The Case of the 100-Year-Old Babies

As you read horror stories in the newspaper (now that it is being published again), you are feeling good about all the preparations you made for your systems. You changed your computers, updated your software packages, and everything continued to work. Your important longitudinal study of children's health is continuing without skipping a beat.

Some of the news stories have been rich!

There was the largest local dairy distributor who went suddenly and dramatically out of business when its stock stopped rotating and it shipped badly spoiled milk, bottled in December, to hundreds of stores in February. “Ship oldest stock first” was the rule, and the milk made in the last week of December never got to be oldest, because 00 comes before 99, and it sat spoiling in the warehouse for a month. Now the EPA is trying to figure out how to get rid of a whole lot of milk that smells worse every day.

Then there was the surprising letter your daughter received. She's a college sophomore, but she got a fundraising letter from the school's Alumni Association: "Dear members of classes of '50 and before: Have you remembered your Alma Mater in your will?" Half the people on her dorm floor received the letters to their immense amusement and to the school's immense embarrassment when that TV crew from a local station showed up.

And then there was the county that found cases that had been in its court system for over 100 years and began to automatically dismiss them. The clerk of the Circuit Court was forced to resign. Your son got out of a speeding ticket on that one.

You can laugh at these stories, because it's clear that you were ready.

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But then . . .

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How did this happen?

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Your Very Own Year 2000 Bug

You are probably already thinking about checking your PC out and upgrading your software packages. But that's not enough. It is important to debunk the myth that "fixing" your computers and upgrading your software will solve all your problems. If you have a broken toaster, and you move it along with everything else you own into a new house, you still have a broken toaster. Even if our fictitious researcher had moved his data from one kind of computer to another, from the mainframe to UNIX or to his PC, the babies would still be 100 years old. It's his data that's broken.

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The Year 2000 Pledge

1. I will not knowingly acquire any computer hardware or software without verifying that it is year 2000 ready, including that it knows that 2000 is a leap year.
2. I will define all date fields in any data layouts, programs, or databases I set up, whether for work or personal use, using the database system's built-in "date" data type if it has one, or otherwise using four-digit fields for the year. (See The Right Format for Dates in Data.)
3. I will investigate any sources of data that I receive that contain two-digit year fields to see whether they can be changed to four-digit years, to verify that I am not relying on something that may break.
4. I will write all dates with a four-digit year, whether entered by keyboard into a computer, or written by pen or pencil onto paper. I will start writing all-numeric dates as yyyy-mm-dd.
5. I will not use windowing to treat two-digit years as four-digit years without actually converting them, if there is any way to avoid it.
6. I will remember Murphy's Law: If something could possibly be affected by the Year 2000, it will break.

Comments are welcome; please send them to
Roger Deshner, rogerd@uic.edu