Just 453 days to go till all the digital clocks click over to 00 o'clock on 01, 01, 2000 and everything crashes. The clocks stop, lifts freeze between floors, pacemakers falter, gigantic complexes of farm machinery grind to a shuddering closure, planes fall out of the sky on to the mile-long traffic jams where motorists stand kicking their cars.
Or perhaps not. Patrick O'Beirne, managing director of Systems Modelling, a company specialising in readying firms for the euro and the millennium problem, says the main thing small to medium business owners should be doing now is assessing their position.
"Check. Find out what your options are. If you don't know where you are, you're lost, and you're an open target for anyone to come along and sell you anything that you don't need," he advises.
At Thursday's Irish Computer Society conference, `Year 2000, The Final Countdown', O'Beirne talked about the safe year 2000 use of desktop software.
Some producers are advising you to upgrade to the latest version of their software, O'Beirne told me. "You will, of course, have to upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 or 98, and put in a Pentium and a few more megabytes of hard disk, and up the memory, and so on." O'Beirne says this may not be necessary. You can often continue to use old software - provided you use four-digit years.
"To enable you to do that, you may have to make other changes in the way in which your database is designed - which is no problem to people who know how it's designed, but poses a significant problem to those who have had it designed for them, and don't know how to make the changes."
These people, says O'Beirne, they should really get in someone who does know how. "Get the person who designed it, and say `fix it'."
Most important is what you are doing with dates. There is no worry for the normal PC users who are simply saving files in a normal way - even though the computer time-stamps the file.
"The dates in the filing system, both in DOS and Windows 3.1, are perfectly compliant. They're fully expanded internally, just stored as a serial number since an origin date of, I think, 1980."
But if you create a table in some word processors, using twodigit year dates - 98, 99 and so on - and then sort them, you may find that instead of 00 and 01 coming after 99, they are sorted to the beginning of the table. "The answer is simple - don't use two-digit year dates, use four-digit ones."
The problems come about not with the ordinary users who do the minimum, but with the power-users who have used fancy macros which rely on year dates for calculations, and whose business relies on the labour-saving use of these macros. "Some of these, not having been aware of the issue with two-digit years, may be riding for a fall." The solution once again lies in awareness and preparedness - get in there now and change those macros to use four-digit year dates.
But the biggest problems face those who have bought business and accounting packages and do not now know whether these are Y2K compliant.
"Provided that you are currently paying your maintenance contract to your software provider, you should find that the big name ones like Sage and Pegasus and so on will have year 2000 upgrades as part of the normal upgrade cycle," says O'Beirne. "The problem is that many small businesses don't have normal maintenance contracts. They might have bought the package back in 1995 or 1996, and don't know that it will only go as far as 1999 and then stop - if you try to type in `00' it will say `invalid date'."
O'Beirne says that this is an opportunity to tidy up your system and upgrade - though this may mean upgrading the machines as well, since some upgrades will only work on, say, Windows 95 upwards. "In the case of accounting packages, many people would be upgrading anyway, for the euro, so they say `we might as well do Year 2000 at the same time'."
Some are using old software made by companies which have gone out of business. O'Beirne says these should change now, rather than facing into possible Year 2000 problems with no recourse to the manufacturer.
A group who face major problems if they do not act in time are those who have had software customised for their own companies.
"Upgrades may not be fully compatible with current versions. I've seen a case where a manufacturing company had a package which had been highly customised for them. They'd spent £10,000 on the customisation, plus the £10,000 the software cost."
"The original programmers have gone out of business. So the company could go back to the supplier, who'd say `Certainly, Sir, you can upgrade to version 7 for £1,000'. Only problem is, all the customisation won't work in the universal upgrade, so they're stuck."
Apart from O'Beirne's presentation, the ICS was an interesting conference attended by about 50 technical and business people, all deeply concerned about the implications for their business of Y2K. See www.ics.ie for comprehensive details.
Websites
www.ics.ie - Irish Computer Society's site has many links.
www.microsoft.com - Microsoft carries information on Y2K compatibility of its products on its website
www.iol.ie/sysmod/year2000.htm Patrick O'Beirne's own year 2000 site.
www.year2000.com Peter de Jaeger's famous and vast site is the ultimate Y2K information source
www.year2000.co.uk - English Y2K site.