Cyberspace on guard for Y2K party gatecrasher

By PETER SINCLAIR

Despite the competing claims of Tonga and Kiribati, most eyes on the Internet were fixed on New Zealand in the first midnight of the new millennium.

The world was watching for the arrival of an unwelcome guest at our big party - the Y2K bug.

The computer code which became the millennium bug was originally a space-saving feature for early programmers. Instead of using four digits to define a date, programmers used only the last two, a shortcut which may cause problems when computers try to move into the next century.

Faceless men in the Kremlin (www.gov.ru), at Whitehall (www.millennium-centre.gov.uk) and the Pentagon in Washington (www.defenselink.mil), plus almost every governmental Y2K agency in the world from Albania (http://y2k.gov.al) to Zimbabwe (www.y2k.org.zw), are monitoring New Zealand's Y2K Readiness Commission to assess the possible impact of the two missing digits on their own infrastructures.

As midnight rolls round the globe, they have from as little as two hours (in the case of Australia) to profit from our experience, and, if necessary, apply fixes derived from Kiwi ingenuity to their own situations.

The Y2K Readiness Commission braced itself for the onslaught.

Its sites (www.y2k.govt.nz and www.watchnz.govt.nz) were designed to withstand a million hits in the first two hours.

But the Gartner Group, the research organisation that first alerted the world to the Y2K problem, now predicts that any difficulties are likely to be isolated, thanks to a worldwide effort to fix the anomaly which may have cost up to $1200 billion.

The group expects most calls to Y2K and telecommunications centres will represent only minor crises rather than true Y2K meltdown.

With predictions that most adults will stay home this New Year's Eve, the most likely Y2K-related problem will be if everyone tries to access the Web simultaneously to see how the world is handling the bug - and causes the Internet to slow or crash worldwide.

The Herald's Website (www.herald.co.nz/millennium/y2k.cfm) will monitor events.