This is a reply to an article written by Harry Browne about Y2K in World Net Daily.
Dear Sir or Madam: I have read the article by Harry Browne in the January 11th edition of your publication and felt compelled to respond because I am uniquely qualified to do so. You see, he classifies those who consider Y2K to be a serious problem into two categories, both of which he dismisses as follows: "The Y2K problem has been exaggerated by people who don't understand computers, and by computer experts who don't understand how the free market works." However, neither of those categories applies to me. While many people can claim to be computer experts (with varying degrees of justification), very few people have been hired by Mr. Browne to modify programs he has written. I am in the latter category, having written assembly language routines to improve the performance of his home-grown word processor for the HP 9845. Given this, as well as my resume, I don't think he can dismiss my expertise in the computer field. As for my understanding of how the free market works: I was introduced to free market economics by Mr. Browne's books and have read quite a bit about it since then, including many of the works that Mr. Browne himself learned from. I would be willing to pit my knowledge of economics against anyone's. And as long as we're talking about economics, I would like to point out something that Mr. Browne seems to have overlooked in his analysis: the companies that are the most critical to the survival of our civilization are precisely those that are the farthest from the free market. I'm referring to the utility companies, specifically water, power, and telecommunications, as well as the banking system. All of these are extremely heavily regulated by the government, and therefore are generally very slow to adapt to changing circumstances. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons that they have started working on the year 2000 problem very late, and in some cases have barely begun. But there is another flaw in his argument that Y2K will not be a serious problem because of the wonders of the free market. As big a fan of the free market as I am, it still consists of people, millions of people, who have all the frailties that humanity suffers from. One of these frailties is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities, and another one is is a tendency to procrastinate. The former of these frailties is the reason that it is so difficult to convince people to prepare seriously for any disaster, whether it is Y2K or a hurricane that is more than 12 hours away. The almost universal tendency to procrastination is the key to the next fallacious statement in Mr. Browne's article: "Many large companies do need to upgrade old computer systems and databases (although your personal computer probably will have no problems). Upgrading a computer system is a formidable task. But so is moving into a new factory, changing a product line, or dealing with new regulations. Companies deal with such problems as they arise, and one way or another they usually solve them." What is wrong with this statement? Just one missing word: "eventually". It is well-documented that most large software projects are delivered very late, and many are never delivered at all, being cancelled before they are finished. (See Ed Yourdon's article on this topic. In this case, of course, being late is disastrous, while cancellation is suicidal, but those are the most likely outcomes of such a large project. What is the conclusion? That most companies aren't going to finish on time. The next fallacy in his article is the notion that because Y2K is a widespread problem, that makes it easier to fix: "The Y2K problem seemed uniquely dangerous because millions of companies have to deal with it at the same time. Hundreds of thousands of COBOL programmers would have to be found -- to examine old computer programs, change every date reference, and test the corrections. But, in truth, a widespread problem is easier to handle, because it offers bigger profits to people who can devise solutions. So now there are products like Revolve, Restore 2000, Milligration, and dozens more -- computer programs that go through old programs, fix the date problems, and test the results. These automated solutions eliminate the need for thousands of programmers." This seems to be an excellent solution, but it doesn't explain why some large companies like Citibank are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on fixing their programs. The answer lies in the analysis of his analogy between fixing Y2K and creating Web pages: "The Internet flourished in a similar, unpredictable way. If in 1994 someone had said there would be millions of World Wide Web sites in 1999, you might have assumed he didn't understand computers. Websites are written in a complicated computer language called HTML. Where are the hundreds of thousands of HTML writers necessary to build millions of sites? But software companies came forward with computer programs that enable people to build websites without understanding HTML. Other programs help specialists to produce the more sophisticated, animated, interactive sites. The result is that we do have millions of websites after all." This comparison indicates a complete lack of understanding of what "the Y2K problem" actually is. It is not one uniform problem that can be fixed by any particular single solution, as is the task of creating a program (or even a few programs) that can translate a user's description of a Web page into HTML code. Instead, it is a collection of hundreds of millions of individual problems, each of which is different from the others. The difficulty is that there are almost an infinite number of ways to perform the same task in a program; the HTML creating programs that Mr. Browne refers to can do it in any way they wish and still get a valid result, but fixing Y2K bugs requires that a person (or a program; in some cases) figure out exactly what the program being fixed is doing and how it is doing it. This can be quite difficult even for a small program that is poorly written, much less for gigantic COBOL programs that have been modified many times since they were written, by many programmers. In fact, Y2K is not even entirely a COBOL problem as Mr. Browne implies: Y2K problems exist in hundreds of computer languages in hundreds of millions of programs around the world. The Department of Defense alone uses more than 500 computer languages, programs written in any of which can have Y2K problems. That is probably one of the reasons why they're so far behind on fixing the problem, as indicated by the extremely low "grades" that they have received from Stephen Horn, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology. But the real "killer application" of the Y2K problem is the one that Mr. Browne doesn't even mention: embedded systems. These are the computers that control much of our nation's infrastructure. They're hidden inside oil pipeline machinery, refineries, power distribution networks, generators, oil tankers, telephone systems, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, and many other pieces of equipment on which our life depends. The good news is that most of these embedded systems will work properly when the clock rolls over to January 1st, 2000. The bad news is that "most" is not enough. It has been estimated that several percent of the systems will fail at rollover or shortly thereafter. (See the following PC Week article). That doesn't sound like very many failures, but it is more than enough to bring industrial civilization to a halt. The difficulty is that even one malfunctioning system in an industrial plant can cause a disaster. On a number of occasions, managers of industrial plants have set the clocks forward to see what would happen when rollover occurred. In most of these cases, the plants ceased to function, and in one case there was physical damage to the plant that took weeks to fix. See Raleigh Martin's WWW site for details. Am I being overly alarmist? Not according to the National Guard's Web site, which says: "Large segments of our nation's electric power grid could fail, causing massive blackouts. Water distribution systems could fail. Distribution of vital petroleum and natural gas could be hampered if electronically controlled pipelines malfunction." Of course, there is much more to the Y2K problem. Even if power plants are ready for the rollover (which most of them are not at the moment), will they be able to get fuel? The railroads aren't compliant. If they can get the fuel, how will they pay for it? No major bank is compliant as of this date, even though some of them have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it in a multiyear project. To conclude: Mr. Browne, however fine a person, a political candidate, and an economist he may be, does a disservice to the public with this article. Our citizenry need to be awakened to the seriousness of the problem rather than put to sleep in the name of the free market. Steve Heller Return to my main page