Lingering Effects of Computer Bug

Re “Braced for the Bug,” editorial, Dec. 20: In the wee hours of Dec. 31, I will be found in my Mission Viejo office, sitting by the phone ready to support customers who will be among the first to welcome in the year 2000. My shift will cover the date rollover in New Zealand, Japan, Australia and points west and will end as midnight arrives somewhere around the Persian Gulf. Others will be on watch as the new date rolls across Europe and the U.S.

As I sit there, hopefully handling few or no crisis calls, my thoughts will be on how poorly this $1 trillion 1/8preparing for Y2K 3/8 has been spent. Too many sites have used a technique called “date windowing” to alleviate the Y2K symptoms without fixing the problem. In date windowing, an arbitrary two-digit value is used to separate 19xx dates from 20xx dates. A program will work properly until the window year is reached. At that point a program will fail. The failure might be spectacular or it could be quite subtle.

No one will be looking for these failures. There will be no multiyear effort to certify programs for Y2K+n compliance. Hollywood will not produce any “latent bug” apocalypse films. This is the real danger of Y2K. We will be encountering these hidden defects well into the next century. Once Jan. 1, 2000, arrives, no one will care anymore. Corporate programming budgets will be spent on integrating new technologies, adding user-requested functions or making updates to reflect the latest tax law changes. The hoopla will be over, but the malady will linger on.

MARK PEREW

Santa Ana

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At exactly midnight, when Dec. 31 becomes Jan. 1, it will not only mark the beginning of a new second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade and a century, but also signal the dawn of a new millennium . . . and hopefully the emergence of a world evolving for the betterment of all.

CHARLES SARTORIUS

Irvine