Separating Fact from Fiction

Myth: No one saw the year 2000 problem coming, and the IT specialists who built today's systems should be blamed for their short-sightedness.

Fact: For many years, it made economic sense to use two-digit dates. "In hindsight, it seems these people should have known better," a National Institute of Standards and Technology publication says, but they were trying to conserve expensive storage and computer memory capacity. "Adding two century digits to a date field for a 100-million record file would have added at least 100 megabytes of storage requirement to a disk that cost upwards of $20,000 for 15-20 megabytes," the NIST fact sheet says. Given the pace of change in IT, no one could foresee that software written in the 1970s or 1980s still would be in use today.

Myth: This problem can be fixed easily.

Fact: True, it's not a technically challenging problem for the most part. That's one reason it never got fixed. But the repairs are time-consuming, the deadline is not subject to slippage and the sheer magnitude of the problem is staggering. The Congressional Research Service has this to say: "While correcting the year field is technically simple, the process of analyzing, correcting, testing and integrating software and hardware among all computer systems that must interact is a very complex management task."

Myth: The "millennium bug" will affect the operation of pacemakers and other life support systems.

Fact: Pacemakers won't be affected, but many other kinds of microprocessor-driven medical equipment are subject to breakdowns because of embedded calendar functions.

Myth: All this hand-wringing is unnecessary, because the IT industry will find a way to solve the problem in time.

Fact: It's not the kind of problem that's susceptible to an automated solution. Software tools are helping with particular aspects of it, such as scanning thousands of lines of software code for date references, but a lot of human effort is the only sure fix.

Myth: Government systems are in worse shape than corporate systems.

Fact: There's no way to prove or disprove this statement. It's likely that open discussion of the problem in the public sector has contributed to the perception that the problem is worse there. As with most things, some agencies are handling the problem better than others, so generalizations about government are suspect.