages, college kids in 9998 will find an easy way to hustle up tuition - by learning the 8,000-year-old secrets of Cobol.
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Jargon Watch
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Raw Data
