Life appears not to be imitating art, but the plot from a 1950s science fiction B-movie: The foolish earthlings have come to rely more and more on their computers. Almost every aspect of their day-to-day lives is governed by an electronic circuit; their cars, trains, airplanes, hospitals, banks, offices, communications, energy systems, defence equipment, even the places they get their food. Now, if only the devious aliens can find a way to destroy the microchips that drive the computers, the earthlings will be at their mercy.
Unfortunately, we have not the aliens to blame, but ourselves. Specifically, the original computer programmers who had a not quite brilliant idea about how to save precious memory space on the very first microchips and programmes.
In brief, they decided to shorten the "date field" the digits that tell the chip what day, month and year it is. Instead of representing today's date, for example, as 15/8/1997, the programmers just used six digits - 15/8/97.
Back in the early 1980s this posed no problem, and it solved quite a few by minimising the amount of data required by programmes. If the people who designed the systems ever even considered what would happen when the year reached 2000, and the last two digits became 00, they thought that by then their technology would have long since been surpassed.
But as each new technology emerged, it had to incorporate the previous programmes and microchips. That usually meant incorporating the fatal date field flaw. Now, the day of reckoning is almost upon us and we are facing the year 2000, or Y2K, crisis.
At midnight, on December 31st, 1999, as the world is in the throes of a gigantic millennium party, many computers will experience confusion. Most will malfunction, believing the new date to be either 1900 or a false date. This will cause some to crash completely, shutting down every circuit.
If nothing is done in advance to mitigate these effects, this could provoke a series of disasters. For example, air traffic control systems could collapse, causing airplanes to crash, traffic control systems might go down, generating gridlock in our streets and motorways, hospital equipment could fail, putting patients' lives at risk.
In the worst possible scenario, nuclear power plants in Britain would go haywire, spewing radioactive dust over Ireland; records of electronic money would be destroyed, wrecking commercial life; factory production lines would grind to a halt as embedded chips malfunction, and businesses would fail; an economic crisis would ensue followed by a depression.
In the most likely scenario, businesses, governments and individuals would leave it too late to change many of what they consider the less essential programmes and microchips - and of course the list of what is "less essential" will expand gradually as the date looms.
This would see planes and trains being delayed, some traffic jams, hospital administration and billing systems revealing glitches, some continental and British nuclear power stations closing down for a time because of safety considerations, building security systems crashing, workers being locked out, people carrying more cash because of reported crashes of ATM machines, some luxury cars not starting or functioning properly, and many more such everyday annoyances.
At least 1 per cent of businesses - probably the ones whose managers buried their heads in the sand around 1997, or companies relying on suppliers run by by such managers - are likely to fail. This in turn will slow economic growth worldwide.
For many organisations, the bad stuff will start happening long before the millennium party hangover on January 1st, 2000. Marks & Spencer, for example, has had a foretaste; its computers ordered the destruction of several tons of corned beef, assuming it was rotten because the "best before" date on the tins indicated that the food was manufactured more than 100 years ago.
In the US, a 104-year-old woman was sent a letter demanding that she attend the local kindergarten, a computer in a prison released several convicts early, believing the release dates to have already come, earlier this century, and Visa had to withdraw credit cards when machines refused to accept their 21st century expiration dates.
In Dublin, the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs is working overtime to get its welfare systems in shape for the date change. Otherwise, taxpayers could wind up paying out old age pensions to 25 year olds. This could happen, for example, if a computer took the date of birth of someone born in 1975, say 15/8/75, and subtracted this from the current year, 00, giving -75. The computer would then, correctly, realise that no one can be a negative age, and render the person's years on earth as 75. Then it would start sending the cheques.
Most non-technical people are appalled by all of this, and usually remark that if we can send probes to the planet Mars, surely we can re-programme a few computers. Apparently, that is not possible without a huge amount of work.
There are only two ways to solve the problem; buy new computers, or get someone to go through every line of machine code, removing and replacing the short date.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that almost every piece of modern electronic equipment contains an embedded microchip, often programmed with the date flaw. The only way to prevent many office lifts, alarms, security systems, sprinklers, heaters, air-conditioners, bank vaults and dozens of other devices from malfunctioning is to remove and replace the chip.
There is a supreme irony to this tale of ineptitude, and it lies in the large amount of cash the fix will cost. Most of the codes that need to be changed are written in the now ancient Cobol software language, and many companies are now begging retired Cobol programmers to come back on lucrative contracts.
Charging between 50p and £1 per line of code, these men and women will go into the next millennium rich and happy, despite the fact that it was they who took that fatal date field shortcut, and caused the entire shambles, way back when.
