String-of-nines8217; may conk computers today

The problem would, however, be temporary and restricted to only tomorrow, they said. As India made a late start in computerisation, not many units use this old system of maintaining dates, they said.

Old programmers used a string of nines to indicate end-of-file. The two 99s in quot;99-99quot; represent the 99th day and the year 1999. Reserve Bank of India RBI has warned all banks about the string-of-nines problem and the British Institute of Standards BIS document on Y2K compliance also gives April 9 as a threat to many computer systems, R Ramakrishnan, head of Y2K cell in the Department of Electronics DoE, told newsmen.

The situation will not be catastrophic, but some systems may stop functioning, especially in the banking sector.

Old computer hardware and electronics systems carrying date-sensitive chips that follow a similar method of keeping dates could also be affected, he said.

The problem will not have much impact on the Indian information technology IT industry though small and medium organisations might face problems, Vinni Mehta, executive director of Manufacturers Association on Information Technology MAIT, said.

He ruled out the possibility of many organisations using such software and hardware, saying this method of maintaining dates quot;is not very popular in this part of the worldquot;.

The problem is not universal to all computers and organisations aware of the problem have taken necessary precautions, Dewang Mehta, executive-director of National Association of Software and Service Companies NASSCOM, said.

According to J R Isaac, advisor at NIIT Ltd, the problem could be corrected in software applications like Cobol programmes if users are aware of it, but at the hardware level where chips are concerned, it is difficult.

Fully automated systems concerned with money transactions with respect to date that face the string-of-nines problem could create more problems, Isaac said.

Real-time systems are more prone to the problem, R Ravi, customer support manager for Y2K at Noida-based HCL Infosystems Ltd, said, adding he had not come across any software package that kept time by tallying a running total of days in an year.

quot;DoE has not included April 9 in the list of key Y2K dates in 1999 at its Y2K helpdesk site on the Internet, but it would be corrected,quot; Ramakrishnan said.

Reports said the string-of-nines problem first hit computers on January 1 this year when the number 99 showed itself in dated computer files.

A few dozen systems worldwide, including Sweden and the United States, were affected on that day.

Systems that did not experience problems on January 1 last might require a longer series of nines to cause problems, the experts said.