Year 2000 computer bomb awaits Arab governments and companies
Regional, Science, 2/20/1998

The American - Saudi bank is sponsoring a regional conference to deal with a software problem that will cause some computers to mulfunction when the year 2000 is reached.

The conference, is being held in Beirut today to discuss the probable effects on corporations, banks, and the Arab states' economy as a whole.

The computer software problem that afflicts the Saudi Bank and others stems from software that was programmed long time ago, where "a year" in computer records is represented as two digits, such as "97" to imply the year 1997.

This leads to a problem as representing the year 2000 with "00" would be interpreted by a computer as the year 1900, as opposed to the year 2000. So for example, a person born in the year 2000, will be seen by the computer as a 100 year-old person.

These kind of errors threaten to paralyze computer systems that control millions of transactions and accounts in governments, companies, banks, payment systems and general services that rely on accurate date and time representation for accurate calculations.

Isah Al-Isah, the bank manager, said Arab states are faced with a severe shortage of technicaly qualified personal and computer software programmers with the needed expertise to deal with this problem. Al-Isah called this crisis "the bomb of the year 2000," referring to the dramatic increase in the cost of solving this problem the longer companies and governments wait to address this issue.

This problem is not specific to any one bank or company, but is faced by other international companies and governments as well including the United States of America.

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