By Charles Miller
Twenty-two years ago this week, there was literally nothing else in the news but Y2K and all the worries about the world’s electronic systems not being able to cope with the change from 1999 to the year 2000. People were worried that banks, communications, utilities and other vital systems might shut down. As you probably know, we survived that and something else also survived. Proving the immortality of bureaucracies, many Y2K paperwork requirements for U.S. government agencies continued for 17 years until canceled by the Trump administration. Less bureaucracy might sound like a good thing, but in this case not all Information Technology people agree.
The fact of the matter is that Y2K-like problems are still very much with us today and the end of every year always causes some new ones to surface. In January of this year, a friend of mine in the U.S. had a GPS navigation system in his car that got a little crazy. It turned out that many Hondas and Acuras manufactured between 2004 and 2012 contained a Y2K bug in their computers.
Computer techs are aware of The Year 2038 problem which is a known time formatting bug in UNIX computer systems. That software keeps time by counting the seconds that have elapsed since the arbitrary starting date in 1970. Why does that matter? Because probably most of the servers that make up the internet run on software derived from UNIX. What is going to happen? At exactly 3:14am and 07 seconds UTC on January 19 2038 all of these UNIX-based servers will run out of numbers and stop counting. That could result in crashing the Internet, but rest assured many engineers are working on ways to keep that from happening. Every year in this week after Christmas all of us IT people think of this.
I remember in 1999 I spent a lot of my time preparing for Y2K, both professionally and personally. One example is the DOS-based program I purchased in 1989 to keep track of my checking accounts. Ten years later, and several computers later, in 1999 that program was still working perfectly, so I investigated whether or not I could continue using it after January 1, 2000 and the answer was yes. A message on a tech newsgroup said that a simple change of habit could permit the program to continue working. All I had to do was change the date entry syntax from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd’yy. See the difference? By changing the second slash (/) to an apostrophe (‘) the program recognized the year as 2000 and not 1900; and the message warned this work-around was good for twenty years.
That “twenty years” disclaimer is something I happened to remember this week, and I am glad I did. That program I purchased in 1989 is still around, at least at my house where it has outlasted a dozen or more computers, it still works flawlessly, and I still use it. Unfortunately, after some testing I was able to determine that Friday, December 31, 2027 will be the last day I will be able to do so.
Here is hoping that all of my readers have a happy and prosperous new year in 2023!
Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and is now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 415 101 8528 or email FAQ8@SMAguru.com.
