Campbell, California
Contact: Al McBride 408-879-2672
December 28, 1999
Small Companies that Waited are the Lucky Ones
Dr. Willard H. (Bill) Wattenburg, a well-known computer and nuclear scientist and pioneer in the development of modern computer hardware and software, says that the Y2K threat was grossly exaggerated. He says an army of Y2K gurus fanned Y2K hysteria in the media the way TV evangelists flash images of the burning fires of hell to open up the wallets of sinners.
Wattenburg predicts that the total disruption of services and dangers to citizens as the result of Y2K won’t be ten percent of the consequences of a single hurricane hitting the Atlantic coast. Most reportable events after midnight Jan 1, 1999, will be the normal and expected local emergencies that happen every ordinary day around the world. However, on the night of December 31, 1999, every hiccup will be reported as the footsteps of the Y2K monster approaching. The next day, the Y2K gurus will issue collective sighs of relief that Armageddon was narrowly escaped.
Evidence of this fool’s game is that the national news media had only one delicious incident to report in the last month of this century: Some citizens of Philadelphia received jury duty notices in December 1999 to appear in March of 1900. Many TV reporters dutifully followed this story with a regurgitation of the dire predictions of airplanes falling out of the sky in East Ruwanda because they were not “Y2K compliant.” No one bothered to consider that in a normal year, say, in the 1980’s, there were at least a thousand typos made on jury duty notices. The only serious harm to citizens will come from Y2K hysteria, the herd phenomenon. Heart attack victims may not be able to call 911 because so many foolish people will pick up the telephone at midnight on New Year’s Eve to confirm that the telephone systems have collapsed as predicted by the Y2k fear-mongers.
The one real danger to citizen safety has always been our overloaded air traffic control centers. Their computer systems are antiquated. Even brief interruptions or errors in these computers can create major safety situations. The Y2K crisis was probably a blessing in this case. It gave the FAA new money to make improvements in critical areas. Airlines that chose not to fly on January 1, 2000, are being prudent. This takes a burden off the air traffic control system and gives it some breathing room to respond to disruptions of any sort. However, terrorism is a far greater danger than malfunctions of airplanes or the traffic control system.
Wattenburg worked with a group of Silicon Valley computer specialists who developed a new Y2K solution that quickly exposes where the Y2K bugs in a computer program could cause problems when the year date 99 rolls over to 00. He says that most computer programs have relatively few Y2K problems that are easy to fix when you have a tool that can locate them automatically. However, corporate America and government agencies spent over a hundred billion dollars using a brute-force procedure called “windowing.” Armies of expensive programmers scanned millions of lines of computer codes and made manual changes that often created more bugs in the programs.
Wattenburg’s opinion is that the majority of computer problems that Fortune 500 companies will experience after year 2000 will come from bugs introduced into their programs as a result of the billions of dollars of manual modifications made to their programs to fix a relatively few Y2K bugs.
He says that the hundred thousand small companies in the U.S. and other countries which did not convert their computer programs are probably the lucky ones. They will be able to get the necessary Y2K repairs done in a smart way and at a reasonable price after 2000. Most of them already know what their problems will be and have made contingency plans to avoid them until they can be fixed.
Dr. Wattenburg is a former professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley and later a nuclear weapons designer at Livermore. He has a well-documented thirty-year history of finding simple solutions to complex technical problems in many fields that experts said couldn’t be solved (see the website www.drbill.org for a list of dozens of his technical exploits that were widely covered in the news media and scientific journals).
In December 1998, Dr. Wattenburg proved that most Y2K problems in computer programs can be fixed automatically by another computer program at little expense -- the same way that computers routinely correct spelling errors in word processing documents and scan for computer viruses. A group of Silicon Valley scientists and former IBM senior engineers with support from Sun Microsystems then built Wattenburg’s solution for the benefit of the thousands of small companies left behind. In November 1999, the solution, called CETA, was tested and then offered free over the internet on the website www.y2kok-solution.com. The story of the CETA project and how it works is on the above website under “CETA EXPLANATION.”
After stories in the San Jose Mercury News and The New York Times (15 Nov 99, page C5) described the new CETA Y2K solution, the website received over 60,000 hits from around the world. Several thousand downloaded the free Y2K analysis program. This program analyses any IBM 390 computer program and tells the owner where the potential Y2K bugs are in his program. Experience showed that most programs have relatively few Y2K bugs that are easily located and avoided. Yet, many of these customers were told that it would cost them a million dollars or more to “remediate” their programs to be “Y2K compliant” by the “windowing” scheme that requires manual reprogramming of their programs (and then maybe another million to take out the bugs and incompatibilities created by windowing).
Wattenburg believes that most who downloaded the free CETA program used it to evaluate what Y2K programming contractors had done to their programs for millions of dollars. Wattenburg said he expects a lot of lawsuits to be filed by enlightened computer users after 2000.
The Y2K fear-mongers led the world to believe that there is some mysterious monster lurking within computers that will only expose itself on January 1, 2000, like a hidden computer virus deliberately designed to do its handiwork on a given date. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Indeed, even slow-witted computer users and gadget owners long ago did a “clock check” on their computer programs to see what they will do when the date rolls past 2000. (A hundred million sleepy souls set their alarm clocks ahead every night, don’t they?) All one has to do to check a computer program for Y2K (or any other time) is set the computer’s clock ahead beyond 2000, run the program, and see what happens. This testing can be done off-line using copies of company data bases if necessary so that errors are not introduced into the real data bases during testing. Most companies have done this. They know most sections of their programs in which the Y2K bug will cause problems or produce funny results. They have made contingency plans until they can fix their programs at reasonable cost. In the meantime, they have simply “patched around” or disconnected those portions of their programs that could cause serious problems.
According to Wattenburg, the Y2K hysteria spawned an army of self-appointed Y2K gurus at all levels of government and industry who tantalized the talk shows and shock media with standard warnings of Y2K disasters. The Y2K gurus carved out a lucrative profession for themselves by memorizing a standard list of buzzwords for the imagined Y2K monsters that lurked in every electronic gadget built by man. It is easy to recognize these hearsay prophets. They can not identify a single Y2K bug of any consequence in terms of its exact location in a specific home electronic gadget, car, utility company, airline, or computer program anywhere. They generally have no idea of what is inside these devices. In preparation for their next appearance on TV news, they simply read the latest Y2K fear-mongering postings on the internet by the idiots who delight in propagating urban myths.
Believe it or not, many of these Y2K scam artists extracted billions of dollars from the otherwise intelligent CEO’s of America by pretending that they actually knew how to ferret out the Y2K bugs that lurked in every electronic gadget owned by the company. All they did thereafter was hire armies of ordinary programmers at outrageous salaries to take apart the clients’ computer programs and write mindless “contingency” plans for everything including flushing the company toilets in case Y2K should defeat the laws of gravity.
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