Panel Urges Caution When Treating Millennial Fever While Computer Glitch Is Real, Professor Says Reaction To It May Be Exaggerated

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.

Not the highly educated. They think Armageddon will be triggered by a computer glitch.

Too sophisticated to believe adding three zeros to a date will bring down the hand of God, or cause space aliens to descend on the Earth, some very well educated people in Pullman say they know the date and the hour: Midnight, Jan. 1, 2000.

On that day millions of computer programs, unable to cope with the new millennium, will shut off air conditioning, plunge the world into darkness, and knock satellites from their orbits to come hurtling toward the Earth, according to the prognosticators.

Costs of repairing a computer glitch caused by the turn of the millennium “appear to constitute the most expensive single problem in human history,” read a message from WSU’s student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, which this week hosted a panel discussion of the problem.

But not everyone is panicking.

All the talk of a time bomb in the world’s computers - known as the “millennium bug” or the “year 2000 problem” - might just be a way for the irreligious, technology-worshiping west to get in on millennial fever, according to a Washington State University political science professor.

“When we’ve come upon a millennium in the past, we find in recorded history people predicted the end of the world,” said Terrence Cook, WSU political science professor. “It use to be fire and brimstone. Now it’s these calculation function points.”

Speaking at the student-sponsored panel, Cook urged the audience to look with skepticism on predictions of software disaster made by software professionals.

When the message of the doomsayers is boiled down it is “hire more computer software specialists and hire them now, before the year 2000,” Cook said.

A widely publicized January study of the year 2000 problem by the Burlington, Mass., firm Software Productivity Research estimated the cost of repairs at $1.4 billion in Washington and $271 million in Idaho. At the same time, SPR advised companies they had only nine months left to begin a fix or abandon all hope.

The firm, Cook notes, is a for-profit research, development and management consulting company.

“Assuming there is a problem, I wonder if it isn’t being exaggerated and exaggerated for a purpose,” he said. “I think we need to distrust the experts here.”

But the problem causing the fuss is real.

Embedded in the lines of code that run software applications are commands requiring references to the correct date. Until recently, dates have been recorded in computers with only two digits. Without repair, the functions will make incorrect calculations at the turn of the century, thinking the year is 1900 instead of 2000. Other software may simply crash.

Correcting the problem means hiring a computer programmer skilled in out-dated computer languages to scan thousands of lines of computer code in search commands likely to affect dates.

Fixing the computers at home and office will be the easy part, according to Mark Manwaring, WSU electrical engineering and computer science professor.

Many less obvious computers exist on aircraft or inside heating systems.

Unlike personal computers, many of the systems can’t be fixed, because their clocks are built in to their hardware, Manwaring said.

Calculating the toll on the economy of the year 2000 problem, SPR’s report, “The Global Economic Impact of the Year 2000 Software Problem,” said when the costs of business failures, bankruptcies and lawsuits are added to software repair, the problem will cost to the nation as a whole $277 billion.

Worldwide, the glitch will cost $1.6 trillion, SPR wrote. And it doesn’t end there, according to SPR. “No doubt the year 2000 software problem will serve as the basis of many masters and doctoral theses in psychology and sociology in the 21st century,” the firm’s report said.

But Wayne Joerding, WSU economics professor, said many of the costs outlined by SPR are actually a wash when the U.S. economy is examined as a whole.

For example, he said, SPR’s biggest itemized cost - $100 billion in lawsuits - likely won’t hurt the economy at all, since money paid out in damages by software companies stays in the economy.

In fact, Joerding said, by keeping lawyers “from actually damaging the economy” litigation over the millennium bug could be a negative cost to the economy.

Other costs of the year 2000 problem, like upgrading computer hardware would likely be done by companies anyway, said Joerding. Based on SPR’s analysis, Joerding said the year 2000 problem will cost the United States around $117 billion, the equivalent of 10 percent of the nation’s investment capital for a year.