Dads Army To Battle The 2000 Bug

A dads army of information technology veterans is being brought out of retirement in a US state to help fix antiquated software programs riddled with the millennium bug.

The Oregon state government is launching the recruitment drive because it faces a shortage of programs who know languages such as Cobol and Assembler, used in applications for mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s, but out of favour since the advent of personal computers.

People thought Cobol was a dead language and moved on to newer ones, said Julie Pearson, statewide technical education manager, who is recruiting a 200-strong special team to solve the problem. Veterans are expected to make up a third of this force.

 

A bill going through the Oregon legislature will allow pensioners, now limited to 1,040 hours of work a year, to work full-time and preserve their retirement benefits - provided they are employed in solving the Year 2000 problem. Changes are needed in software that will fail when faced with dates after 1999.

The employment of IT veterans, some of whom helped develop the programs now becoming unstable, is intended to reduce the estimated $86.9 million (53.3 million) cost of fixing state computer systems.

The state estimates it can pay half the rate outside consultants would demand and cut the millennium bug bill by a third.

The UKs department of trade and industry and business groups will also explore using a dads army against the millennium bug at a skills summit being organised by Taskforce 2000, an agency backed by the Confederation of British Industry. The origin of the millennium bug lies in the cost of computer memory when many mainframe programs were written. This led developers to save space by storing the year as two digits rather than four.

Many ageing computer programmes, which assume correctly that 97 means 1997, will become confused after the turn of the millennium and wrongly identify 00 as 1900 rather than 2000.

The problem, although straightforward, is costly to correct. In the UK, 300,000 additional IT staff are needed, according to Taskforce 2000, and pay rates for Cobol programmers have increased by about 20 per cent.

Some work is being sent to developing countries such as India, where wage rates are lower.

Financial Times