Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Mar 12/99) - Gerry Hamilton from Haylor financial services sounded the alarm bell at council March 8 when he addressed the state of the town's Vadim computer system.

The system is currently being revamped to bring in newer, more Y2K-compliant Concorde computers to help stave off the threat of computers "blowing up," or crashing.

"If you leave it as is now you would lose your tax roll. You would have an inability to access computers to find out who paid taxes on what property and when," Hamilton told council.

"So it's extremely important that it be done."

Hamilton said in the 1960s, when many computers started being mass produced, programmers had different ways of signalling the end of the millennium. One way was to fill in the date field with nines. That means when the year 2000 strikes, the date field expires.

Further, Hamilton suggests if any date was installed to be the end of a computer's life, it could be even earlier than Jan. 1, 2000.

"On the 99th day of 1999 you may have trouble. Or maybe it will be the ninth day of the ninth month. There's one sure way to find out and that is to leave the computers as is until the 100th day of 1999."

Hamilton equated the situation to keeping valuables in a safe where someone is set to change the combination without notice, to something nobody else knows.

Valuable tax or billing information could be inaccessible if nothing is done to switch to an updated computer system.

"The clock is ticking," said Hamilton, who is a former programmer and has made Y2K problems his niche.

"And the cost of not doing it is utter chaos."

Hamilton suggested the town hire data-entry workers and he stressed the current town staff should not be burdened with entering data into a new system on top of the work they currently do because it will be too much for them.

He disagreed with Coun. Derek Lindsay's suggestion to run the computer systems in tandem, asking why the town would need two sets of books.

On budgets, Hamilton said there may be no need to panic if all that happens is the printed out copy has a date that reads the year 1900.

Problems will arise, however, if any mathematical calculations are done that take into account the year.

"Let's say that you have a mortgage and you've been making your payments faithfully. Then on Jan. 1 you get a bill for $1,000,000 for 100 year's interest," he says.

"You probably wouldn't like that very much."