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Y2K COMPLIANTiCollege anticipates no problemswhen new millennium arrivesWhen Saturday, Jan. 1, 2000 arrives, CharlesMcKown will be at his computer, further testing all of thedata changes he and his staff have made to Cowley's system.McKown, director of computer services, said he andhis staff have been working to get the college Y2K compliantsince early 1997. The nearly two-year processwrapped up just before Christmas 1998."The problem with Y2K is not that the changes aredifficult, it's just that there are so many of them that haveto be made." said McKown, in his eighth year at the college."There are tens of thousands of programmingchanges that need to be made. It's inevitable that somethingis going to get missed. But it only takes a couple ofseconds to fix it."The reason for the Y2K problem dates back to the1970s. McKown said that when computers were firstbeing built and when databases were becoming popular,people did everything they could to squeeze out as manydigits as possible. Thus, the six-digit year-month-daysequence was born."It was just the way human beings used to writedates." McKown said. "And if they could save somespace by eliminating two digits, they did it. Today, it'shard to fathom trying to eliminate two digits. We don'teven worry about that."In 1982, the company I worked for sold a computerthat had 4K of memory and two nine-inch floppydrives and itwas so expensive."sold for $30,000. Memory and disk spaceSince computers read dates asnumbers, when theyear 2000 arrives, the machines would treat the 00 digitas if itwere the year 1900, not the year 2000. Computersthat have been brought up to compliance will make roomfor two more digits, thus recognizing that the year 2000Improvements madeto Southside CenterThe remodeling project that began at the SouthsideEducation Center during the1998-1999 school year finishedfor the fall of 1999.is larger than the year 1999.McKown said the process is time consuming."You have to restructure your database to makeroom for the two extra digits." he said. "They are all fixedlengths. And now you're asking itto squeeze two charactersinto the middle. All of your reports are going to bewider. You have to transfer all of the data out of the oldstructure and into the new structure."McKown spent many weekends at the college doingjust that.For instance, each major database function atthe college would take an entire weekend to transfer."I came in and got the computer working on it," he said.Date-based calculations, McKown said, are the computerfunctions most critical for the change. Anythinglife-threatening, obviously, but also the banking industryuses date-based calculations extensively."If we miss one, the report won't be lost, it will justlook different," McKown said. "For instance, in our transcriptprinting program, if we missed changing it, thetranscript report would show a student's most recentsemester attended, rather than the oldest one. Most of theones we're going to know whether we missed them."McKown has conducted live tests of the databases."I don't anticipate any serious problems here or anyother place in the world," McKown said. "I'm not goingto take any vacation around Christmas, but we're goingto be OK at the college."On the mother board of a computer rests a basicinput-output system chip. If a BIOS chip is not upgraded,the computer will shut down when it turns over to 00."The computer only works on a certain date range,and when it gets to the year 2000, that's out of its realm,"McKown said. "There is a patch to update the BIOS chipso that the computer has enough smarts to not shutdown."Briefly SpeakingExpansion included the addition of 1 1 new classroomsand two MCSE (Microsoft Certification SystemsEngineer) labs.Southside also expanded the number ofcomputers in the learning labs from 10 tonecessary to accommodate thethe learning labs during the fall of 1999.Enrollment during the fall18, which was130 students enrolled inof 1999 was at a recordhigh of 445 full-time equivalencies in122 classes. Theenrollment for the fall of 1998 was 322 FTE and thespring of 1999 was 348 FTE.Southside also added some new positions, includingCharles Myers, director of computer technical education,and Mia Allen, instructor for computer and businesstechnology. There also were two notable promotions:Sarah Wesbrooks became theCowley's coordinator atSouthside, and Sheree Utash was promoted to associatedean of northern campuses and director of the SouthsideEducation Center.The MCSE program was added, and an A Plus Pluscertification program from Microsoft will be added soon.