Contact: Joe Farris
Mike Rackley already has made plans for next New Year's Eve, but they don't involve party hats and champagne.
Rackley, head of information technology services at Mississippi State, will be camped out with several colleagues in the university's Network Operations Center to see what happens to campus computer systems when the Year 2000 arrives.
Nothing, they hope.
"We're very confident that the major systems we're responsible for centrally are Year 2000 compliant," Rackley said.
His planned New Year's Eve vigil is inspired by the cautious, leave-no-stone-unturned attitude that has characterized the university's approach to the problem of potentially date-confused computers. If something should go wrong, the staff wants to get the earliest possible start on fixing the problem.
"It's not that we don't feel that we're prepared," Rackley said. "We've done a lot of tests, but it's like practicing for a football game. You don't know for sure how everything is going to work until it's the real thing."
MSU got an early jump on the problem, beginning with a comprehensive study in 1997. By June of last year, about 8,700 campus hardware and software systems had been analyzed and the process of making necessary upgrades and corrections was well under way. A campus-wide meeting in mid-1998 alerted individual campus units of the need to assess their own technology for Y2K compliance.
"We're most concerned about those things that are beyond our control," Rackley said. Nobody knows how many computing programs written in years past, perhaps by students or faculty no longer at the university, may still be in use and potentially afflicted by the Y2K bug.
Rackley said it's up to individuals and departments to help identify those problems and correct them. Databases, spreadsheets, and similar programs used by individual departments could cause glitches if their developers used the previously common two-digit method of denoting years in dates.
Besides computers, a host of university fax machines, VCRs, copiers, and other equipment with embedded microprocessor systems could be affected.
"I would be most concerned about expensive research equipment 6-to-10 years old," Rackley said. "The more expensive the electronic equipment, the greater the worry. If I had a piece of electronic equipment more than a few years old, I'd contact the manufacturer and ask if it's Year 2000 compliant."
Generally speaking, personal computers built after 1995 probably are Y2K compliant, Rackley said. Also, Macintosh products aren't affected by the problem, regardless of date of manufacture.
Software used on campus is a different matter. The date of creation isn't a good predictor of how well it will work next year. MSU's information technology services office has links on its website to a number of software vendors that provide information about the Year 2000 status of their products.
Rackley said the ITS web site devoted to the Y2K problem provides extensive information on the nature of the problem and what individuals and departments can do about it.
MSU employees on campus and throughout the state are being encouraged to "read all about it" at www.its.msstate.edu/y2k, he added.