31. Desember 2000 The Y2K problem a year late

The Norwegian Railways were hit by the Y2K problem a year late. On December 31, the new Signatur trains and the Oslo Airport Express ground to a halt, as the data controlled operating systems refused to function.

However, the fault was overcome by turning the computer clocks back one month, and only minor delays were experienced on the last day of the year 2000.

The experts believe the problem occured because this year was leap year, and December 31st was the 366th day of the year 2000.

http://www.norwaypost.no/content.asp?folder_id=1&cluster_id=14943

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 31, 2000

Answers

Nando Times

Millennium bug belatedly bites Norway trains

The Associated Press

OSLO, Norway (January 1, 2001 5:09 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - The Y2K computer bug bit Norway's national railroad company later than expected.

The bug was discovered when none of the company's new 16 airport express trains or 13 high-speed, long-distance Signatur trains would start early Dec. 31.

The computers on board the trains apparently did not recognize the date, something not anticipated by experts who checked the systems thoroughly last year in anticipation of problems feared worldwide when the clocks rolled to Jan. 1, 2000, a spokesman said.

"We didn't think of trying out the date 31/12/00," said Ronny Solberg of Adtranz, the German producer of the new trains.

Sunday's problem was quickly solved on a temporary basis by resetting the computers to Dec. 1, 2000, and the trains started upon ignition.

"Now we have one month to find out what went wrong so we can fix the problem for good," Solberg was quoted as saying by the daily newspaper Dagbladet.

The older trains that still make up most of the NSB state railroad's fleet were not affected.

The problem had little impact on train traffic as the airport express trains were quickly put back on schedule, and some older trains were used on the two long-distance routes affected by the glitch. All trains were running as usual by Monday, according to the Norwegian news agency NTB.

Y2K was caused by decisions by computer programmers decades ago to use two digits to represent the year. The shortcut saved money on memory and storage, but also caused some computers to wrongly interpret 2000 as 1900.

After billions of dollars and months of preparation worldwide, few problems were recorded last year.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), January 01, 2001.