Best defense against chaos is knowledge, vigilance

January 29, 2000

Is everybody all relaxed now that we have squashed the big, bad Y2K bug? Hey, maybe there never was one. Maybe it was all a bunch of computer industry hype to shuck us out of some more bucks.

Either way, can't we just forget it and move on in blithe ignorance? Nope, sorry. The fact is, if not for the millions of person-hours worked, billions of dollars spent and trillions of program lines written, we all might be smashing down the doors of our paranoid neighbors who stockpiled emergency rations instead of laughing at them the way we are now.

The catastrophe that did not happen should serve as a warning and prompt to action.

For one thing, in this leap year we still have Feb. 29 to get through. "Some experts say that is going to be a bigger problem than Y2K, but I don't think so," John Attas, director of the Easton Publishing Co. computer system department, said Thursday. "But who knows?"

Right now, Attas said, we're finding "new problems introduced by software used to solve Y2K problems."

It's like insecticides that do kill bugs, but mess up other things in the environment.

"Sometimes we're our own worst enemies. Nothing is blowing up, but we are going to be four or five months screwing around with the unexpected effects."

Attas' five-person department is responsible for 17 servers (computers that run networks of other computers,) more than 250 various personal computers "and 20 proprietary software packages that have to talk to each other and share data.

"We have more than a million lines of code just in our publishing system alone," he said. And Easton Publishing, with 22 daily editions a week and 31 weeklies, is just one relatively small, though extremely complex, operation.

Yet, "out of 28 publication zones (as seen by the systems,) 16 are not working right now, to one degree or another," directly or indirectly from Y2K "issues."

Multiply that by a myriad of businesses, industries, governments, hospitals, schools and homes addicted to computers, linked by a global network, all balanced on a mass of machine language interacting in ways nobody understands, and we still have an increasingly precarious situation.

"For one thing, we've installed a lot of defective software over the last year," Attas said. "They tried to incorporate major upgrades with the fixes. You can't write that much software that fast without making mistakes."

Some of them don't show up for a while. A program might call a particular line or subroutine, or refer to a few bits of data, only once a year or less.

The fact that the smartest, richest people in the world supposedly didn't see this 2000 coming is scariest of all. I mean, duh, it's been on the calendar for more than four centuries.

We humans have a way of painting ourselves into corners. Check history. But this could be a really tight one.

"Is there a big scam going on?" Attas asked. "Maybe, but what are you going to do?

"Everybody's relieved everything didn't blow up, but this is a continuing thing."

Even though we missed the electronic apocalypse -- for now -- that doesn't mean we are safe from a creeping chaos.

"Quite chaotic," Attas said. "That's a good word."

The best defense against chaos, as it has been in every epoch, is knowledge coupled with vigilance.

Unfortunately, we are not turning out enough people with the fundamental technical knowledge required to do that job.

As a matter of public policy let's demand initiatives now, before we relax too much.

Frank Keegan is editor of The Express-Times, P.O Box 391, Easton PA 18044-0391.

Source: San Bernardino Sun archive #125711

http://www.newschoice.com/Newspapers/Gannett/Sun/default.asp

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 17, 2000