Just south of Silicon Valley, where he toiled for many years as a computer engineer, Tim May is spending his retirement in the picturesque hills of Corralitos, Calif. But he's not there simply for the view. May believes his spot in this rich agricultural and fishing area might spare him the hardships of a famine ushered in with the new millennium, and he's ordering gold coins and laying in food in bulk just to be sure. He's also buying weapons, adding regularly to his growing gun collection. In the coming months, says May, more and more Americans are going to realize that "we aren't going to make the deadline."
The deadline? Some sort of cultish prophecy, perhaps? Nope. He's talking about the famous Year 2000 computer bug, or Y2K, as the acronym-happy computer industry has dubbed it. On Jan. 1, 2000, May and many other software experts believe, millions of computer systems could go haywire, shutting down life as we know it and turning our information age into a digitally dysfunctional society. Electric and phone service could be lost. Banks and supermarkets shuttered. Life savings could vanish and lives be imperiled.
Really? No, not really. Well, not likely anyway. But that hasn't slowed the mounting angst over the Year 2000 glitch, particularly on the Internet, where the mix of technical savvy and suspicion is proving to be the perfect outlet for dire predictions. "I've never seen such hysterical projections, and I lived through the paranoia of the 1960s," says Nicholas Zvegintzov, president of Software Management Network, a Los Altos, Calif., company specializing in software maintenance.
Still, there are grim reports that corporate America isn't taking the Y2K task seriously enough, a danger that will be highlighted this week at Senate subcommittee hearings. The Senators will be told that an examination of recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings found that 60% of the U.S.'s biggest companies had not completed the first step of assessing whether their systems are ready for the new century--much less begun fixing the problems. "That's a disturbing percentage at this late date," says Steven Hock, president of Triaxsys Research, which studied the SEC filings.
But the flaw in such reports is that they mistake reticence for inaction. Most companies are purposely saying as little as possible about the issue in their public disclosures. Hock concedes that the sec's information request was both voluntary and vague, and that big companies have a natural tendency to clam up about business operations and potential liabilities. The majority of firms, says Hock, do seem to be focusing on their most critical systems--a strategy that should spare us from catastrophic consequences. "There will be some extremely annoying, disruptive failures," says Hock. "But it's not going to be the apocalypse."
The bug at the center of the Year 2000 mess is fairly simple. In what's proving to be a ludicrously shortsighted shortcut, many system programmers set aside only two digits to denote the year in dates, as in 06/15/98 rather than 06/15/1998. Trouble is, when the computer's clock strikes 2000, the math can get screwy. Date-based equations like 98 - 97 = 1 become 00 - 97 = -97. That can prompt some computers to do the wrong thing and stop others from doing anything at all.