What's the rush? There are still 138 weekends until Year 2000

Where's the grief?

We'd been warned, "The crashes are coming! The crashes are coming!"

Sages whispered dire warnings about the pernicious "millennium virus," which would strike all computer systems that stored the year as two digits, such as "97," assuming that the century was 19 and leaving no way to move into the 21st century.

Any computer fed "00," you see, would just assume 1900. Bad assumption. Makes for faulty computations.

All for want of two lousy digits. Or, rather, the lack of space for two lousy digits in computer systems built years ago, with the expectation they'd be replaced long before anyone cared -- or dared -- to enter a date beyond the 20th century.

Try that on some of them and one of two unpleasant things could happen, as explained by Air Force Capt. Billy Legg, Year 2000 project officer with the Headquarters Standard Systems Group at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex in Alabama.

"In a best case scenario, when someone types in the date 2000, then the system would just quit working," said Legg in a press release.

"In a worst case scenario," Legg said, "when the digits of the year 2000 are entered, the computer will assume the year is 1900 and process erroneous data. For instance, I was born in 1957. If the computer can't accept the date 2000, then it will return my age as a negative 43."

As I too go back in time, I recall first hearing about Y2K (shorthand for The Year 2000) at the fall 1995 meeting of the System Integrators Systems Users Group in Des Moines. The problem was rated one of the top five that Sacramento-based SII should address, the users declared.

By spring 1997, with barely 138 weekends left before computer wizards will run out of those precious Saturdays and Sundays on which to perform their magic, corporate America was found wanting.

Only one company in eight had implemented a full-bodied effort to prepare its systems for the next century, according to a survey released in April by Cap Gemini, an information consulting firm. Another 18 percent had detailed plans in place -- and an astronomical 87 percent said they'd just outsource for a solution.

"The sorry truth is that most corporations still don't have their arms around the problem, and time as well as resources to deal with the problem are quickly running out," Jim Woodward, senior vice president of Cap Gemini, told Business Wire.

Newspapers may well be in this group.

"We've looked briefly at it. We have a project that is supposed to start up in June," said Bill Steigerwald, director of information systems at the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer-Times, an SII editorial, classified and library site.

At Atex Media Solutions, "we're somewhat disappointed to find that most of our customers have not given this a lot of thought yet," said Gary Young, director of support services at Atex headquarters in Bedford, Mass.

But need they? Eighteen months after I first heard of Y2K, most everyone knows about it. What newspaper folk may not know is ... there's no problem.

Honest. Just ask the suppliers.

Not my problem
"No problem/no solution required," publishing systems supplier Euromax said in a fax from its U.S. office.

"Generally, this is not an issue with the CCI product line," responded Jorgen Valkaer, North American sales coordinator for Denmark's CCI Europe.

"The CE Engineering products ... will not have any problem with the Year 2000 rollover," said Margaret McGrath, director of marketing at CE Engineering Publishing Systems Inc. of Loomis, Calif.

"Baseview's suite of editorial and circulation products are completely unaffected by the 2000 issue, and have always been ready," said Geoff Osler, director of marketing for Baseview Products Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich.

"Our customers will be year 2000 compliant through the normal product release process," said David Erdner, vice president of the publishing solutions unit of Unisys Corp. of Irving, Texas.

"CText's Dateline editorial, Expressline editorial pagination, AdVision classified and Alps classified pagination products are all year 2000 compliant," reported Eugene Kiel, vice president of product marketing and development for Ann Arbor-based CText Inc.

"About the only area where this is an issue is accounting interfaces to less sophisticated systems than ours," said David Kraai, president of Advanced Publishing Technology of Burbank, Calif.

"With our new software, it's been taken care of for the last two years. We don't have that problem," said Nicholas Koriakin, director of sales for Houston-based CompuText Inc., producer of classified and editorial software. Referring to software introduced at NEXPO '95 in Atlanta, Koriakin said, "Virtually all of our customers are upgraded to the new system."

System Integrators weighed in as only SII could:

"The new base time (Pig time) will move SII's maximum date from 2008 to 2034 using the sliding window technique," said Debra Osfeld, Year 2000 project coordinator. "The record conversion will occur automatically, any time a data record with old (Cow) date is accessed by the new Pig system."

Now I know why it's always been fun to get down and dirty with SII -- its barnyard mentality.

Remember those two digits that stand for years? Programmers were free to choose when to start counting time -- CText opted for Julian date arithmetic, Kiel said, so its products' base date is Jan. 1, 1600 (and the year is stored as a four-digit number).

SII, being SII, pegs its base date to "a unique history, based on the birth of a cow," Osfeld said.

