Tikkabik

Five years ago the industrialized world was in a panic at the thought of changing from 1999 to 2000, because of the so-called Y2K bug -- caused by an old software programming trick that reduced year date values from four to two digits in order to conserve memory.

Computers and ATM cards would stop working, we were told. Power plants would shut down. Hell, planes would drop out of the sky. Seems absurd in retrospect, and nothing bad happened -- the shortcoming was discovered and, for the most part, fixed long before the date actually switched over.

Seems that memory limitations are still plaguing us, however -- remember the Christmas week problems with Comair? On top of wretched weather-related delays and cancellations that plagued the midwest during Christmas, a Cincinatti-based subsidiary of Delta airlines managed to bollox all of its 1,100 flights.

The problem, as it turns out, is a 16-bit memory register issue. Put simply, its computer system couldn't handle the massive amounts of scheduling changes that needed to be made.

Comair's scheduling system, which was built by a Boeing subsidiary called SBS International, was hard-limited to about 32,000 changes in a single month. Normally, this is fine, but bad weather and highway closures nearing the end of the month created a scheduling nightmare that caused Comair's antiquated scheduling software to overrun.

Apparently SBS has a newer scheduling software application that fixes this particular glitch.

Don't you find it reassuring that in 2005, we're still running into computer problems with critical infrastructure services like air travel that should have been fixed in the 1980s?