Editor’s note: This is the first article in a five-part series on Y2K preparations at Iowa State. Today’s story examines the compliance efforts made by the ISU Computation Center for university computer systems.

The year 2000 is less than a month away, and Iowa State computer experts are expecting Jan. 1 to come and go without a hitch.

“I am confident we are ready,” said Rabindra Mukerjea, assistant to ISU President Martin Jischke.

Mukerjea said the Board of Regents, state of Iowa, set standards for each university to obtain before the end of the year.

These standards were part of a state mandate for Y2K compliance set by a consulting company hired by the state, said Dorothy Lewis, associate director of the ISU Computation Center.

“That list of specifics was supplied to the Board of Regents,” she said. “We were required to meet those as if we were working with the same company.”

All three regent universities — ISU, University of Iowa and University of Northern Iowa — as well as the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School and the Iowa School for the Deaf reported their compliance statistics to the board, which in turn presented a combined report to the state.

“There were a number of them that went across different kinds of systems,” Lewis said, including mainframe systems, desktop systems and networks, with multiple standards for different kinds of equipment.

“We fulfilled the requirements before the end of September,” Mukerjea said. “We have been very busy for quite some time.”

In fact, Mukerjea said ISU has been preparing for Y2K since the 1980s.

“It became pretty clear that there was going to be a problem,” Lewis said. “This was not something that came up at the end of the ’90s as an observation.

“It’s really just a matter of recognizing that you can’t code dates in just a two-digit format. Once you realized that, you could make changes,” she said.

The Computation Center switched over to using UNIX systems in the late 1980s because it doesn’t have as many potential Y2K problems as some other systems, she said.

“There aren’t as many problems with UNIX because of its more recent development,” Lewis said.

As a UNIX-based program, Lewis said Project Vincent should have no problems in the new year.

“We’ve been testing all the services provided under Project Vincent to make sure they’re available,” she said.

Getting the Computation Center Y2K ready involved a variety of steps, Mukerjea said.

“We did a detailed analysis to assess what needed to be done,” he said.

Lewis said the center first went through the inventory stage, going to all the colleges and departments on campus to find out the compliance status of all computer systems.

Next was the assessment stage, in which Computation Center staff determined what systems needed to be corrected or discarded. Some computers were old and needed to be replaced anyway, Mukerjea said.

In the remediation stage, center staff decided how to fix systems. Then the implementation stage went through with the fixes.

The new and improved systems then were tested to make sure they would work, then finally validated or tested with other systems.

“We have done testing with advanced dating to see how the computer will likely react,” he said. “Depending on the results, we took different kinds of actions.”

Mukerjea said the results were quite positive.

“This was part of the requirements we have for reporting to the state,” Lewis said.

In order to cover all systems on campus, the Computation Center had Y2K coordinators in each department or college, she said.

“The whole idea is applying diligence to this situation, and we have done that,” she said.

Each month throughout the past year, center staff asked department coordinators to report their completion percentage in each category.

During the past 12 months, Lewis said most of their efforts have been dependent on computer vendors’ developing Y2K-ready software. For example, ISU cannot make a Microsoft program Y2K compliant, and therefore cannot correct a problem dealing with a program not yet updated by the company.

If any problems should occur on Dec. 31, the Computation Center staff will be ready to tackle them.

“We are quite ready for what will happen when the date rolls over,” Mukerjea said. “I don’t anticipate any problems.”

Lewis said solution center staff will be on duty that night and will be watching the news to see if any Y2K problems develop in other areas of the world as the date changes in each time zone.

“We’ll be able to find out what’s going on elsewhere,” she said. “We’ll respond to problems immediately.”

Despite all the disaster preparations, Lewis said she doesn’t expect any glitches to arise.

“ISU should be confident due to all the testing,” she said. “Our system is ready.”