I was recently asked to keynote a computer conference in Cincinnati. When I asked what they wanted me to speak about, I was told "Y2K." This, of course, is the sort of slangy term for the coming "Year 2000 Crisis," or "Millennium Bug," or even TEOTWAWKI ("The End Of The World As We Know It") as propagated by such industry alarmists as Gary North and Peter de Jager.

At the time I was asked to speak on this, I had no particular passion for the subject, as we in the Multi-Value community are fairly insulated from the problem, thanks to the intrinsic date handling logic built-in to our collective systems. If you're unfamiliar with the Multi-Value date scheme, it is the picture of simplicity. It uses Dec. 31, 1967 as a reference point of day 0 on our internal calendar. When a date is entered into the computer, a calculation is performed and the number of days prior to or after that date results. This "internal" date is the end result that is stored. From there, we can extract and format dates in pretty much any manner you can think of, not to mention zip through calculations such as aging accounts receivable.

As usual in this community, we are on a different schedule. Our first big crisis occurred in 1995 when we hit Day 10,000 on our internal counter. We survived, but I'm guessing that there were a few problems at a few sites. Our next big crisis is scheduled for 2031, when our internal date assumption on a year field rolls over. (If you enter a date as 1/1/30 in a Multi-Value platform, it is assumed to be 2030. This can currently be a problem for birth dates.)

So I began researching the Y2K thing and came up with a very alarming discovery: It's everybody else's problem. From the giant databases at banks, credit card companies and the Publishers Clearing House, down to the embedded systems in your pacemaker and Chrysler, there are potential problems looming. Nobody knows the extent to which this will be a problem, but let's just say that survivalist food suppliers are definitely a growth industry.

I found plenty of material that easily allowed me to fill my allotted 15 minutes for my keynote speech. (Much of what I used for research is conveniently linked from my Web site at the URL below in case you need to get your blood pressure up.)

Then, as fate would have it, the weekend before I was to leave for Cincinnati, I received an e-mail from a Pick site somewhere in the mideastern United States. It might have been Indiana. This guy posed the following question:

"I currently select my invoices by using the statement 'SELECT INVOICES WITH DATE < 990915.' How am I going to handle this when the date reaches 2000? It seems like an awful lot of work to have to go through my entire database and put '19' in before all the dates."

He couldn't be more right.

It seems that whomever coded his application had perhaps never seen a Multi-Value platform before. Perhaps they had never seen a programmers reference guide either, as they coded and stored all of their dates in EXTERNAL format, bypassing the elegant date-handling logic and creating a massive problem later down the road, which they are now dangerously nearing.

At the risk of being incessantly didactic, the lesson here is that this guy could have saved a bundle by having invested a small amount in training. As it is, they are now facing the arduous task of having to go through their entire application and either do the "19" thing or implement the date-handling logic.

So, it is not necessarily safe to assume that all Multi-Value platforms are immune to the Y2K problem. Anywhere that dates are stored in an EXTERNAL format, problems almost certainly will occur. My suggestion is to put someone in your company on the task of auditing your systems to ensure that this has not happened, so you won't be surprised on Jan. 1, 2000.

Not that it will matter anyway, according to the alarmists. Because on that day the power grids are going to fail, airplanes will fall from the sky, the government will grind to a halt (how will we be able to tell?) and the banks will all collapse, triggering a global recession and panic.

Then again, maybe not. But you should at least make sure that your systems are prepared for 1/1/00, the only global crisis in history that will come in on schedule.

Jon Sisk (http://www.jes.com) is president of JES & Associates, a computer software training company based in Newport Beach, Calif.

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