News
While universities and corporations worldwide are scurrying to avoid massive computer system failures in the year 2000, College computer administrators say Dartmouth is well-prepared for the coming millennium.
The "year 2000 problem" that many systems operators are struggling to correct arises from a small programming defect in a computer's capacity to handle dates.
If the computer reads the year as two digits, the advent of the millennium will cause failures because "00" is not greater than "99." This illogical progression, as computers see it, from "99" to "00" is expected to cause systems to behave unpredictably, in some cases, shut down altogether.
The College, for the most part, expects to avoid the year 2000 problem, according to Director of Administrative Computing Bill Barry.
Barry said the College is taking two steps to ensure its computers avoid problems at the turn of the century -- regularly buying new systems which have been programmed to deal with the century change and implementing "in-house developed software," programmed by the College to fit its special needs.
But there are still some older systems on campus which could be affected by the coming of the new millennium.
For example, the D1 system, Dartmouth's original time-share system, was set up in the late 1960s and could be affected if it is not phased out.
Though there were plans to shut down this system several years ago, there are still some programs run on the system, Barry said.
