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Millennium Bomb: Will Man Self-destruct?
Post Express -
February 11, 1999
Page 24
By March Oyinki
"The millennium
glitch fallout: oxygen machine failure kills 1,500 miners in South
Africa," "Mir Space station drifts into orbit, crews in
danger". Disaster in Japan, two subway trains collide, 5,000 lives
lost,: "A blackout in California, death toll in hospital hit
1,000." "Plane crash in Nigeria, 320 passengers feared
dead," "One million deaths usher in the year 2000."
The scenario,
doomsayers believe, will be a gloom picture of calamity and stampede. It
will be that of rushing ambulances and siren from police vehicles hooting
at full blare and heading in opposite directions. Accident, traffic jam,
pandemonium," dog bark, baby crying, explosion, and horror will fill
the air. The very existence of man will be threatened by his own ingenious
creation. Is the Y2K computer bug a real threat to life on earth? Will the
doomsayers' prophesy about the Y2K apocalypse come true?
Robert Bemer thinks the threat of the Y2K bug is a reality, Bemer is a computer scientist, and a one time IBM whiz kid, who along with Grace Hopper wrote COBOL, the programming language behind the Y2K bug. In
1979 Bemer issued a widely publicised warning of the potential failure of the programme if the first two digits representing a calendar year are not added.
Some people stil don't believe there is any real threat. I don't have to convince any 'Thomas,' but just read the prediction of Peter de Jager, which he made in 1977. De Jager is a Canadian, a mathematics
graduate fresh from college and a new employee with the Big Blue. It was he who out of curiosity, first detected the year 2000 but and stated that, the computer would not recognise the year 2000. He later predicted that, "The economy worldwide world stop ...
you would not have water. You would not have power.
Both De Jager and Bemer's predictions point to the obvious, and that is, the Y2K glitch is a real threat, if the Y2K bug is a real threat, how can it be fixed, and how much time do we have left to remedy this
malady.
The Y2K bug fix is as old as the bug itself. In 1957, the year Robert Bemer and his cohorts wrote COBOL programming lsanguage, he invented a picture clause which allowed a four-digit year. But this
never received IBM's approval, Effectively, for more than 40 years, computer scientists have known that there is a fix for the Y2K bug, but the knowledge of the damage the bug is going to cause was first expressed y Peter de Jager in his 1977 prediction.
Twenty-two years after de Jager apparently sounded the first warning alarm of the dangers that would follow the Y2K glitch, it is quite ignominious that governments all over the world,
especially the developed economies, waited until the nick of time before suddenly getting into frenzy.
It is only recently, in 1995, to be precise, that some countries started making serious efforts to try and minimise the effect of this threat. The United States and the Netherlands are
the two most Y2K compliant nations of the world. However, at the end of this millennium, the most compliant nation will still fall below the 60 per cent mark. The strategy therefore, is to focus on those sectors that are considered as “critical”. These
include aviation traffic control and transportation services, telecommunications, power generation, population and pension systems, etc.
The
magnitude of the danger such a malfunction would cause can best be
understood when you and discover that the traffic light,
elevator, train, airplane, satellite transmitters, blood
bank, national censors and pension fund databases, and so many other
infrastructures around you are all controlled by computer chip. It
is only then that you can understand the extent of destruction the
Y2K malfunction would cause.
Take a typical situation where 1,000 airplanes from different parts of the world are in the air, and aY2K malfunction occurs, how many lives do you think would be lost. When you add up
the devastation that may occur as a result of the Y2K glitch in hospitals., in a single day all around the world. The scenario won’t be too far from a holocaust.
It is
therefore imperative for government to focus on a few but critical
segments of the economy, and allowing her to channel resources to
these areas to ensure
compliance before the end of the century. I t is very sad to note
that some third world countries are low IT consumers.
Excerpts from a World Bank report released recently by United States information Services, (USIS). Quoted Hugh Sloan, the bank’s senior information technology (IT) officer for Africa,
as saying that, “…the impact could in fact be greater because these developing countries are more dependent on fewer and older computing systems, and they have many more competing national demands for scare resopurce.”
Sloan’s comments should be taken seriously because the least prepared countires will be the most hit. What I despair most, is the fact that the Y2K compliant countries that are
non-compliant. This will be a negative and an extremely frightening development. because, the already fragile economy of many third world countries, especially those in Africa will be further worsened by such as boycott.
As it is now, there is no other alternative than to take immediate action. We have only up till end of March 1999. At least so says John Koskinen, an aide to President Clinton and
chairman of the President’s Council on the Y2K conversion.
The only way Nigeria could take advantage of its apparently low IT consumer status, is by concentrating on those areas that have been identified as “critical.” I believe that because
these parastatals are not heavily computerized, the cost of Y2K compliance will not be so much that it becomes a huge financial burden on the already scarce and over stretched resources of the government.
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