While they are loath to admit it, the year 2000 has more than a few technocrats shaking in their boots. The so-called "Y2K bug," directly or indirectly threatens the integrity of computer systems, networks, and technology world-wide. Even everyday items like home thermostats and garage door openers could fail on January 1, 2000. Economic, political, and social upheaval will follow, say some experts, if the problem is not solved.

The Y2K frenzy reminds me of the kind of hype and anticipation that preceded 1984, inspired by George Orwell's allegorical novel of the same title. Add to that the millenium bug, and you get all the cataclysmic hallmarks of 1984, with one ironic twist: The very thing we feared most about the year, Orwell's infamous "Big Brother," is precisely what we stand to lose in the year 2000. No device has given government, or business for that matter, greater access to our personal lives and habits than the computer. So why are we worried? And what difference should it make to writers?

"Y2K" is practically synonymous with the computer bug, but the year 2000 provoked concern long before our little techno pest appeared. The end of the millenium is the raison d'être for innumerable cults and religious groups. To certain Christian sects, for example, 2000 AD is the reputed date of the "Second Coming." William Butler Yeats' 1921 poem "The Second Coming" plays on that theme with these familiar lines: "...after twenty centuries of stony sleep...what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born." Nostradamus predicted the world would end in the year 2000. And even champagne merchants are anticipating an unprecedented shortage of the "bubbly" on the eve of the new millenium. Given the implications of the Y2K bug, it would appear the doomsayers are vindicated. Indeed, many of the web sites devoted to this high-tech glitch seem to revel in the hype of these provocative themes. Most of them have Y2K products to sell and, no doubt, welcome a little help from Nostradamus.

The problem with the year 2000, from a technological standpoint, is its last two digits. Out of ignorance, laziness, or lack of foresight, (and some say, to save money), computer products and high-tech components were designed to operate on a two-digit year. Thus "1999" is simply "99." The 19 is assumed. If you add a year, the numerals become 00, which these products and components will either recognize as 1900, or not recognize, at all. Testimony given before a Minnesota state legislative committee investigating the problem this year, described a date-forward test carried out by officials of a Louisiana fire department to determine whether their fire fighting equipment was ready for the new millennium. Everything checked out, except the hook-and-ladder, which failed to extend when the date rolled over to the year 2000.

A few experts have been aware of the Y2K bug since the 1960's. But little was done about it before 1996; and its implications went largely ignored until only recently. The Federal Government, for example, waited 'til just last year to form a Year 2000 Conversion Council for overseeing and coordinating the transition at the federal level. The good news is that significant resources are being poured into solving this problem, and many systems in the U.S. already are, or will be, compliant by the year 2000. The bad news is, it may be too little, too late for the rest. In his book Y2K Citizen's Action Guide, Eric Utne (Utne Reader), considered one of the more optimistic writers on the subject, concludes that, because of its complexity, the millennium bug can't possibly be fixed by the year 2000. Even if the United States could solve all of its Y2K problems in time, it's a forgone conclusion that other countries can't. And experts are predicting a domino effect because of the interconnection of high-tech systems world wide.

What it means for writers is both intriguing and worrisome. Yeats' beastly metaphor and Orwell's ominous "Big Brother" are indicative of the image evoking, symbolic, and metaphorical potential that dates (whether actual or virtual), indeed numerals in general, hold. One need only mention the year 1929, for instance, to evoke images of panic and doom. Ray Bradbury understood the ironically chilling power of the numerals 451 when he called his sci-fi thriller Fahrenheit 451, (the kindling temperature of books). A whole book of the Old Testament is devoted to numbering. And, of course, there's numerology which concerns itself with the occult significance of numbers. All of this is indicative of our fascination with numbers and dates, from the Ides of March to Friday, the 13th, as well as the roles they've played and will go on playing in literature.

Publishers expect to be deluged (if they haven't already, given the current level of hype) with manuscripts from writers hoping to cash in on the Y2K frenzy. As publisher of a poetry magazine, I anticipate more than a few millenium submissions. Newspaper articles on the computer problem and its implications are being published daily. Infoseek, one of numerous search engines on the internet, lists over 120,000 web sites which make reference to Y2K. And I found 60 books with "Y2K" in their titles available from AMAZON.COM, alone. All of them have been published since 1998—an indication, perhaps, of the rather tardy attention the problem is getting.

Americans seem to be in a kind of stupor over the millenium bug crisis, and we writers figure (or, at least, hope) it won't affect us since we don't deal with date sensitive data. Lacking the technical expertise to help ourselves, we become like T.S. Eliot's "withered stumps of time" in a wasteland of our own denial, afraid even to ask: "'What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?'" We just blankly trust that Bill Gates is taking care of it.

