http://www.trib.com/HOMENEWS/WYO/NatronaY2K.html

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Natrona County: no delivery on contractors' Y2K fix

CASPER, Wyo. (AP) - Software companies contracted to fix Natrona County's computers in order to handle the date change to 2000 will not finish the job on time, according to county officials.

The county has paid three companies more than $800,000 on $1.4 million in contracts, but the software requested about two years ago still has not been installed.

County offices are now planning to get their work done after Jan. 1 without the help of computers.

"Services are hopefully not going to come to a complete stop," County Treasurer Gary Widup said. "Unfortunately, though, we're going to be a lot slower than in the past."

County Clerk Mary Ann Collins said she will not pay on some of the companies' bills until the work is done.

Officials with Cole Layer Trumble Co. of Dayton, Ohio, Atlantic TurnKey of Amherst, N.H., and Software Computer Technology of Lexington, Ky., could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Widup said he was unsure whether his office would be able to manually process all of the 500 of so vehicle registrations it receives for renewal each day.

"If it gets to that point, I may just shut that department down completely," he said.

In that case, he will try to make arrangements with law enforcement officials, he said.

Collins said her office will have to type titles and other documents by hand instead of simply printing them from a computer.

"Things are just going to take a little longer," she said. "It's going to be tough on the employees, but the public shouldn't notice too much."

The so-called "millennium bug" causes computers to misinterpret the last two digits of 2000 as the year 1900, which could add 100 years interest to a credit card bill, for instance.

Widup said the existing, noncompliant software is used to manage the county's database, but is not the database itself, which means information should remain intact regardless of programming problems.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 23, 1999

Answers

"The so-called "millennium bug" causes computers to misinterpret the last two digits of 2000 as the year 1900".

Hey wait a minute here, I haven't heard this before. Why hasn't someone mentioned this? Sounds like it could be a real problem.

Just kidding Homer, your posts are as usual informative. I am just getting cranky after two years of the media explaining what Y2K is and no one still seem's to get it. But as Mary Ann say's "the public shouldn't notice to much".

-- ~***~ (~***~@earth.ebe), December 23, 1999.