Organizations worldwide are working to avoid computer problems caused by the change in dates on January 1, 2000. Craig Williams and his co-workers are debugging an entire city of these “Y2K” problems and from sewage to stoplights, parks to phone systems, everything needs to be looked at. “We’ve been working on it for quite a while,” said Williams, MIS manager for the City of San Mateo.

“We ran a pilot project at the end of 1996 and early 1997 on the best approach and pitfalls to look for. The problems Williams found were real, but far from insurmountable. “There were a lot of things that were simply cosmetic changes… reports could come out with zero-zero on them and anybody intelligent would know that meant 2000,” said Williams. Fixing the problems sometimes had a ripple effect. “We found out that if you touch an old code that has worked for years it has a tendency to create new bugs,” said Williams. “Everything we have in the city will continue to work at the Year 2000 popover, but some of the management data could be incorrect.”

The work continues. “We have a Year 2000 committee looking at all the non-data processing type operations, like the sewer plants, parks and recreation, air conditioning units,” said Williams. “For the most part, it’s a lot of low tech stuff..” Sprinkler systems and street signals are simple 24-hour clocks and the library will be okay, but there is always a clunker.

“We had one air conditioning unit in our senior center which the experts say is affected by the year 2000,” said Williams. “I’ve asked them to check if we can just move the date back to 1971 or something so the calendar is essentially the same. We don’t get any management reports from the air-conditioning system.” Routine maintenance and budgeted upgrades have saved a lot of trouble.

The city’s main host system, an AS/400, became Y2K compliant a couple years ago and a new operating system was primarily as a budgeted upgrade, said Williams. “We just replaced the phone system though its natural budgeted cycle,” said Williams, and older desktop PCs were budgeted to be replaced in June anyway. Computers being retained are checked with software which locates problem code and brings it up on the screen for repair.

Although he doesn’t foresee any showstoppers, there will be bumps in the road, Williams said. “Any programmer that tells you he’s 100 percent sure his code is compliant, I think is dreaming,” he added. The sheer volume of work plus the human factor work against a perfect transition. “There are thousands of lines of code we have to go through. We write code all the time thinking it’s foolproof, then have bugs pop up,” he said.

Testing continues. “When we finish an application and think its ready to go, we copy it over to another section of the computer, change the date on the job and run it through a Year 2000 test,” said Williams. The debugging program pulls up a date field to be corrected, but that date may be moved to another field somewhere else in the code. “You have to make sure you don’t miss something like that and since there are humans working on it there are going to be some that are missed,” Williams said.

“I’m not losing any sleep over it, but there are going to be bumps.” Another spoke in the Y2K wheel is being dealt with at Visa International in Foster City. With computers ranging from terminals in grocery stores to those transacting nightly transfers of up to $3 billion, the world-wide credit card company took the Y2K problem seriously years ago.

“In 1994 we started analyzing what we needed to do to our system, and we got on the issue of making sure cards with an expiration date in the year 00 or later functioned,” said Linda Elliott, executive vice president of Visa International. Visa’s computers are linked to banks transferring Visa’s funds as business partners, and to very large retailers who “are a direct end point to the Visa net system. We are working with them directly to make sure their systems are working appropriately,” Elliot added.

Visa’s core main frame and distributed systems have been “remediated,” terminals worldwide have been upgraded and constant testing is taking place. A sizable percentage of Visa’s 1800-plus technicians have been busy with the problem for years and cost has been considerable. “If I gave you man hours on fixing the problem, that would only be a piece of the puzzle,” said Elliott.

“We have had various numbers of people working on this for five years now and there has been a lot of replacement hardware and software purchased and a lot of hand-holding activities in terms of working with our 21,000 members in 260 countries around the world,” she said. “We have a core group of people who are devoted to it full time, both a technical team and a business team” Elliott said, but the numbers fluctuate.

“For instance, when we were doing code remediation we had a lot of programmers into it,” but the number of programmers “was never steady for more than a month at a time,” she added. Testing is exhaustive, but at billions of dollars a night, the stakes are high.

“We roll the clock forward every two weeks and have a schedule of test dates we go through. First it is New Years Eve, 2000, then it is New Year’s Day, then it is a couple days after, then we go through leap year in 2000. We go through that cycle of days every two weeks,” Elliott said.