Tomorrow’s date, 9/9/99, may cause problems for some software written in Cobol (CI No 3,740). The venerable programming language occasionally uses a string of four nines as an end-of- file marker, meaning that when the string occurs, no more data can be read from the file. Government agencies, financial institutions and utilities are reported to be keeping an eye on the problem, hoping that glitches may serve as a guide to how to handle the Y2K bug. President Clinton’s Y2K advisory council intends to collect status reports. The Coast Guard has added supervisors and the Transportation Department has assembled its natural disaster team.
Experts, however, are optimistic that the Four Nines problem will be a mere blip. April 9th 1999, the 99th day of the 99th year, passed without a serious software meltdown, as did the 1024th week of operation of the Global Positioning System. Nevertheless, Andy Kyte, a Gartner Group analyst, warned against complacency. This is not going to cause a significant number of failures or breakdowns. But it may well reinforce the complacency of those that currently should be acting to deal with the real year 2000 issues, he told Wired News.
That said, Kyte does not expect apocalypse as the millennium ticks over. The majority of errors are going to happen in the few weeks running up to [December 31 1999] and a few weeks after, with gradual inefficiency building up over computer networks, he explained. This reinforces the fact that year 2000 is not a pyrotechnic event. Except, we hope, for the fireworks.
