Their software was partly written 20 or 30 years ago, and has a way of proliferating. Ingram of EDS Corp. says he got a call from a computer expert about a program Ingram had written in the 1960s. It had turned up in a new program at a completely different company. IBM and other computer companies, realizing they couldn't expect clients to buy new software every model year, made sure that each new model was largely compatible with earlier programs. With luck, it won't affect me.
Many local governments are in even worse shape than federal agencies.
Gwyn, city manager of Grand Prairie, Texas, has started fixing a long list of vulnerable systems in his own community that includes traffic lights, emergency communications, water distribution, public records, even data on releasing inmates from jail. Experts are predicting more trouble in the health sector, as patient billing and insurance records at hospitals or HMOs are vulnerable. Certain kinds of biomedical equipment, including patient-monitoring devices, are also in danger of malfunction. Because many electric utilities have gotten a late start, localized power outages are a threat. When the test clock turned over to the year 2000, a safety system mistakenly detected dangerous operating conditions, and the power generators completely shut down.