Dec 31, 1999 - 11:54 PM

Humans 1, Machines 0: Y2K's First Bite Is Mosquito-Sized By Kevin Noblet Associated Press Writer

Computers silently switched to 2000 in country after anxious country Saturday, but the dreaded Y2K bug's first bite was barely felt.

Japan reported the failure of a computer linked to radiation monitoring devices at a nuclear plant, but said it wasn't considered serious enough to shut the plant. Experts said many Year 2000 computer troubles still might take days or weeks to develop.

But after months of Y2K warnings, the prevailing feeling was one of anticlimax.

Cash machines kept working in New Zealand, one of the first nations where computers were put to the test by the date change from 1999 to 2000. The lights stayed on in India, planes landed safely in China and telephones still rang across the Middle East.

In Russia, much of which still runs on clumsy Soviet-era technology, officials reported no problems at nuclear weapons sites or at any of the country's 29 nuclear reactors. Likewise, aging atomic power plants ran without a hitch in Ukraine, which in 1986 suffered the world's worst nuclear disaster with a meltdown in Chernobyl.

Western Europe and Africa also seemed to sail into 2000 without incident. No problems were seen in Angola, Uganda and Kenya, where the telephone system was said to be functioning as erratically as usual. Italy, one of the worst-prepared countries in the West, also appeared to cross into the new century without any major trouble.

Many countries suffered brief disruptions in phone service, blamed not on Y2K but on the surge of midnight calls by people to family and friends. Cell phone service was slow on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach because of high demand, but no Y2K-related problems were reported in Brazil.

A critical milestone for worldwide air travel passed without incident at midnight Greenwich Mean Time in Britain. GMT, also known as Universal Coordinated Time and "Zulu" time, is the global standard used to track planes as they cross time zones.

The widespread expectation that computers would fail in many nations was based largely on anecdotal information because "we didn't know what technology was there," said Matt Hotle, research director at the technology consulting firm Gartner Group.

Among the scattered Y2K glitches that did crop up, a provincial court in South Korea issued automated summonses to 170 people to appear for trial on Jan. 4, 1900 instead of Jan. 4, 2000.

Elsewhere, ticketing machines on some buses in Australia briefly jammed. Forecasting maps at the French weather service initially displayed the New Year Day date as "01/01/19100."

In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration reported momentary problems with printers in transoceanic air traffic control centers in New York, California and Alaska. An electric utility in Wisconsin suffered a Y2K-related glitch when its clocks jumped ahead 35 days, but there was no interruption in power.

"Literally, you can count the number of Y2K-related calls we've received around the world on one hand," said Don Jones, head of Y2K troubleshooting for Microsoft.

Communications, transport, defense and power systems continued to function normally.

"I feel like I should be reporting something dramatic, but I'm afraid I can't," said Ian Macfarlane, governor of Australia's central bank. He was almost apologetic as he announced no problems with his country's financial system.

In preparation, governments and industry had spent an estimated $500 billion worldwide bug-proofing their computer systems to avoid electronic confusion when '99 became '00.

Even so, many countries shut down vital systems for the midnight hour just to be safe:

Airports in several countries cancelled flights. Subways in Cairo and Istanbul were closed. Large ships were banned from the Bosporus strait. ATMs in Beijing were shut. Indonesia cut oil production.

Meanwhile, many people stockpiled food, cash, gasoline and other essentials, anticipating the crash of an increasingly computerized world.

Despite the seemingly smooth transition around the world, experts said it wasn't time yet to totally drop your guard.

"We do expect to see glitches, headaches, hiccups in the systems that support business, some of the accounting and billing systems, so these will create inconveniences next week," Bruce McConnell, director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center, said in Washington.

Bruce Webster, co-chair of the Washington-based Year 2000 Group, said he expects the biggest system failures to occur gradually, over a period of days and weeks. Even so, he downplayed the risk,

"Most Y2K errors are pretty dull," he said. "A program stops working or it makes a bad calculation. None of this means planes falling out of the sky or nuclear meltdowns."

Like officials in many parts of the United States, Y2K authorities in many countries gathered at control centers and in bunkers, bracing for the worst.

The island of Guam, a U.S. territory selected by the Department of the Interior as one of the main stages for its Y2K-monitoring project, entered the new year at 9 a.m. EST Friday. Dozens of emergency management officials spent the evening in a civil defense compound, relaxing only when the first hours of the new day passed trouble-free.

While they worried, New Year's Eve partiers danced at the island's tourism center. "I think everyone was getting too paranoid," said Lourdes Rivera, an 18-year-old reveler who was Miss Guam 1999.

But in Japan, at just 10 minutes after midnight, officials detected the failure of a computer that receives monitoring information from the Shika Nuclear Power Station, 170 miles northwest of Tokyo. Officials said the problem was Y2K-related, but the plant would remain open while they tried to fix it. The actual monitoring devices were still working, they said.

AP-ES-12-31-99 2351EST

-- Casey DeFranco (caseyd@silcom.com), January 01, 2000