On December 31, while most people gear up for the biggest party in, oh, a thousand years, Karl Heins will be in his Forsythe Hall office. His task: help guide Stanford -- and its sprawling computer system -- smoothly into the year 2000.
With about six months to go, Stanford's preparations for the millennial software bug are going well, says Heins, the University's Y2K project manager. By the start of fall quarter, programmers expect to have repaired vulnerable equipment. That means fixing computer programs that deal with anything date-sensitive, from financial aid to payroll. A campuswide test of affected systems is set for October 13.
Stanford's two hospitals face a much greater challenge. While the academic campus should be sparsely populated when the ball falls in Times Square, patients will continue to flow into area hospitals. Officials at the Medical Center aren't promising to be ready in early fall when the University wraps up its work. But Vicki Running-Washburn, the administrator for clinical engineering at UCSF Stanford Health Care, says they do expect to have repaired and tested equipment by December 31. "Most of the [potential] failures we have found have been noncritical," Running-Washburn says. For example, a computer program that isn't fixed in time might still function but report an incorrect date.
Both hospital and University officials say the Bay Area is better prepared for systems disruptions than other parts of the country because people here are always planning for the next big earthquake. Stanford, for example, has its own power plant, which can operate independently of the Pacific Gas & Electric system if necessary. Just keep your fingers crossed that there's no New Year's earthquake.
