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80,000,000,000 Embedded Chips with Date Problems? or "Chips with Everything!" by Alan Simpson That is what the doomsayers and academics were telling us through emails, conferences, videos, and TV shows, during late 1998 and onwards. All other indicators pointed to the bulk of mainframe remediation to be on target, and the effect on command-and-control software to be minimal. Many of us called for the tensions related to Y2K media be relaxed. But far too much money was being made by the Doomsayers, and they came up with a new threat "Embedded Chips". We heard that Oil refineries would self destruct, chemical works would explode, and Oil wells would go crazy because engineers had buried date sensitive chips deep underground, encased in concrete and steel. Questions like "Why would anyone bury a semiconductor that may fail deep underground" , and " Why does an Oil Well need to know the date?" were repulsed with the usual rhetoric of doubters being unqualified "Pollyanna's" In my own specialty of satellite communication, I had many an argument, and at one conference raised a laugh by asking "if a satellite needed to know the date so it could send you a birthday greeting." One British "Consultant" was less than complimentary and said I should go back to satellites, "because I don't know the first thing about computers, or embedded chips, they are the greatest threat to Mankind." But not every nation was in panic mode. At several briefings, around that period, the Japanese were unconcerned about embedded chips, while the US, and UK were demonstrating the "Headless Chicken" Syndrome. Now the US Intelligence Agencies spend $30,000,000,000 a year and count tanks, missiles, bombs and bullets. The Japanese spend, who knows what, and count chips, lathes, presses, and wafer fabrication plants. Why therefore had their top analysts gone into a huddle, and come out smiling? Putting together the obvious questions of design sanity, and smiling Japanese, it was not hard for a non Ph.D to assume that these astronomical figures being thrown around the US media were flawed. Fanned by the Rabid Right, desperately needing to keep the public in an Armageddon Mode for the Second Coming of Christ, it was full steam ahead towards unseen catastrophe. Not to be outmaneuvered the Doomsayers changed strategy in early 1999, saying it was not the original manufacture that was the concern, but subsequent reprogramming of chips, now renamed "embedded systems" by local technicians, who promptly threw away the plans. . There is a lesson here. Few CIO's, CEO's, Analysts, Guru's and those making the decisions, had the slightest clue about technology that could make or break their business. We had become seduced by Silicon Valley and had forgotten the simple rules of business. I have to say that after keynoting the conference in New Orleans, in February of 1999, I decided to stop playing in this comedy, and went off to do more fun things. Unless a business has well defined, and developed intelligence resources, it will have a Y2K fiasco, again and again. The US silicon chip manufacturers should have been the first up before the Horn, or Bennett Committees with a statement that there were xbillion chips produced since 19xx, xyz have date functions, and 0.001% will pose a threat, which will result in the following...... Come to think of it, maybe the $30,000,000,000 spent on intelligence gathering every year, plus many billions unaccounted for, could have given Congressman Horn and Senator Bennett the same figures, and saved the nation much agonizing. |
