Its a weird feeling when the power goes out. Its kinda like oh-oh, is she going to come back on? Like my experiance on July 2, 1997. That was really really scary. That was before I had even heard of the y2k problem. If you read this article it becomes evident that if the power goes off for a few hours were in deep trouble.... Rent the movie "Trigger Effect" from your local videostore and then try falling asleep. Ignorance is bliss....

P.S. Will the internet be working on 1-1-00?

-- Greg Wiatt (gwiatt@northlink.com), January 17, 1998

Answers

Clearly no Internet if the electicity goes off. Or if the phones don't work. Or if.... The hardest one for me to believe is the "routers", which route the messages around the internet, are not y2k compliant!

-- Art Scott (Art.Scott@marist.edu), January 19, 1998.

Talked with Town of Poughkeepsie policeman who returned my prepublication copy of Ed's book. He lives out in the "country" where they lose electicity easily. He has a motor-generator that he uses to run his furnace, refrigerator, water pump, VCR, etc. during power outages. He has a 5KW unit. He cautions against using metal storage containers because some gasoline additives corrode some part of metal gascans. PS He's going to read E

-- Art Scott (Art.Scott@marist.edu), January 21, 1998.

To address your P.S:

I'm the Network Operations Manager of a regional ISP that serves one of the three largest urban areas in the United States.

In my considered opinion as an Internet progfessional, the Internet is dead after 1-1-2000.

The bright side of this is that people will be too busy trying to find food to care.

The reason that it's dead is because the Internet is highly dependant on networks routing through each other and suppliers being able to reliably communicate on demand. Removal of one of those suppliers in a chain has a catestrophic ripple effect.

Further, there are two or three single points of failure that are VERY vulnerable. Fully one-quarter of the North American Internet is located in a large equipment room on the second floor of the Prudential Building (common called "Pru 2") in Chicago. Literally every ISP in Chicagoland -- including all of the "big players" has a significant presence there.

At the present time, one could wreak havoc all over the 'net -- worldwide --with a pair of diagonal cutters. The infrastructure in that one room is such a physcial mess that those who lease space there live in fear that the Fire Marshall will perform an inspection. You've never seen anything like it.

There is ethernet cabling strung in monstrous spiderwebs running to the overhead runs, where they're bundled together in groups as thick as my legs. There are power strips scattered all over, underneath ethernet, sitting under heat-producing equipment, etc. There are modems from some of the smaller ISPs supported solely by ethernet cables -- i.e., there are external USR modems just sitting amid ethernet cables. If you took the cables away, the modem would be hanging from its serial cable.

A pair of diagonal cutters and fifteen minutes unattended, and every ISP in Chicago, including Sprint, MCI, and AT&T would be down, and it would take weeks to put back together. Nobody knows where the other end of their wire goes.

Y2K will hit like fifty diagonal cutters -- or a hundred, or a thousand. No one knows for sure.

I'm personally certain that the Internet cannot survive.

If it were possible to salvage anything of the Internet at this point, it would be by deciding which national backbone was worth saving and pouring every effort into seeing that it will survive.

Of course, there's a fat chance in hell that AT&T will abandon their backbone in favor of MCI's ...

Not that MCI's backbone is necessarily compliant. In fact, having worked for an AT&T subsidiary for several years, I'm convinced that the companies most at risk of failure are the largest ones.

Unfortubately, the biggest national backbones belong to large companies.

I simply can't imagine a realistic Y2K scenario that doesn't include the death of the Internet. There are so many things that have to be functioning, an impossible-to-predict number of which simply won't. It ranges from non-compliant embedded systems to routers to hosts that act as routers to key root DNS servers ...

It's gone. The Internet is gone in Year 0 -- conceivably sooner. It will probably be rather harshly impacted (as will banks) by the GPS failure in August, 99. A huge percentage of Internet machines get their time from tick.usn.mil.

John Smith

-- John Smith (pobox42@hotmail.com), March 25, 1998.