Corrections or additions?
Author: Melinda Sherwood. Published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on January
5, 2000. All rights reserved.
Y2K: The Post Mortems
Y2K judgment day has come and gone, but no one has
answered
the obvious question: was it all worth it? Worth the Senate hearings,
the millions of dollars in compliance efforts, and the columns and
columns of articles in the media?
Again, no answers. “If you’re asking if there would be some major
breakdown because of something we didn’t do, I don’t know,” says
David Feyrer,who led Sarnoff’s Corporation’s Y2K Readiness
Project.
But Alan Wallach, a former IBM programmer and author of “The
Year 2000 Hoax,” has heard that line too many times. “We did
know,” he says. “We just didn’t ask the right people. We asked
economists and people making a fortune on this thing.”
Feyrer and Wallach come together to discuss what might have gone wrong
on January 1, what didn’t go wrong, what never was going to go wrong
(Wallach’s stance), and what we can learn when fear and technology
mix, at the Princeton ACM/IEEE meeting on Thursday, January 20, at
8 p.m. at the Sarnoff Corporation. Joining them is consultant Perry
Weaver, who helped in Y2K compliance efforts at a hospital in
Philadelphia.
Call 609-924-8704. Free.
Ira Fuchs, vice president for computing and information
technology
at Princeton University, discusses the same issues that morning,
Thursday,
January 20, at 10 a.m. at the 55 Plus meeting at the Jewish Center
of Princeton. Call 609-737-2001.
Like many consultants, Feyrer (who is also an ordained Episcopal
priest)
reconciles his own job with the apparent no-show of Y2K by invoking
scientific prudence: “Until you go into a specific situation you
don’t really know,” he points out. “I get in and get up to
my knees in what’s going on and piece together the information that
I need.”
What Feyrer found was, out of the nearly 2,000 projects that went
out of Sarnoff in 10 years, only about 50 contained date-time issues
susceptible to glitches. Of those, he adds, fewer than 10 required
substantial amounts of time to remediate.
The fear that embedded chips would bring the world’s infrastructure
tumbling down — that was stuff of science fiction, not science,
says Feyrer. “From a scientific standpoint,” says Feyrer,
“the hysteria around Y2K made no sense. The collective
apprehension
was exacerbated by charlatans, P.T. Barnums who saw profit, and in
fairness, there were people who really believed that the end of the
world was at hand.”
Feyrer grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where his father was an
accountant for Bethlehem Steel. He graduated from Muhlenberg, Class
of 1963, and after three years in the army went to Philadelphia
Divinity
School. He left the clergy in 1979 so he could raise his six children.
For the first part of the 1980s, he worked for a car dealership in
Wilkes-Barre. His son led him to computer programming. “When I
was in the car dealership I was always intrigued with computers but
I was frustrated with them too,” he says. “I bought my kid
a computer, and he kept teaching me and I became familiar with a
number
of database programs. Eventually, I made the computer do what I wanted
it to do.”
Now a resident of Westford, Connecticut, he is the state chaplain
for the Connecticut National Guard as well as a consultant. He doesn’t
preach in the workplace — unless it’s about better asset
management.
From the technologists’ standpoint, that was one of the potential
contributors to Y2K error. “One of the problems that many
corporations
have is they have poor asset management — they didn’t know what
they bought or what they had,” he says. “Many corporations
just had no idea what computers they had. At Sarnoff, we had over
3,000 computers on our books, many of them nonoperational.”
By taking inventory and upgrading their clients’ systems, Y2K
consultants,
if they did nothing else, at least gave corporations a good spring
cleaning, says Feyrer. “If they didn’t do it now they’d have to
do it later,” he says.
Alan Wallach rejects such cozy justifications — onscientific grounds: “I’ve heard people say `because we’ve upgradedit’s going to take our economy to new heights,’ but I feel that’sone of the worst things to do — rewrite programs when you’retryingto fix a bug,” he says.A former IBM programmer, Wallach has earned himself a place on theblacklist of Michael Hyatt (“The Millennium Bug”) byclaiming that Y2K was an all-out hoax and has become something ofa thorn in the side of his peers. “I’ve been taken as a nut,”Wallach readily admits. “I had one guy E-mailing me every timehe read something that was going to happen on January 1, asking mewhy I think it’s not true. I told him to try Prozac.”In reality, Wallach is a stoic in a fanatic’s world. He’s been arguingsince 1998 that Y2K is a sociological, rather than technological,problem, caused by the voluntary surrender of society to masshysteria.Wallach uses the story of Chicken Little, the alarmist fowl who spreadthe word that the sky is falling, to illustrate the power of grouppsychosis in his book. The crisis mentality in America, however, ismore serious because it is “a movement with an economic structureof its own,” he writes in “The Year 2000 Hoax” (SafeGoods,1998, $9.95). “A meteorologist on TV can’t stand to give justa `fair and mild’ forecast. They look for something bad to reporteven if they have to say it’s a long way off or only a remotepossibility.There are many companies making incredible sums of money from thecrisis. There are many with a vested interest in encouraging thecrisisrather than debunking it. I would worry more about the fear of acrisisthan an actual crisis.”Wallach lives in western Massachusetts, where he runs a consultingcompany. “In retrospect, what I’ve seen in my travels since Iwrote the book is that I guess the wrong people have been asked whatto do,” he says. “A whole bunch of incompetents advisingpeoplewho knew nothing. Programmers all said the same thing: we don’t knowwhat the big deal is about. The embedded chips — that was thebiggest joke I ever heard. As an old programmer, I knew that thingsdon’t happen that way. “Rather, Y2K was the invention of a few politically and financiallymotivated people, says Wallach, including the media, consultants,and even IS people. “What we have is a situation where themanagersof the companies saw an opportunity to get a lot of money for a bigproject,” he says. “If management gives me an opportunityto have a $15 million budget to rewrite the thing I’m not going toturn it down, because it makes me politically important.”And after January 1, many businesses would dare not question theirdecisions, says Wallach. “I think they’re still sold a bill ofgood that they did the right thing,” he says. “I think anybodywho spent a couple of million dollars redoing their software, butif you ask them, they’ll say we had to do it — nobody wants tolook foolish.”There’s a hint of resignation in Feyrer’s summation of the Y2K effort:”We had to diligently do what we had to do,” he says. “Ifa corporation didn’t bring on someone to do what I did, then therecould have been legal repercussions.”Like Wallach, though, Feyrer hopes to leave collective paranoia andprofessional chicanery behind in the 20th century. “The worldhas a lot of people who are out to make a buck,” he says.”Somebodywho is knowledgeable about computers can look at this and say it’sfine. Somebody who is older and not conversant with computers maythink there’s some kind of magic there. I think people are stillafraidof technology and that’s why they let gurus lead them. What we needto do is not park our brains at the door and let our emotions runamok.”Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
