Tripod Home | New | TriTeca | Work/Money | Politics/Community | Living/Travel | Planet T | Daily ScoopPOLITICS & COMMUNITY
Peter de Jager
interviewed by Brian Hecht on 17 October, 1995
"The clock is always ticking."
Peter de Jager, an expert in the area of management technology, is on a campaign to make the public aware of the ramifications of millenial change on the world of commerce.
Tripod: What seems to be the problem here?
PJ: We have a date format, YY, which only gives us two digits for the year. If I ask you when you were born, you'd most likely say, '55, rather than 1955. If you were born in the year 2000, what would you say? 00. That's where the problem comes about. The 00. If I ask the computer today how old I am, it goes 95 minus 55, and says, "Peter, you're 40 years old." In the year 2000, it'll go, "Peter you're 00 minus 55, you're minus 55 years old.
Tripod: What are the larger implications, aside from computers miscalculating your age?
PJ: Interest rate calculations. If you have money in the bank, that span that goes from, say 99 to 00, how long has it been in there? It's been in there minus 99 years. Minus 99 years of interest calculation is not good for you. Basically, what they do is take 99 years compound interest, and they take it out of your account. They don't put it into your account. Which is okay -- because if you have a Visa bill, well, that's 23 percent interest, and they'll put 23 percent, compounded, for 99 years, into your account.
Tripod: Now what's the worst thing that could happen? Is it possible that there will be blackouts? Missiles will launch? The government will forget you paid your taxes?
PJ: The worst-case scenario is probably a severe downturn in the economy. If you're an organization, and your accounting system can't handle the year 00, you don't find out about it until the first invoice comes off that's wrong. To change your accounting system could take three to six months. To install a brand new one might take six months to a year. Especially if you're a large organization. What I mean is if you can't print an invoice, you don't have cash flow, and if you don't have cash flow, you're out of business.
Tripod: So on your homepage, when you say we're coming to a collapse on January 1, 2000, that's not an alarmist exaggeration?
PJ: Alarmist is a word that's used a lot. And to me, raising the alarm isn't alarmist. I know these systems will not work unless we fix them. Now, fixing them is not that big a deal.
Tripod: Tell me what it will take.
PJ: It takes some money. It takes a lot of money. Because we have so many lines of code. A typical organization has anywhere between 25 million and 100 million lines of code. Let's assume that you could fix a line of code in 10 seconds. When you've got a hundred million of them, it's a lot of work. It doesn't matter how quickly you can fix them; it's a lot of work to fix them. So they're a complicated task, because your systems are not independent of everybody else's systems. Everything you see is, to use the old Ted Nelson word, "intertwingled." Everything is interconnected.
Tripod:So even if I wanted to reset my Mac, or my company's computers, to read in a compatible way, who's to say that's going to be compatible with the way anyone else has done it?
PJ: Exactly. Is the way that you solve the problem going to compatible with the way that you client, or your partner in business, solves the problem? If you're a manufacturing company, let's assume that you have everything right, your systems are fine. You're a manufacturing company and you build cars. And you order a gas tank from me. Trouble is, my systems are down. I can't deliver you a gas tank. Question is, can you build yourself a car? And how many components make up the things you build? What are the chances than 10 percent of those won't be able to be supplied to you because the computer systems are faulty?
Tripod: There are some related problems, too. Tell me about this day of the week problem.
PJ: Day of the week is simple. January the first of 1900 was a Monday. January the first of 2000 is a Saturday. If your computer is using 00, as it doesn't know that the 00 represents 2000, and it assumes, which it's most otherwise going to do, that it represents 1900, then it's going to calculate the day of the week being Monday when actually it's Saturday. And that can cause trouble in traffic systems that have a traffic light set up to rush hour. If it's assuming that it's Monday, and it's not, it's Saturday, it's going to be all messed up. If it's assuming that it's a Friday rush hour, or rather it is a Friday rush hour, and the computer says "no, no it's Sunday morning," it can get real tricky.
Tripod: And the 1999 problem? That's interesting to me.
