Volume 3, Number 17 Copyright 1998 TGG October 26, 1998

EDITOR: Jack Ganssle, jack@ganssle.com

CONTENTS:
- Embedded Seminar in Boston
- Embedded Y2K
- Thought for the Week
- About The Embedded Muse

Embedded Seminar in Boston

Embedded Y2K

First, we know, for sure, that a huge number of products currently in factories and consumers’ greedy hands use embedded computers of some sort.

Second, some of these are date-dependent. Millions of date chips (used mostly in embedded systems) were shipped that have an inherent Y2K problem, as they used only two digits to represent the year. Some amount of the code and hardware is therefore surely broken.

Fourth, 80% of embedded system projects are delivered late. The software/firmware industry is notoriously unreliable in meeting deadlines.

So, it seems to me there’s little likelihood the Y2K problem will be adequately addressed by Jan 1, 2000. We’ll surely see things fail.

What I don’t know is the magnitude of the problem. If your kids’ electronic toys stop working, the resulting tantrums won’t make the economies of the world collapse. Many embedded systems are unimportant gadgets used by people who expect to frequently replace electronics. Maybe the landfills will groan under the weight of discarded techie-toys, as the economy is buoyed when folks race to replace their failed electronics.

But will the electric power grid shut down, or will planes fall out of the sky? This seems unlikely.

More interesting is the possibility of compounding failures. For example, a tiny glitch somewhere might interrupt deliveries to a factory. Since Just-In-Time deliveries have eliminated inventory buffers, that glitch may shut down an entire plant, which in turn may cascade to more and more shutdowns. We know that the economy is so complex that small forces can result in totally unpredictable - and severe - results.

I suspect that huge single point failures won’t be much of an issue, but think we’ll see lots of small issues crop up. Hopefully these will damp out, like little wildfires that never combine to incinerate the entire forest. But I think our world is so interdependent that no one can predict the non-linear way these small problems could combine to cause chaos.

There’s good news, though, indicated in this recent submittal to the Risks digest (Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems):

Whisky tipplers can rest easy after the announcement last week that a technological crisis that had threatened to halt the flow of Scotch has been narrowly averted. Burn Stewart Distillers, whose brands include Tobermory Single Malt and Wallace Liqueur, has declared that its computer systems will be millennium compliant by the end of the year.

Although the whisky industry is steeped in tradition, it relies heavily on computers to control many aspects of production and marketing. Burn Stewart alone sells about 18 million bottles a year to 500 major customers. Failure to deal with the millennium bug - which threatens global computer meltdown due to an inability to recognise the date change from 1999 to 2000 - could result in widespread disruption of the distilling, bottling and marketing processes.

(Reused without explicit authorization under blanket permission granted for all Risks-Forum Digest materials. The author(s), the RISKS moderator, and the ACM have no connection with this reuse.)

Thought for the Week