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Millennium Bug may succumb to aggressive industry attackThe Millennium Bug may not live long in the newspaper field. Using such insecticides as Upgrade and Replace, publishers and suppliers appear ready to eradicate the turn-of-the-century menace -- with time to spare. The Millennium Bug, of course, thrives in the digital cowflop dropped on all manner of computers during the young days of code writing, when two digits were used to store a year. In the '70s and even '80s, when the life-span of a computer system was anticipated to be mere years, not decades, stashing "1979" as "79" saved vital disk space. The century was assumed to be "19," an assumption that will be invalidated on Jan. 1, 2000, putting operating systems, applications and digital links -- big and small -- at risk of failing. As the day looms when the century rolls over and "19" cannot be assumed, publishing systems managers and their suppliers are scampering against time to make room for "20" -- as in "2000." They may just win the race. In conversations with a dozen newspaper systems managers, consultants and publishing systems suppliers, The Cole Papers was told of plans made and kept, of systems brought into compliance -- able to leap the century mark and run intact -- and of problems, both resolved and lurking somewhere ahead.
Suppliers step up to the plate
"We have an Atex system and as you know, they take care of everything," said one executive of a major East Coast daily, only half in jest. His comment illuminated one key change since last we visited the issue (see The Cole Papers, May 1997). Back then, Gary Young, the Year 2000 guru at Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass., said he was "disappointed" Atex customers were silent on the issue. No more. "Right around the September time frame is when we saw customer awareness build to where people are actually chasing us down to talk about the Year 2000," said Young, director of support services at Atex. "That is very good news. We're very pleased that that has started to happen." Atex still has to complete work on its Enterprise advertising system to bring it up to Year 2000 standards, but Young said that task will be done early next year. "Our standard code is going to be done well before the end of 1998," he said, alluding to the degree of customization at most Atex sites. "Whether every customer is going to be ready to take it before the end of 1998 is the question." The Atex support group is "meeting demand," Young said, having been expanded by three people domestically and about eight overseas. The group is booked through March for what he called "early assessments." In such initial visits, Atex gauges the extent to which software has been customized and whether hardware must be replaced to accommodate current software. Atex will support its venerable J-11 minicomputer, which has been around since the early '80s, well past 2000. "We have some things in the software that will cause problems in the year 2018," Young said. "I hope we have people on our newer products before then. I don't want to see J-11s in the year 2018." Atex won't be seeing J-11s at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch any more. Time has taken its toll. "There are a lot of reasons outside of Year 2000 to replace the system," said Dan McGuire, production systems manager for the P-D and its corporate parent, Pulitzer Publishing Co. The Post-Dispatch has signed a letter of intent for an unnamed new front-end because the Atex system, installed in 1983, is "becoming more problematic." Symptoms? "We've had backplanes literally burned up." One Atex site, Newsday on Long Island, N.Y., is ready to rock, roll and beta test. "If they deliver on their system changes, we'll be OK. If they don't deliver, we've got a problem," said Dan Egan, publishing systems software manager for the Times Mirror paper, which is expecting Atex to make its PC News Layout product Y2K-compliant and is helping debug upgrades. "We've put a lot of time on the Atex side, and so far we are comfortable," Egan said. His paper has gone through a hardware upgrade and now is working on "analyzing all systems Atex will connect with." Young noted that Atex support gets to connect with about 150 systems made by Dewar Information Systems Corp., which Atex acquired in 1995. "The good news is that the Dewar 4 is a more standard product than Atex," he said. Like the atmosphere at Atex, Harris Publishing Systems Corp., the pagination systems powerhouse based in Melbourne, Fla., reports that worry there is equally in check. "My general sense is that there's concern and people are moving to replace their legacy systems," said Russ Latch, product marketing manager for Harris, which has more than 300 sites. Almost all Harris products are Year 2000-compliant, Latch said, including the increasingly popular NewsMaker editorial front-end. "We have had some recent orders," Latch said, "but I can't say absolutely that they decided to replace their system because of Year 2000 concerns." Harris is upgrading some of its stable of older products, including its 8300 line, and some systems that are still DOS-based. Owners of some older products have been given "end of life" notices, Latch said, but for the most part, Y2K is a nonissue because most sites have products that have been certified as 2000-ready or will be after software upgrades. "We don't see any great impact on demand to get all this done in the next year or two," Latch said.