In 1963, years before he founded SII, Jim Lennane "was developing software to track cows for the California Dairy Association. A requirement of the system was the ability to handle the birth date of the oldest cow in California, which was determined to be somewhere in 1940.

"Hence, this system base date became known as 'Cow Date' or 'Cow Time,' and has been used on the SII system to this day," Osfeld said.

Left to graze, bovine-based SII systems actually are designed to record time correctly through 2008, she said. But the clock moves on.

"To avoid drastic changes in code, and produce a new base date in a timely manner, a date with the same characteristics as 'Cow Time' was needed. The date of 1968 was selected as the new SII base date, and in keeping with the farm theme, the new date is now known as 'Pig Time.'"

Hmmm. Good thing Lennane wasn't working for a proctologists' group back in '63. ...

Some solutions
Like some suppliers, the Union Leader in Manchester, N.H., doesn't have a problem. It just threw out the troublemakers before they could cause trouble.

"We're in the fortunate position of having replaced all our systems fairly recently," said Dirk Ruemenapp, vice president for operations. "We're currently installing a new Harris Newsmaker system and have replaced our general ledger system with a system that obviously is able to handle the transition."

As luck would have it, he said, the Union Leader's policy of replacing systems every seven years or so meant that no system would be around to catch the millennium virus (which isn't a virus -- it's a congenital defect).

All systems but one.

"We have encountered some minor problem with that respect with our circulation system that's a Collier-Jackson," Ruemenapp said. "We have some people who do long-term subscriptions with us. It can't handle the year 2000."

After joking that "we don't know who owns Collier-Jackson now," he said, "we're going to replace that system as well." (The surviving company was recently renamed Geac Publishing Systems and is based in Tampa, Fla.)

So, is this issue overblown? What the suppliers are saying -- and Ruemenapp is doing -- is simple: Replace systems, or simply upgrade existing ones. QED, right?

Not hardly. First, some of them acknowledge that their products needed some tweaking. CText, for example, "had concerns" about its older DOS-based classified and editorial systems, concerns now laid to rest, Kiel said, with fixes for its Advanced File Management system due out in the third quarter.

(It's worth noting that CText's OS/2-based Dateline and AdVision installations "are Y2K compliant," Kiel said.)

And CCI, looking far down the road, has an itty-bitty one, too.

"The issue we do have is that the UNIX date is OK until the year 2036 and the database date is OK until the year 2050," Valkaer said.

Uh, but that's not all.

"Unknown to CCI at this time is the effect, if any, of such items as server hardware clocks, micro-code, etc. that may have an adverse effect on system operations at the turn of the century."

This is where tough becomes complicated. And where the suppliers begin to sound alarms, not for their products, but for their customers' operations.

"Also currently unknown to CCI are the effect of the issue on non-CCI third-party software used in our product offerings and the effect on two-way integration with other software vendors -- such as Atex and SII."

Don't stop there, suggested Fayetteville's Steigerwald, pointing to "all the desktop databases that have popped up in the newspaper" and "all these PCs, many of them still on DOS."

"It's a challenge," Atex's Young said. "There's more than an upgrade of a system in a vacuum. There's the interfaces to all the other systems, which is where we find all the challenges will be. For example, if Collier-Jackson didn't read my mind and implement the same fix, we have a problem.

"There's a whole boatload of work to be done around interfaces."

What's a paper to do?
Crank up now before it gets truly too late, suggests Tom Bray, chief financial officer of Questicon, a Baltimore-based consulting firm whose slogan is Y2K compliant: "Hindsight explains what foresight would have prevented."

"We think they really need to get somebody who is totally devoted to that project," Bray said, "a Year 2000 project manager."

Analysis and diagnosis are key, Bray said, because so many sites have systems that grew like Topsy, starting with a core system and then branching out to others -- a situation all too familiar to Atex.

"We have a broad range of customers, anywhere from running 1970-some-odd-old hardware to PCs," Young said. "We are not going to back the year 2000 fixes into 15-year-old software. If someone is truly on three-year-old software, then that's not an issue, but not a mix of three-year-old and 15-year-old."

Similarly, SII has drawn a line in its system baseline, Osfeld said, with plans to make Y2K-compliant any hardware -- including TNS-IIs -- that's running Tandem's C30.08/.09 or newer operating system.

Interfaces, upgrades, DOS, third-party apps -- it might be tempting to join the Union Leader and throw out the baby with the bath water.

But many sites don't have that option. Tribune Co.'s Orlando Sentinel is one. It gathers and publishes the news on a legacy Atex system, and makes big bucks from classified ads run through an SII system.

And it's now installing CCI Europe pagination.

