Millennium bug: Panic like it's 1999

"The entire industry is in a state of denial."
Mike Elgan, Windows Magazine

Three years from a deadline wouldn't sound like the last minute to many people. But for businesses and government agencies facing a massive update of millions of computers, with an estimated $300 billion to $600 billion price tag, 1997 started to feel that way.

When the annual odometer rolls over on January 1, 2000, a lot of computers are going to become confused and think it's 1900. And three years is little time to check millions of computers and billions of lines of code to make sure that doesn't happen.

In computing's earliest days, memory was scarce. So dates were recorded in the shortest possible form, and many software programs used only the last two numbers in a year -- such as "70" instead of 1970.

All sorts of programs perform all sorts of calculations with those numbers, many of which will come up with strange results on "00." The problem is particularly acute in programs that have been used for decades and revised and updated, but never rewritten from scratch. Government agencies, banks and large companies often depend on such older software on mainframe computers.

Say, for example, it's January 1, 2000. Just after midnight Eastern Time, IBM chief Lou Gerstner, on the East Coast, calls Microsoft's Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington, to wish him a happy new year. Because it's still 1999 on the West Coast, a phone company computer bitten by the millennium bug could bill him for a 99-year call.

Or a January mortgage payment that arrives in December could be flagged as 99 years late. Government agencies anticipate problems calculating benefit payments, prisoner release dates, and, of course, tax numbers.

But it's not just big, old mainframes. Some desktop computers are vulnerable, especially older ones running Windows 3.1 or earlier (Macintosh computers are immune). Embedded devices -- the computers that run cars, large-scale air conditioners and security systems, among other things -- could also fail.

In September, New Zealand teen-ager Nicholas Johnson said he'd designed a program to fix the millennium bug, but he was short on details while awaiting a patent.

Linguistic purists point out that the "millennium bug" is misnamed -- the millennium actually begins on January 1, 2001, because there was no year zero. But the computers, blissfully ignorant of the finer points, will face problems in 2000 just the same, barring a solution.