Y2K Strikes Back

Final after-shocks of the millennium bug in Hungary

On January 2nd drug stores throughout Budapest could not open for business as usual because their computers crashed. According to system administrators, the infamous millennium bug, which by now was believed to be extinct, had unexpectedly resurfaced and caused the problem.

Workers discovered this problem on the first working day of the new year when the following message appeared on their computer screen: invalid system date. The same message appeared in over 1,000 drug stores in all.

In Budapest, this number represents half the drug stores throughout the city. The crashed computers made it impossible to print out bills or receipts, or to use the system's database. As a result, it was not possible to make any type of sale. Many simply kept their doors shut.

The drug stores affected by the "resurgent" Y2K bug were all linked to Novodata, the software company which maintained the system in use by the drug stores. The manager of the company had no comment on the affair, stating simply that the problem was due to final after-shocks of the millennium bug. All he could do was express the hope that the problem would be fixed later the same day.

While it may be convenient for programmers to lay the blame for a system failure on some sort of scapegoat, the fact of the matter is that Y2K has been too frequently used as a cover for shoddy programming. In this particular case, the mistake was quite elementary: the use of a two-digit year date which masked whether the date really belonged to 2000 or 1900. Hence, while last year the system may have correctly calculated the date as 2000, the new year saw the date revert to 1901.

In some ways, it can be said that this "resurgent" millennium bug was only to be expected. Many hold to belief that 2001 is actually the true start to the Third Millennium. In Hungary, this is widely believed to be the case.

Even so, one has to lay the blame on programmers who, despite warnings and software fixes about the time bomb in their midst, did a crappy job. And it not only has to do with the inability of programs to cross into the Third Millennium. In one case, a winery suffered from what can be best described as "reverse Y2K syndrome". In essence, the database system simply converted all 00 year dates as 2000, thereby erroneously cataloging wines from the year 1900 as being 100 years younger.

To be fair, it's not only computer programmers that are at fault. It's perhaps more accurate to say that the Y2K problem actually has nothing to do with computers or technology per se, but is simply an accident of human nature. In Hungary and many other areas in the world, the proof of this can be seen in a graveyard.

Until the turn of the millennium, tombstones frequently had the first two digits of a four digit date inscribed by the name of a surviving spouse. This was probably done as a matter of efficiency for the stonemason. However, for the unfortunate people who lived to see the turn of the new millennium, Y2K became a problem carved in stone.