"When you start getting into it, at least on the publishing side, you're starting to see how mammoth a project it is, seeing which systems have to be done," said Y2K Project Manager Joan Nichols.

Despite her title, "there's nobody that's devoted to it," Nichols said. "I'm the local project manager and I've been putting in maybe 10 percent of my time. But I have all my managers that support these systems working on it -- so everyone is putting in pieces of time."

"I've been looking at all our systems," Nichols said, citing also Layout 8000 and Admarc, page dummying and advertising programs from Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa., and Neasi-Weber International of Northridge, Calif., respectively. "Many of them need upgrades and some don't. We're trying to phase this in."

The Sentinel newsroom's Atex must be interfaced to CCI.

"That's probably going to be my next system," she said. Her 10 J11s and Young should get along fine: "We gave them some pretty heavy upgrades a year or two ago. We better be able to use them for at least two or three more years."

How many systems and products are involved in Y2K bug eradication?

"Hundreds, because we've actually gone down to the level of the software, even on our Macs," Nichols said. "We're contacting all of them just to get their reading."

Suppliers respond
The support staffs of Atex and SII are gearing up for the crunch.

To meet Atex customers' needs, "we have a few of us on year 2000 exclusively," Young said. Developing tests is a key task now, as is assisting customers to prepare to inventory their hardware and software.

SII customers are encouraged to sign up for assistance PDQ: "As of March 1997 we have 51 installations scheduled well into 1998," Osfeld said, noting that one site will play a pivotal role.

"SII is currently working to simulate the Orlando Sentinel's system at SII Sacramento's site to test our installation procedures, and to collect information on system downtime and resource requirements for code and data conversion," Osfeld said.

Nichols welcomes the assist.

"It was probably a year or so ago that we knew their software was not 2000 compliant," Nichols said of SII. "Class is a huge portion of our revenue and we decided we had to just dive right in."

Nichols expects to load software on the Sentinel's test system, a genuine gift in this situation, sometime in June -- leaving 19 months to get out the bugs.

"We set a deadline for the end of December '98 so that we can run a year on the new software," Nichols said. Ad takers use about 70 PCs equipped with RoadRunner cards; because they do not carry any non-SII software, the task of bringing them up to speed isn't complicated by third-party applications.

Testing procedures have yet to be worked out. "We're working it out system by system," Nichols said. "We'll set the system date ahead and then do some cursory testing."

Testing is a great concern up the coast in Fayetteville.

"We're going to have to spend a tremendous amount of time during 1999 making sure it all works," Steigerwald said. "I'm not too concerned about dates. Accumulating statistics is where we might have a problem."

Now a letterpress operation, Steigerwald raised another Y2K compliance issue: "We're going to be buying a new press soon -- it's going to have electronics. What will the effect be with the new presses of the switchover date?"

Tick, tick, tick
Time won't run out for Capt. Legg and his crew in Alabama. "We already have a system that is certified compliant," he said.

(He'd be happy to detail how -- just surf on the World-Wide Web to http://www.ssg.gunter.af.mil/ and click on the Year 2000 Natural Working Group link.)

Clearly, the Air Force has a Legg up on Y2K. For newspapers that don't, Atex's Young offers some advice.

"The actual identifying of all the things that need to be fixed is a far greater challenge than implementing all the fixes," Young said. "We can conform or convert to another date standard in a matter of minutes."

But he sounded a warning: "It's not reasonable to believe that you can just contract out your year 2000 work and not worry about it."

-- Pete Wetmore

"And with the year 2000 problem breathing down our neck, who is really interested in speech recognition or biometrics? Be honest."
-- J. William Gurley, Deutsche Morgan Grenfell's Above the Crowd e-mail newsletter

Advanced Publishing Technology,
(818) 557-3035,
e-mail: 74541.3353@compuserve.com;
Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(617) 275-2323;
Baseview Products Inc.,
(313) 662-5800,
e-mail: marketing@baseview.com;
CE Engineering Publishing Systems Inc.,
(916) 652-5263,
e-mail: cesales@ceengineering.com;
CompuText Inc.,
(713) 480-3494;
CText Inc.,
(313) 677-4700,
e-mail: sales@ctext.com;
Euromax,
(602) 816-6136,
e-mail: wwwemx@dde.dde.dk;
Geac Publishing Systems,
(813) 878-7867,
e-mail: vsinfo@geac.com;
Neasi-Weber International,
(818) 895-6900;
Software Consulting Services,
(610) 837-8484,
e-mail: scs@nscs.fast.net;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com;
Unisys Corp.,
(972) 541-8059,
e-mail: daviderdner@unn.unisys.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.