Making the Great Leap Forward
"We've converted many sites," said Anne Markle, vice president of customer services for Sacramento-based SII, citing papers as large as the Orlando Sentinel and Chicago Tribune, and as small as the Janesville Gazette in southern Wisconsin. As with Harris, some SII equipment got an "end of life" notice -- sort of. Tandem Computers Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., notified SII that it would not certify for the Year 2000 the TXP processor that Tandem introduced in the early '80s and which is still in use at some SII sites. While Tandem is withholding certification, SII reports some sites will continue to run their TXPs with at least SII's software certified as bug-proof. Through October 1998, SII is committed to assisting at least 72 of its customers in installing a routine upgrade that includes conversion to one of two years in Pig Time -- either 2004 or 2033. (When created in the '80s, SII systems were based on Cow Time, an arbitrary date on which a California cow was born. Systems running on Cow Time had underlying software that could handle dates through 2008, but editorial and classified applications would choke on 2000. Pig Time was chosen to represent the Year 2000 solution solely to maintain the barnyard theme.) The upgrade options for 2004 and 2033 "get them beyond the year 2000," Markle said -- a position the Chicago Tribune appreciates. "We wanted to take the safe route," said Tim Harris, the paper's senior systems analyst. "We wanted to hopefully take the time to see if those sites that went to 2033 had any bugs," which could be squashed before the Trib needed to take the next step, beyond 2004. If it does take that step, Markle warns, moving to 2033 "requires a bit more work," which involves updating individual files -- a daunting task in a system with say, 52,000 classified ads. Catherine Tobin's been there, done that. Tobin is SII system administrator of Syracuse Newspapers in New York, publisher of the morning Post-Standard and evening Syracuse Herald-Journal. On Nov. 15, "they started the conversion from Cow Time to Pig Time," said Tobin. Because her site opted for 2033 ("we chose to just be done with it -- take two weekends out of our life and just do it") all 52,000 classified ads had to be updated that weekend. A couple of glitches arose. The process was expected to take four to five hours but took seven. One date field was automatically error-checked and wouldn't go past 1999, "so we took the range check out of that field," Tobin said. But the system is now Y2K compliant -- save those "till forbid" ads, which are scheduled to run until the advertiser calls them home. In Syracuse, they number 450 or so, and Tobin has already programmed a tickler message to herself for late in 2003. "After you reach 2003, we have to edit the TFs, make a change in the text and file them away to make the change to 2008," she said, referring to an oink in Pig Time -- systems elevated to 2033 must have their files updated again between 2004 and 2008. Tom Threm has a similar message stored in his SII system in Janesville, Wis., where the upgrade process went fairly well. Aside from the fact that "any custom code can mess you up," the manager of computer systems at the 27,000-circulation morning daily found alternate key files posed some problems, as did a field in wire routing records. The Unexpected, of course, dropped by the weekend of the upgrade. "The main system power supply went out -- we lost a CPU," Threm said. The operation was "dead in the water for three to four hours," pending the arrival of a part zipped over from Tandem's Milwaukee office. "If it wasn't for these things, this would have been a snap," Threm said, noting that SII still has to provide a new PostScript driver; the one that came with the upgrade "doesn't work with our typesetters -- it puts the text on the wrong part of the page." Still, Threm praised SII. "I'm glad they did it. I don't have all the knowledge myself. This is really the way to do it." This isn't news in Sacramento. "We're finding that customers have so much to worry about when it comes to the Year 2000," said SII's Markle. "It goes far beyond our system, with lots of data in and data out that they need to be concerned about." One bit they needn't be worried about is what upgraded SII systems send out -- that hasn't changed in the course of the upgrade, so systems accustomed to taking in data from an SII system should be able to continue to do so unimpeded. Other systems, however, pose hazards that may be hard to detect. McGuire is cataloging systems not only at The Post-Dispatch but at the several community newspapers operated by Pulitzer, "to see if there's any firmware that's date sensitive," such as in the pasters in the press room or controllers in the mail room. Carol Howard is the director of computer service at The Oregonian in Portland, one of the new Harris NewsMaker customers and an old CSI classified site (see box). She's waiting for a business system upgrade in 1998, while AT&T has pledged to upgrade her phone system in 1999. Like McGuire, "embedded systems" are her worry -- things such as press control units, elevators and fax machines (faxes "have a programmable prom and there's no way to set the date ahead and test," Howard said).
Ready or not, here it comes
"They need to get started immediately, they need to start the process," said Tom Bray, the chief financial officer for Questicon, a computer consulting firm in Baltimore. "There are some people who have analyzed it to death, but there are some things you can actually be getting done while the analysis is taking place." Moreover, "if they're starting now, if they're looking to actually start to do some work in April or May, they're going to be hard-pressed to get the resources," Bray said, citing his experience in helping companies in the health care and financial industries. Even those who started planning for Year 2000 a comfortable while ago find little reason to rest easy. Journal Register Co. publishes 18 daily newspapers and 120 non-dailies, overseeing them from headquarters in Trenton, N.J. That's where Allen Mailman labors as technology guru for the newspaper group, and where he began his Y2K planning in 1996. "We designed a matrix -- by site, by vendor -- to identify which systems could and should be upgraded, which systems had to be replaced and the rare situations where the sites were already compliant," Mailman said. The result: a massive timetable showing replacement and upgrade plans. As 1997 winds down, Mailman's pleased with the progress to date, but acknowledges 1998 "will be horrendous" as Y2K fixes are rolled in -- as upgrades, either software or forklift -- and his company's self-imposed deadline looms on Dec. 31. "We've got more projects going on in more sites than we've had, probably ever," he said. In the long run, the Year 2000 issue may have some unexpected benefits. For suppliers, "the Year 2000 issue has given them the golden rainbow -- which is good, some of them need it," said Mailman. Systems people "are going to get their hands around what they've got," Bray said, and maybe learn how to get even more out of it. And in Janesville, Threm said, "We had to upgrade our SII/Mac software and now this is working a lot better than we had." But for most technical types, caution remains the watchword. "I really feel that if you pretty much don't have this done by Jan. 1, 1999, you're in trouble," said McGuire, who admitted to some butterflies in the belly. "We think we have a good plan," he said, 18 months after initiating the project. "Am I confident? No. I've been a nervous wreck since I started this whole process." Calling Y2K-related work "a tidal wave," Howard voices confidence in her paper's planning and staff. "I'm comfortable that our inside things are going to get done." Outside, Young sees a big problem overseas. "One thing we are finding is that the United Kingdom is only about two months behind the United States in awareness. However, continental Europe is much further behind, and we are very concerned about that, obviously." Back on this side of the Big Pond, "if I were in the end users' shoes, I'd want to be farther along than most users are," Young said. "But they're distracted by those other things -- like having to publish a newspaper every day." -- Pete Wetmore
"There are a lot of scare tactics going around. There are a lot of systems that will be OK. There are lots that won't. There will be systems that will die. It's tough to find all the bugs."
Atex Media Solutions Inc., Also see Rebirth of a legacy system. From THE COLE PAPERS, December 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved. |
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