In his net book, Year 2000 Recession (available on YARDENI.COM), Dr. Ed Yardeni, who writes the "Y2K Reporter" and is chief economist of Deutsche Bank Securities in New York, reports: "Notwithstanding the widespread belief that 'Bill Gates will fix it,' the official position of Microsoft is that this is a problem that everyone must fix on his own." Indeed, despite assurances of testing, good practices, and user education, a 1997 company disclaimer reads:

...an ominous disclaimer when you consider that the most prolific disk operating system on personal computers today is Microsoft's Windows 95 (or its Windows 98 upgrade). Apple Computer, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun MicroSystems, among others, offer no Y2K warranties, either; although most state that their products are Y2K-compliant.

Are the issues related to the year 2000 transition, really, that serious? Again, from Yardeni's net book we get these choice words of Charles Rossotti, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who called the problem "scarier than the average disaster movie that you might see on Saturday night." MONEY.COM offers this analysis: "Even a computer system that has been carefully prepared for the year 2000 can be undone if it electronically exchanges data with one that isn't bug free." U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called it "a devastating computer problem [which] will have extreme negative economic and national security consequences." According to U.S. Senator Bob Bennett, "The Year 2000 problem lies at the heart of our economy." And even Rochester, Minnesota's famed Mayo Clinic is taking no chances. Linda Letts, a nurse at the Clinic-connected Methodist Hospital, notes that all staff will be required to report for their respective shifts with no New Year's holiday until January 3, 2000.

What are writers saying about the millenium bug? If book titles are any indication, we could be in deep trouble. Take, for instance, these titles from dozens of books on the subject at AMAZON.COM: Y2K: It's Already Too Late; Y2K, the Day the World Shut Down; Time Bomb 2000; Y2K Equals 666; and rather tellingly, Y2K Gold Rush. In his book What will Become of Us...Counting Down to Y2K, Julian Gregori quotes a May 1998 Washington Post article about the bug by Robert Samuelson: "I lean toward alarmism because all the specialists I contacted last week – people actually involved with fixing computers – are alarmed. On the record, they say the problem is serious and the hour is late...Off the record they incline toward Doomsday."

Inclined to be somewhat skeptical, myself, I asked a local Y2K consultant whether he considers the problem to be serious. Scott Berkholz of Stream Software, who is working on the problem for Carlson Companies, said that, while he hasn't begun stocking up on canned goods, he is concerned and doesn't believe the problem is being over hyped. Yet, in his words, "It's ludicrous to take extreme measures in the United States, at least; in other countries, I would."

Virtually no one in America can expect to escape the effects of the millenium bug. Computers control nearly every aspect of our lives: food, water, energy, money, transportation, communication, security, etc. From the back cover of Gregori's book, "The average American depends on over 264 computers per day." The extent to which you, as a writer, depend on a computer for your writing, communicating, and livelihood, the Y2K bug could affect you. It surely ought to be of concern to publishers who maintain date sensitive data with date dependent applications like Quick Books and Microsoft Access and Excel. And while writers often don't work with date sensitive data, many of the applications they use have date sensitive components. I, for one, keep track of my accounts with Quicken Basic '98, which still relies on a two-digit year.

Eileen Buckholts, author of the e-book Y2K Run to Save Your PC from the Year 2000 Bug, offers a convenient free checklist on her web site, Y2KRUN.COM, for PC users. According to the checklist, if your computer is an early Pentium or older, was purchased prior to 1997, has software that runs on DOS or is not the latest version available, and has a calendar function that won't let you see past 1999, you probably have the millenium bug. The checklist also mentions the inherent problems of tracing the Y2K status of computers assembled with components from a variety of sources and freeware available over the internet. Other Y2K web sites offer similar checklists, as well as solutions for PC users.

While Apple Computer says its products are ready for the 21st century, I could find no information on the company's web site about the Y2K status of early products, like the Apple II computer. But the company does warn its customers to be wary of software designed by other companies to run on the Apple platform. Like Apple, most computer hardware and software companies offer Y2K information relative to their products on their customer service or technical support lines and company web sites.

Word processing and desktop publishing programs present an interesting set of problems. The really old ones, which do not have date sensitive functions, such as "mail merge," are probably better than later versions which do. But the fact that the older versions usually operate on DOS platforms is problematic, since the platform itself is not Y2K-compliant. Only the very latest word processing applications--those produced since 1997, can be expected to be Y2K-compliant. But don't assume that, just because you bought an application in 1997 or later, it is bug free. My Quicken Basic 98, which is not Y2K-compliant, was purchased new last year!

