HIGH TECH CORNER: CLOCK TICKING ON COMPUTER GLITCH

With only 20 months to go till the year 2000, the clock is ticking for a meltdown. The start of this year will bring havoc to us all even if you don't own a computer. Now this is not a doom sayer prediction, it is more like a Joe Friday's answer of "Just the facts, mam."

Many programmers have created software that had a major potential problem. The last two digits of the year were used for date calculations. An example of this would be the year 1998, which would be looked by a software program as simply 98.

This simple little item was done for one of three reasons. The first is that computers, only a few years ago were much slower and smaller in memory than they are today so software was written to go as fast as possible with the least amount of resources. The less numbers you have to compare for a date string the faster the program run.

The second reason is due to poor programmer planing that the year 2000 is quickly approaching. But the worst reason is that programmers have coded software this way for job security.

So how does all this affect you even if you don't own a computer yet? The U.S. Treasury has 62 Main Frame computers that churn out all that government money -- from welfare programs to paying on the national debt. Only 10 have been upgraded to date and current reports state that all will not be upgraded in time.

So the money machine known as the government will come to a halt on many frontiers. But what if you don't deal with the government because you live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere? The U.S. Nuclear Early Warning System for a potential missile strike from a foreign power has not yet been upgraded. They can't take it offline to fix it. The year 2000 could put this country at a grave risk of a foreign missile launch.

If your business schedule is way too busy to worry about a nuclear strike then keep in mind that the 213 FAA sites across the U.S. that control all the airline traffic across our beautiful country has not been upgraded yet. This problem is so serious that the KLM airline has already publicly announced that it will not fly on day one of the year 2000.

And finally what if you're the homebody with no worries, who checks out the latest info on the neat web page at www.semissourian.com or hangs around reading this wonderful paper under your reading light? U.S. power plants have a serious problem lurking in the dark. Only one third have been upgraded to date. So expect power outages. The bottom line is that starting on day one of the year 2000, there will be a lot of news happening. The only question is will we be able to see it.

This Internet is the fastest growing segment of the computer industry. If you are not on the net yet it won't long until you are. The biggest complaint for the net is the speed. We live in a society that constantly wants information faster.

So how do you get faster Internet speed? The choices range from the expensive to the cost affective approach. The top performance method would be to have the phone company put in a T1 quality phone line into your home or office and connect directly to the Internet.

This approach is what Internet providers use to support all of us calling in. Plan a new mortgage on the house to pay for it.

The next approach is to get a digital phone line called ISDN. With this type of phone line you can get dual 128K transmission -- receiving capabilities for around $500 a month plus installation. My wife told me to find a better way.

So I purchased the new Direct PC dish from the HUGHES corporation. You can see info on this technology at www.direcpc.com. This is the next generation satellite dish from the Direct TV company. Yes with this dish you can watch your TV and download from the Internet at a whopping 440K baud rate all at the same time.

The upload is still done with your local ISP (Internet Service Provider). The charges vary on this system based upon when and how fast you want to download from $9.95 to $49.95 a month. WEB pages just seem to appear compared to the slow paint approach that happens on a 28.8 modem.

Finally you can upgrade to a 56K modem for maximum speed on a conventional analog phone line. The technical reason to upgrade even if your local ISP or phone companies switch (phone call router) does not support 56K yet is that the voltage output on a 28.8K modem is around 1.5 volts. An analog phone line however will accept the 10 volt swing that the 56K modem delivers. The higher voltage creates a much quieter signal on the phone line thus lowering the error rate.

Finally with Windows 98 shipping in just over a month, a question has been e-mailed to me several times. Should I upgrade to Windows 98 which is Microsoft's final release of a consumer operating system or wait until Windows NT 5.0 Microsoft's Professional Op System ships?

I am running both here. I feel the answer is quite simple. If you typically run a word processor or spread sheet or even games one at a time, the Windows 98 is your only choice. Window NT is just plain big and requires more RAM, more speed, and more hard drive space. It's great if you have all of this and have several applications running at the same time.

Rich Comeau is an electronics scientist and owner of Digital Labs of Cape Girardeau. E-mail him at digital@ldd.net