Never one to rush a good cataclysm, Stan weighs in at the midnight hour with his own take on Y2K.
I had resolved not to bore you with my spin on the Y2K saga. Yet, as the clock of Damocles ticks on, I thought I should throw my ancient hat in the ring before the world ends and every known computer column collapses. Composing a potentially final Abschied helps mightily to focus the mind. After all, literally, the so-called Y2K "bug" is the fault of EOFs (Extremely Old Farts) such as moi who were recklessly conserving bytes back in the 1950s. Even earlier, in fact, as I'm fond of telling my gullible clients: "Fear not," sez I, "we coped with the 1899-18100 transition." (Yes, Hollerith cards had diverse X-Y overpunchings and some even offered a col-81). Some are blaming COBOL for the default [19]yy format, yet programs written in contemporaneous languages such as APL also took the millennial-unaware route [1]. What I can assert is that way back in the [19]50/60s many of our applications were unavoidably involved with [20]yy dates. For example, insurance companies were among the first to computerize, and policy-expiration dates and actuarial tables oft went beyond 12/31/1999. (Quick diversion: an actuary is a statistician who wants you to die on time.)
However, as you've been reading ad nauseam, certain clock chip odometers will flip from 99 to 00 with no overflow warning, and many naive programs, not mine, will default to an off-by-one-century, 1900. Not so bad, really, as one-off errors go, until you reach 1914 when the century went irretrievably rotten [2]. The bright side, often overlooked, is that telephone calls spanning 12/31/1999 and 01/01/2000 will result in large negative on-line connect times with huge credits on your AT&T bill. Similarly, Miss Otis will regret that the elevator has not been serviced for an unsigned 68K years — an obvious fail-safe situation.
Kevin G. Barkes, who hosts the most mis-hit website (www.kgb.com [3]), has an infallible Y2K solution. You simply buy ($20) and wear his KGB Y2K Beanie™. Given the probability of being zapped by a Y2K problem, the probability of such while you are improbably wearing the Beanie is...I leave the multiplication to you and Bayes. You may recognize an earlier, less advisable variant: always carry a bomb when you board a plane!
Sneak-Preview: My Feb'00 Column (if such there be):
I've been working on the next-big-hyped, truly portable language. It's a sort of Java/Common Lisp mélange retaining the syntactic simplicity of C++ and Algol68. The temp in-house designation is BALSA but my Indonesian Xerox marketing colleagues prefer TIMOR.
References
[1] APL Quote Quad, Vol. 29, Number 1, September 1998, SIGAPL (ACM Press). A wonderfully honest summary of Y2K origins and fixes.
[2] Barbara Tuchman (Pulitzer Prize for History, 1963). The Guns of August. Essential reading for all who think that the current e-strategic machinations have outdone Machiavelli.
[3] Old lefties and ex-CIA agents are daily linked by primitive Yahoo! searches. But at least Kevin is less bothered by those exotic invites from <MuscoviteVixenSeekingUSLovers>.
Stan Kelly-Bootle has been computing on and off since 1953 when he graduated from Cambridge University in Pure Mathematics and hacked on EDSAC I (the first true stored-program computer). He is a contributing editor for UNIX Review/Performance Computing, and a Jolt Judge for Software Development Magazine. His many books include 680x0 Programming by Example, Mastering Turbo C, Lern Yerself Scouse, The Devil's DP Dictionary, The Computer Contradictionary, and Unix Complete. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, his songs have been recorded by Cilla Black, Judy Collins, the Dubliners, and himself. Stan welcomes email via skb@crl.com and his website http://www.crl.com/~skb/.