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© Copyright 1998, Jim Loy
I've heard that the government will shut down on Jan. 1, 2000, because all their computers will shut down. At first glance, this is absurd. On second thought, it makes a lot of sense.
There is a problem. But it should have little effect, and be easy to fix. For example, an accounting program deals with the date. But it shouldn't matter whether the year is 98 or 00. The program should still work. The reports may say 1900 for a few days. But that should be easy for a programmer to fix. A few programs are more sensitive to dates. But the solution should be simple, even then.
Should be! There are two complications which may shoot down the entire government. The first complication is that they are going to wait too long to solve the problem. That wouldn't be a disaster, except for the final, real problem: undocumented code. This is a sloppy programming practice, which makes even a simple program murder to modify. I, myself, have been guilty of this.
dBase is a database system with its own programming language. In dBase, a date contains a four-digit year. So dBase will have no problem in the year 2000. But people with programs written in dBase (the language) may have all kinds of problems. It depends how the programmer has used the dates. 2000 may still end up in your data file as 1900. This may be easy to fix, maybe not. The program may take the last two digits of the year and called them Y0. If another programmer modifies the program, he/she may not notice that Y0 is a year. The program may subtract Y0-Y1 to get a number of years. Well, if Y1 and Y0 are in different centuries, you will get the wrong answer. For example, instead of 2 years, you may get a negative 98 years, and maybe a crash.
What should you do? That's hard to say. Maybe read up on the subject. Maybe consult with the original programmers, if they can be found. At least, perform some tests, but be careful. Set the date to after Jan. 1, 2000, and see if the programs work. But be careful to run copies, and not the real programs and data.
What should the government do? Mainly, they need to spend some more money, and hire the people who can figure out their programs. Oh well, easy come, easy go.
Will your Windows 95 shut down on Jan. 1, 2000? Try it and see. It should work fine. Use Settings to set the year to four digits, to find out if the year is working.
I actually had an employer who insisted that all programs be mostly undocumented, in an effort to prevent other people from modifying our programs.