It's one more indication that the quiet, international crisis surrounding the Millennium Bug is deepening.
Airports are convenient places to see the complexity of the problem.
The people who run Sea-Tac are working to make an inventory of systems affected by programming that only processes the last two digits of a year, assuming the first two are 1 and 9. But that's not a luxury available to airports, Wall Street brokerages, payroll managers, captains of high-tech warships, or anyone who sees the pervasiveness of microprocessors in modern life. We actually believe ATMs will work. About half of the systems have been inventoried - not fixed, just checked to see if they might have 2000 troubles. Systems will have to be fixed or replaced.