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Hmmm... Is There Maybe a Silver Bullet??? 

Westergaard Year 2000 - July 10, 1998  
I received several calls Wednesday reporting on a radio story about "some company" that has a silver bullet for solving Y2K. We've all heard this one before but our Conference Director, Pamela McLernon who works out of Plymouth, MA tracked it down to a private company in Waltham. Data Integrity Inc. is the name of the company. Her curiosity was piqued by the report that the company has a mathematical approach to solving the Y2K Problem. 
 
I spoke yesterday with an executive who (a) is a Westergaard Year 2000 afficionado, (b) proceeded to lose me with some techie terminology, and (c) graciously sent me a White Paper, which came in last night. 

Interesting stuff, too intense to explain here other than to say that the product, the Millennium Solution®, employs a patented mathematical technique tradenamed Dynamic Centuries®. What this does is to insert a call routine to correct date variables in a module only if they are used in a mathematical operation or comparison. 

The reason we haven't heard about this earlier is that the patent was only just obtained. Citibank, NationsBank, CS First Boston and Dept of Interior have signed on although one never knows if this means really using it or just giving it a look see. 

The idea is that computers can be trained to see "00" as 2000, not 1900 as is generally assumed. Take a simple example, which is to calculate the age of a Social Security participant born in 1938. 

Subtract 38 from 99 and you get 61, which would be the correct age next year. Subtract 38 from 00, however, and you get -38. That obviously mistaken answer is sent to the application's fix date routine, which adds 50, thus computing the answer as 12. It then adds another 50 and you get the correct answer, which is 62. The reason it adds 50 twice rather 100 once is that Y2K Problem computers are, of course, programmed to recognize only two digits. That's the problem to begin with, remember? 

This idea may be a hoax -- but I don't think so. dii is not public so it's not a stock promotion at least for the moment. My nose tells me this story is going to have legs. 

I suggest "going to the videotape" (to borrow a phrase from Werner Wolf who, by the way, was talking so excitedly the other night that his teeth fell out) -- which is to say look at Data Integrity's Web site and order a copy of the White Paper.
See for yourself.
http://www.dii2000.com
By John Westergaard

Article can be found online at Westergaard Year 2000

White Paper Available by Request