White House Seeks to Dispel Y2K Panic

Worried that routine failures Jan. 1 will be attributed to the year 2000 computer problem and set off public panic, the White House plans to release figures today showing how often some systems typically fail.

“Every day things go wrong, and nobody pays much attention,” said John Koskinen, President Clinton’s top Y2K advisor.

The Y2K problem derives from the possibility that computers with older programming could fail because they read the year 2000 as 1900. But Microsoft Corp., for instance, fields roughly 29,000 phone calls daily from customers whose computers fail for other reasons.