Sliding into the tractor seat, a farmer, weary from celebrating the new millennium, wipes sleep from her eyes. It is Jan. 1, 2000 and her alarm clock’s failure has made her late for feeding the cattle. She turns the key in the tractor but it won’t start. The computerized dash is flashing a warning she has not seen before.
Back in the farm house, her phone calls to the dealer won’t go through. The power flickers and fails.
This Saturday morning will be like no other. All around the world computers have failed and back on the farm the house begins to grow cold. The generator on a neighbor’s hog barn drones a tune across the cold prairie. The only thing that protects the pigs from the elements is a seldom-used diesel engine and a salvaged old generator.
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Meanwhile, the family at a nearby dairy farm is faced with trying to milk 65 cows by hand. The automatic milkers are down. Without hiring additional help, it’s going to be impossible. Cows’ udders begin to swell and toxicity becomes a problem.
Trains scheduled to pass on the main line stop. Engineers know there are other trains out there, but they are unable to communicate, so they sit idle and wait for instructions. Grain stops moving to port. Come Monday morning, the control panels in port terminal offices fail.
The ship, late docking because of communication problems with the harbor master, waits for a load of grain that cannot be moved to port. Other captains sitting in English Bay will soon start charging demurrage for their wait and the farmer back in her now cold kitchen will have to pay. The millennium bug has struck.
While this is a worst case scenario for agriculture, computer experts and executives in charge of shepherding their companies into the year 2000 say it is not total science fiction.
Dubbed the millennium bug or Y2K, the problem may force many computers to self destruct when their internal clocks reach 2000.
Many computer programs keep track of the year according to only the last two digits and it’s not clear how they will respond when the digits flip back to 00 at midnight 2000.
Computers are often required to compute time and date. For example, 1999 minus 1998 equals one. In computer lingo, this is often abbreviated as 99 minus 98 equals one. But 00 minus 99 is equal to -99 and 2000 ends in 00. That could create problems when computers are asked to calculate dates after 2000.
Some computer experts estimate that as much as 400 billion lines of computer code in North America must be checked and changed. So far 400 million have been completed. Companies are changing entire computer systems and upgrading software to Y2K compliant standards. A continental shortage of computer programmers has ballooned to nearly 500,000 people and the number rises daily. Officials with Canada’s federally appointed Task Force 2000, charged with motivating business to address the problem, suggest the cost of upgrading and the costs associated with failing to upgrade will exceed $12 billion.
Beyond the standard PCs and company computers, many other systems are in danger. For example, farm equipment monitors and automated safety systems on machinery may be affected.
As well, grain elevation and transportation, livestock slaughter, food processing, commodity and money markets may be hit as the clock ticks past 2000.
Utilities can fail, power and telephones can be interrupted, banking systems could stall, factories could grind to a halt; anything that relies on computer information might be affected.
The effects may be catastrophic, or if the proper changes are made, the millennium bug may stir up only minor glitches. But computer experts say more than 50 percent of companies in Canada are not prepared for big moment.
“If they haven’t already started taking steps to prepare, it may already be too late for many larger companies,” said Bill Gargano, of Computer Horizons, an American computer consultancy dealing with Y2K issues.
Any automated system using a computer control can be affected if it relies on a clock. If a computer clock is telling a machine to check itself for errors, warn the operator about service intervals or acts as a safety control that periodically inspects itself for faults, the computer may consider the year date of 00 a problem and shut itself down, or it may stall.
Integrated or embedded chips are often the culprits. They are so common and so well-hidden that a farm may be dependent on dozens of them without the producer ever encountering them.
These hardware components, often single computer chips, have software built into them. Programs cannot always be changed from the outside and in many cases chips must be physically replaced. Not all have the potential to cause a machine to stop working and many have no clock functions at all. The solution is knowing which kind of chips a machine has, if any.
That makes early diagnosis vital.