Ultimately, the problem goes deeper than your word processing or desktop publishing program. Older operating systems are probably not compliant, and some of the new ones aren't, either. INTEGRATIONSOLUTIONS.COM, for example, states emphatically that "Windows 95 will fail" in the year 2000. None of the many operating systems out there—Linux, Sun Solaris, BSD, Net-BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, among others—is offering Y2K warranties, and some aren't even claiming to be bug free. But deeper than that, the seat of the millenium bug seems to be the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) of computers, themselves. According to Integration Solutions, 93% of PC's manufactured prior to 1997 will fail on January 1, 2000; almost half of those produced in '97 will also fail, but most PC's made after that should be okay. Knowing that alone, however, isn't enough. The very languages on which our computers depend to operate and communicate with one another must be considered, too. PERL.COM, the web site for the Perl programming language commonly used on the Internet offers this intriguing disclaimer: "...Perl is every bit as Y2K-compliant as your pencil; no more, and no less." The problem is not the hardware, firmware, or software, so much as it is the "wetware" (human factor), according to this web site. Ultimately, the only appropriate view of the problem to take is a holistic view, one which considers all aspects of your system and the systems with which it communicates, as well as the data and software you use.

There is almost no way to be certain that your system, particularly if it is older, is bug free without testing it or running software designed to ascertain and correct the problem. The good news is, there are a wide variety of products on the market designed to do just that. Most of them have the number 2000 in their names—products like Fix 2000, Test 2000, Tracer 2000, Norton 2000, 2000 Toolbox, Check 2000 PC, Bridgeway 2000, Survive-2000, etc. Some are designed to test and/or fix certain applications only; others work at the systems level. The bad news is, a few of these products have been shown to contradict the results of others.

The most important thing to do to prepare for the year 2000 from the standpoint of your computer system is to know what you have and know its vintage. If you have any reason to suspect that your computer, its platform, and any of the applications and data you use are not Y2K-compliant, then you have three options: (1) you can run tests and correct the problem yourself, if you have the technical sophistication, or purchase software which will do that for you; (2) you can upgrade or replace your non-compliant software, platform, and/or system with new Y2K-compliant equipment, components, and/or software; or (3) you can do nothing. According to Scott Berkholz, you could ignore the problem and allow the computer to "chug" into the next millenium believing the 20th century had started all over again, or you could work around it by setting the system date back a few years. But a non-compliant application or system will very likely corrupt date sensitive data or cause compliant applications which are introduced to it to fail.

With a minimum of technical know-you, you can perform a simple test to determine if you computer system is Y2K-compliant. Berkholz recommends that you first backup the system to a media that is restorable from, then set the computer's internal clock forward to a few minutes before midnight December 31, 1999, and let it run. After the clock passes midnight and the date rolls over to January 1, 2000, check all of your computer's functions, programs, and data. If everything works, you're in the clear. However, you still need to be cautious that you do not introduce non-compliant components, applications, or data to your system. Internet users need to be particularly vigilant. According to Berkholz, the millenium bug is not a computer virus. It cannot "infect" your system and spread. "But," Berkholz warns, "Y2K-bug affected data from other systems can affect your system." I , for one, plan to back up everything on my computer; remove or upgrade old applications; upgrade my operating system; run the date-forward test and any other required tests; replace the BIOS chip, if necessary, or the computer; and then be cautious about what data, components, and applications I introduce to my computer after that.

Beyond the personal implications of the millenium bug for writers, however, are the larger implications for society. Writers have an important role to play, not only in documenting this unprecedented occurrence, but in helping to deliver accurate information, offering thoughtful analysis, and inspiring genuine solutions. Writers also have an opportunity they haven't had in 2000 years to conceive the images of a new millenium; celebrate its birth; discover its hidden ironies; revisit time's unrelenting measure of indifference; and create the metaphors we will need to explain; survive; and transcend it. Perhaps we should resist the inevitable hype, the doomsayers, the Armageddon watch. But like cataclysm junkies, we seem to anticipate Y2K as though it held out our next fix. In all the frenzy, have we forgotten that the 20th century, with its two world wars, holocaust, missles and rockets, atomic weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction, not to mention artificial intelligence, has already proved to be the most cataclysmic in history.

URL: http://www.streamsoftware.com/y2kart.html
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Last modified: Tue Jan 25 19:38:14 CST 2000
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