By Hamza Hendawi
THE TIME is new year’s eve in 1999. The place is London. Revellers throng Trafalgar Square in their thousands as Big Ben’s 12 midnight bongs begin, ushering in the new millennium.
Barely have the customary whoops and cheers begun to fade when traffic lights dim and the city starts to black out bit by bit. Train services grind to a halt; operating theatres and intensive care units shut down in hospitals all over the land.
This is the nightmare scenario of the millennium computer bug, as portrayed in a video released recently by a British railway company for a seminar on the problem. Its purpose was to remind everyone of the magnitude of the dilemma, and to caution against complacency in dealing with it.
The problem is real enough. According to some predictions, it threatens a liquidity lock-up that could send world markets crashing; it could activate and even release nuclear weapons, render plastic money useless, and interfere with phone services, microwaves and the worldwide web.
It is the kind of end-of-the-world scenario you would expect to see only in movies. But this one is not part of a James Bond plot – and the saviour would not be agent 007, but rather hundreds of thousands of computer programmers, hardware and software manufacturers in every corner of the world.
Their task would be to remedy the problem between now and December 31, 1999 – at an estimated cost of $1 trillion.
The problem of the millennium bug arises from the fact that most computers and programs are designed to read only the last two digits in a date, which means that the year 2000 could cause a massive and global problem. Computers and programs which have not been rewired by then will read dates as if they were a century old, recognising January 1, 2000 as January 1, 1900.
In Cyprus, where the computer culture has flourished so much in recent years that its per capita computer ownership is among the highest in the world, work to raise awareness of the problem kicked off only this week when the island’s computer society organised a one-day seminar on the millennium bug.
“The best way to handle it is to treat it as a virus,” said Andreas Hadjioannou of the Cyprus-based NetU Consultants Ltd.
“Small and medium-sized enterprises will face the biggest problem because they don’t have access to the latest information on the problem,” according to Panicos Masouras of the Higher Institute of Technology’s Information Technology Department.
“Is there a silver bullet? The answer is no and the options are limited,” he said.
“The ‘do nothing’ approach is one that I don’t recommend – because it will be like putting an expiry date on your organisation,” he warned some 150 participants, who included programmers, vendors, representatives of manufacturers and consultants.
“Any time between June and September next year should be the real deadline for the rewiring, because you need the rest of the century to test your new programs,” he said.
Another warning came from Harris Hartsiotis, marketing manager of British- based consultants Millennium (UK) Ltd. “The problem is global and the date is immovable. The alternative to dealing with the year 2000 problem will be going out of business,” he said.
Hartsiotis advised Cypriot businessmen and users of personal computers not to waste any more time in dealing with the problem. “The resources will become scarce and more expensive, and we advise that the work should be done by September 1998 to give your systems a year for testing.”
But if speakers from the Bank of Cyprus, the Popular Bank and the government are to be believed, the advice from Masouras and Hartsiotis was old hat.
“December 1997 will mark the end of our reprogramming, and the implementation phase will be completed by the end of next year,” announced Philippos Leandrou of the Bank of Cyprus’ Year 2000 project.
“Our aim is to get into 1999 with a clean 2000-compliant system,” he told the seminar.
An address by senior Popular Bank systems analyst Marios Tsakalakis was equally reassuring, while Xenia Eleftheriou of the government’s Information Technology Services Department informed listeners that the government was on top of the problem.
She said the government began its reprogramming process in January this year, and that the whole project was scheduled to end by November next year.
In addition to in-house resources, she said, the programme is costing the government £36,000, a figure which many participants thought to be inexplicably low.
Already, said Costas Agrotis of the Finance Ministry, computers at the Inland Revenue Department have been made 2000-compliant.
