Few Year 2000 Glitches Are Reported on First Working Day

By BARNABY J. FEDER

ear 2000 computer glitches began appearing as much of the world headed back to work Monday after the New Year's holiday, but they remained scattered and, for the most part, trivial.

The nation's financial institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange, opened Year 2000 trading without a hitch. The relatively smooth sailing continued not just in the United States, which spent over $100 billion on Year 2000 preparations, according to government estimates, but also in foreign nations that had spent far less.

"We're seeing that there were no threatening effects in the companies," Salvador Bellido, vice president of the Spanish Confederation of Medium and Small Businesses, told the news agency Europa Press. "We're beginning to think that all this has been set up for someone's benefit. I don't know if it was Bill Gates or who," he added, referring to Microsoft's chief executive.

As they have been doing ever since the rollover to 2000 occurred on Saturday with no major disruptions, computer experts and government officials repeated their convictions that testing in recent years had amply proved that the threat had been real. They also said that the similar outcomes around the world for such varying investments were not surprising once the different levels of dependence on computer technology were taken into account.

Basic services like power, telephones and water run with little or no help from computers in many countries, said Bruce W. McConnell, director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center, the United Nations-sponsored Year 2000 information clearinghouse in Washington. And late starters at home and overseas benefited from the experience of others. "It was possible to catch up with a modest expenditure because the tools had become very efficient," Mr. McConnell said.

In addition, where computers are used overseas, they are often older systems with much simpler programming and fewer links to other equipment, making repairs simpler, according to the Gartner Group, an information technology consulting firm in Stamford, Conn.

But Mr. McConnell and others monitoring Year 2000 incidents said the continuing good news did not close the books on Year 2000 risks. He cited as an example the unknown status of government systems in numerous developing countries. "We haven't seen their payrolls run yet," he said.

Others cautioned that even in the United States, things have not been going quite as flawlessly as the public reports to date might suggest. Gartner Group said it had received confidential reports of about 400 Year 2000 flaws by midafternoon, mostly among midsized and smaller clients and nearly all of them fixed within hours of their discovery.

"That's a significant increase over yesterday, about 50 percent," said Louis Marcoccio, Gartner's Year 2000 research director.

Many of the flaws showing up are too silly to even be irritating.

For a time Vice President Al Gore's Town Hall Web page (www.algore2000.com) informed visitors it was Jan. 3, 19100 if they arrived via a Netscape browser and Jan. 3, 192000 if they came to the site using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. An automated selection program of a telephone service that reads The New York Times and other newspapers to blind New Yorkers informed clients they would be hearing the Jan. 3, 1900, issue.

But some problems reflect the kind of flaws that consultants fear could put pressure on some computer users as the days go by. One electronics company told Gartner that it had discovered a Year 2000 glitch that generated faulty orders. It caught the mistake before any shipments went astray but not before the bad data had been sent to a larger database including records used for other activities like telemarketing.

"It's going to take several days to clean up the database," Mr. Marcoccio said. "Meanwhile, they have set up a temporary database to handle orders and they will eventually have to go back and mix the two."

Mr. Marcoccio said his concerns about small business were reinforced Monday morning when he visited his dentist in suburban Boston and encountered an apparent Year 2000 problem. He was the first patient of 2000, and when the secretary tried to set up his next appointment, the computer system crashed. Efforts to get it started generated error messages suggesting that some patient records may have been destroyed, he added.

Over all, though, Gartner and others say the news continued to be encouraging. The Tokyo stock exchange, which was closed Monday, opened without trouble this morning. Hubs in the distribution system like McKesson HBOC, a San Francisco-based pharmaceutical distributor, reported no problems with orders and shipments. Industrial giants like General Motors began manufacturing with no discernible hitches.

"It's definitely looking good," said Jeffrey Cripps, who has overseen DaimlerChrysler's Year 2000 interactions with its many suppliers.

One problem cited by government officials Monday morning as potentially critical prevented kidney dialysis equipment manufactured by Gambros, a Swedish company, from running through an automated cleaning cycle at the end of the day. But that failure was actually discovered during testing Saturday in Scotland in two models that are not sold in the United States, according to Tim Schoenberg, a Gambros spokesman in Aliso Viejo, Calif., who added that no patients had been harmed and that it was easily circumvented.

Perhaps the most widely reported problem over the weekend -- the failure Friday night of a ground station that processes information from military satellites -- was put to rest when the Pentagon reported it was operating normally.

John A. Koskinen, chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, said he did not expect any of the disruptions likely to arise from here on to be broad enough to have any impact on the national economy.

Other signs of growing confidence included a trickle of consumers returning propane heaters and other devices purchased as insurance against disruptions to Home Depot, Sears Roebuck and other retailers. Sears is charging 20 percent of the cost for "restocking." Charity groups like Second Harvest began collecting food donations from consumers who had decided they no longer needed some of the food supplies they had put aside.

Susan Earl, director of development for the Second Harvest chapter in Nashville, said, "The calls started coming in right after we arrived at 9 a.m."

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), January 04, 2000

Answers

I like this report because it's a mix, and gives a look, however brief (and if some insist, however spun) into a variety of different areas -- supply chain, end user, etc. I'm hoping this trend continues in this sense: it seems to at once demonstrate that the problem was indeed worth the work and attention, unlike what some of the odder naysaying voices are now asserting, but at the same time showing that not everything need be interpreted as clear proof of imminent disaster (thus the note that the 400 reports concerned flaws then mostly fixed -- ie, that rather than giving up, programmers and tech staff are doing their jobs). Time will tell.

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 04, 2000.

Amazing! Four days into Y2K and 'the war is over' for some!

They're imitating the Pollies which Koskinen and de Jager are now proto-Doomers - what an interesting study in psychology :).

And the second shoe hasn't even fallen yet...

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 04, 2000.

Gartner Group is down on their collective knees praying for problems, just like certain luminaries in this forum, because otherwise someone with a law degree is going to see their fingerprints all over the hype and the negative side of the balance sheet.

    --bks

-- Bradley K. Sherman (bks@netcom.com), January 04, 2000.