by Marina Sofos ‘02

It’s less than a year away.

Many fear the worst, having already stocked up on food and clothing and even converted to solar housing. It’s become one of the hottest topics in the media. What will happen? Will we all die? Can we possibly survive? No money, no heat, no water, or even worse?

Such reactions may be extreme, but one doesn’t have to be a doomsday predictor to worry about Y2K. In fact, being overly laid back about the whole situation isn’t very wise. So, how much should we worry? What exactly is Y2K, and what measures should we or can we take to avoid it?

Historically, computers were set to read years with two digits instead of four, in order to save memory space, time, and money. The year 2000 began to worry computer programmers when it was realized that coding dates with two digits meant that when the year 2000 came, the computer would assume that it was 00, or 1900.

Our driver’s licenses, credit cards, and checks are all read with two-digit years, so that when 2000 comes, a computer could read all of these items as invalid. Even telephone switches, voice-mail systems, and elevators can be affected. Will Brown students suddenly be unable to get into their dorms, eat at the Ratty, or receive student loans? Will faculty members no longer receive paychecks? Should we panic?

According to Anne Oribello, Year 2000 coordinator for CIS, the answer is "no."

For many businesses and firms, the Year 2000 problem has taken top priority. Likewise, here at Brown Y2K has been a top priority over the past few years, and a task force within Computing and Information Services (CIS) has been assembled to assess and resolve the situation.

As of October of last year, seventy-six percent of Brown’s centralized administrative systems had been deemed Y2K-compliant in a project totaling $4 million in cost. This high percentage is due to the extensive measures that CIS has taken to ensure that the University is as prepared as it can be. In addition to tackling the administrative systems, CIS has issued departmental surveys in order to assess the status of individual Brown departments and respond accordingly.

CIS has created a webpage, accessed through the Brown homepage, that gives details about the Y2K situation at Brown, in addition to advice and strategies for both students and faculty to resolve their individual problems and questions. According to CIS, there are five areas of risk that are being assessed campus-wide: desktop applications, applications built by departments, software packages purchased by departments, CIS administrative infrastructure, and CIS-supported administrative applications.

In the Y2K realm, two strategies are being implemented. The "Race to Replace" strategy actually replaces old systems, while "Repair in Place," adopted by Brown, approaches the problem by reprogramming or expanding current systems. The strategy has definitely worked for Brown so far. As of now, the necessary measures for Payroll/Human Resources, Student Loans, Employee Loans, Admissions, Financial Aid, Accounting, Plant Operations, telecommunications, retirement plans, the endowment, and card access to buildings are all either completed or on schedule.

The Student Information System (SIS), which is responsible for the Bursar’s handling of tuition, room, board, and fees, is actually being converted into a new language, and will then have code changed to comply with Y2K.

Although the centralized machines are under control, the fate of many of the departmental computers is still unknown. Only about half of the surveys distributed have been filled out and returned to CIS. There’s really no way to know if the thousands of computers operated at Brown by students and faculty will be okay.

That’s where CIS’s webpage comes in. The webpage not only gives advice, but also provides links to various computer and program vendors that people can access. According to Oribello, it is crucial that people don’t panic, but that they still continue to take precautions and prepare as best they can.

"We don’t live in a vacuum, so that even if we’re prepared, if others aren’t, it will still affect us. We also can’t predict everything, so there will definitely be some minor glitches," said Oribello. "But we must also consider that Y2K has become such a prominent topic, with so many people working on it, that almost everything has been addressed."

But January 1, 2000, may not be the only problem date. The year 2000 also falls under a usually-forgotten exception. Oribello notes, "Years evenly divisible by four are leap years, except years evenly divisible by 100 which are not, except years divisible by 400 which are!" This unusual occurrence means that the year 2000 will not be a leap year, as would normally be programmed in a computer. If not fixed, the missed leap year could set the computer behind by a day.

Although most machines are threatened by the change of millennium, computers running the UNIX operating system will automatically avoid all such problems because they set dates based on seconds. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them fool-proof either. According to Valerie Green, systems programmer for the Department of Computer Science, the seconds are measured in bits. After the available thirty-two bits fill up, a system, if not updated, will crash. For the Brown CS department, this will occur sometime in the year 2038.

The UNIX issue isn’t as great of a problem as Y2K because it will occur on different computers at different times, and most of those computers should be replaced by 2020, when the problem will begin. However, Oribello also pointed out that many also believed that all computers would have been replaced before Y2K would become an imminent threat.

So what do we do? "Every day, computers don’t do what we want; they crash or the power goes out. We have experience dealing with computer problems in the past. Y2K, or any such problems, fall along the same lines. We shouldn’t panic, but we should also not ignore the problem," advises Oribello.