PJ: The 1999 problem is that a lot of computers, a lot of programmers, use the 1999 to indicate an end-of-file marker. So your program is going through, processing records, and the way it knows when it's ended a file, is when it finds a record with the year equaling '99. Trouble is, when you reach 1999, there's going to be a lot of those records, and your files won't get processed in time. Another aspect is the sort sequence. Zero-zero will sort, not after 99, but before 01. So your new data will be put at the top of the file rather than the bottom of the file the way it's supposed to be.
Tripod: Now, is there any deeper meaning here about how long we can sustain this sort of corporate, computer-driven culture? It seems like it's deep with resonance.
PJ: Well, I wouldn't go that far. What I'd suggest instead is that the corporate culture we've created is so brand new that we really don't know what we're doing. We're making this up as we go along. We thought that when we wrote systems 30 years ago, that those systems would be replaced in 30 years, or in 10 years, just like you replace a car. In actual fact, that's not how computer systems evolve. The way they evolve is like an onion. As you need new capability, you snap on a new layer of complexity.
Tripod: This almost seems the stuff of science fiction. Does anyone ever get your efforts confused with crazy doomsday stuff?
PJ: Yes, absolutely. We've had a couple of people looking through Nostradamus to see if they can find any references. We've had a couple people say "This is the millennium crisis that was written about in the Bible, etc., etc. " Who knows?
Tripod: And this is obviously a personal issue for you too. How will you feel if 2000 comes, and everything's fine, or if you didn't do enough?
PJ: It'll be the latter, not the former. It will definitely be "Did I do enough?" Was I good enough in getting the word out there? Did I take the right strategy? The option of, well, nothing happens -- that won't happen.
Tripod: So what's it going to take to jolt people into action?
PJ: Articles, announcements behind the major companies. Significant business people admitting that there is a problem. For the banks to admit that there is a problem with their credit cards ... that they can't handle these expirations dated 00. A lot of admission and people coming forward and saying, "Yeah, there is a problem. He's right," will not just handle it. It needs other people as well.
Tripod: It sounds like it's going to need a real PR effort. Have you considered a slogan? Or a campaign?
PJ: I don't have the funds or the wherewithal. I've been doing this using grass roots technology, the strength of the Internet, my abilities as a speaker, the power of the press. I haven't been able to throw money at this; all I've been able to throw at this is smarts. We've gotten pretty far just with that. I wish I had a couple hundred thousand dollars-- I'd take out a full page ad in the New York Times. A full-page letter, and get some good names on it. That would have a lot of impact. But stuff like that takes a lot of money.
Tripod: Do you know the Prince song 1999? Have you considered that as a theme song?
PJ: I have. (chuckle) I haven't thought about theme songs...
Tripod: So what are you doing personally on your own system to prevent a meltdown??
PJ: I use a package that doesn't rely on dates. I have a small accounting system that's just Quicken at the moment. It has, to the best of my knowledge, no problems, but if it has, I don't have a whole bunch of stuff. I'm a one-man company. So I don't rely on computers to tell me the time. Unlike larger organizations.
Tripod: Let's say 2000 comes and nobody does anything to prevent this. Where is the safest place to be?
PJ: Away from technology. Where you don't have to rely on it. And not under the flight path of any plane.
Tripod: Where will you be in the year 2000?
PJ: I'll be probably be on an island.
Tripod: I noticed on the homepage you like to point out exactly how much time is left until the millennium. Is that something you're always conscious of? Like, how much time do we have left right now?
PJ: Right now... I'm not conscious of that all the time. I know that if you started today, your organization, by the time you get your act in gear, and start looking at lines of code, you would have about 750 work days-- that's '96, '97, '98, 'cause you have to be complete in '99. So you have 750 work days to do 100 million lines of code.
Tripod: And the clock is always ticking?
PJ: And the clock is always ticking.
Editor's Note:
Rest assured, Tripod is safe! Our own tech fella, Jeff Vander Klute has assured us that he is already taking precautions to make sure that, when the year 2000 arrives, your Tripod account will be safe and sound.
Map | Search | Help | Send Us Comments
