Gee, it's amazing how time flies when you're having fun. Why, it seems like just yesterday that Java and visual tools were being touted as virtual Advil for every programmer's headache...uh, sorry, that really was just yesterday.
In any event, time waits for no programmer, as evidenced by the coming "year 2000" crisis. If your head has been buried in microcomputer silicon, you probably haven't had to worry about the very real problem looming on the heavy-iron horizon. At the heart of the problem are the two-digit dates hardcoded into billions of lines of code and data files. (Rumor has it that DDJ's own Al Stevens is even responsible for some of this code.)
Although we take disk storage for granted today, programmers used to represent years in terms of two digits in an effort to save valuable disk space; the year "1966," for instance, was simply referenced as "66". That was fine in the '50s and '60s when the year 2000 was as remote as a gigabyte hard disk that would fit in the palm of your hand. Programmers didn't worry much about problems 40 or 50 years away (do you today?) because the task at hand was daunting enough. Nor did they expect that much of the software they were writing would be in use at the turn of the century. And even if some code was hanging around, it would be someone else's problem.
Then along came the 1970s, the rise in housing prices, and the advent of 30-year mortgages. What banks discovered was that when scheduling loans into the year "01" (for "2001"), the software treated the date as "1901." Insurance companies and other organizations involved in long-term projections began running into the same problem--dates used in programs were rolling back, not over, at midnight, December 31, 1999. And since dates are used more than any other type of data, just thinking about the morning of January 1, 2000 (okay, January 2, considering the holiday) caused a whole lot of shaking in corporate accounting departments.
Identifying the "millennium" or "year 2000" problem is straightforward and the deadline for rectifying it is fixed. Solving the problem, however, will be a monumental task that, at its lowest level, amounts to inspecting every line of code in every program or data file that might be affected. Experts estimate that for many organizations, that could be up to 100 million lines of code at a cost of $0.50 to $1.00 per line. According to year-2000 guru Peter de Jager, we're "talking about a global effort that will cost between 300 and 600 billion U.S. dollars... [and] an effort that will require 2 million skilled programmers."
As you might expect, an industry has grown up around the year-2000 problem with the requisite trade shows ("Year 2000 Solutions: Resources and Strategies for Managing the Year 2000 Date Conversion Problem," which met in March 1996), publications (the "Tick, Tick, Tick" newsletter, edited by Williom Goodwin), and Web sites (http://www.year2000.com).
Likewise, software companies such as Computer Associates, Micro Focus, Viasoft, and others have come forth with tools and services that address the problem. One component of CA's approach, for instance, involves "CA-Impact/2000," a parser-based "impact-analysis" tool embedded into source code. In a similar vein, Micro Focus's "Challenge 2000" program also includes tools for analysis and reengineering. Some companies have opted to rewrite their systems from scratch using object-oriented tools and techniques. Others have moved to PC-based client/server systems, away from mainframes altogether.
Still, there is an upside. Cobol programmers can count on continued employment, and there are some great parties being planned. Times Square hotels offering Millennium Eve blowouts are already booked up, Great Britain is putting together a $300 million Year 2000 exposition, the Pope has kicked off the Jubilee of the Year 2000, Mazda is launching a new Millennia automobile, Elizabeth Arden has an upcoming line of Millennium skin-care products, and Farberware will soon start shipping its Millennium pots and pans. And you can expect at least one forward-looking politician in the coming election season to promise legislation officially rolling back the clock to 1900.
But once the 1993 vintage Dom Perignon (which will be distributed December 31, 1999) is gone, governments and corporations that haven't planned for year 2000 conversion will wake up to a bigger headache than a post-party hangover. In many cases, it may already be too late for smoothly implementing the conversion. Let's see, from the cover date of this issue, there's a little more than 1300 shopping days left. Tick, tick, tick....
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief