University officials working on the Y2K issue expect today to come and go without a hitch — or a glitch, for that matter.

The potential problem is in the numbers, and the nines have it. If written as four consecutive nines, today’s date poses a small but potential pre-Y2K problem for computer systems running older software. The problem stems from a method computer programmers used, mostly with the COBOL programming language, to signal the end of a file.

“Before magnetic tape or disk storage, which have end-of-file markers built into them, programmers would use 9999 to symbolize the end of a file,” said Wayne Ostendorf, director of ISU’s Administrative Data Processing Center.

The ADP Center maintains the computer systems for a large amount of university data, including records for the student information service AccessPlus.

Ostendorf said ADP’s systems, along with systems across the university, should experience no problems due to the calendar rolling over to Sept. 9, 1999.

“It’s been probably a good 20 years since computers here would have used potentially problematic software,” he said.

Rab Mukerjea, assistant to the president and head of a special Y2K task force at ISU, echoed Ostendorf’s sentiments.

“University systems have been upgraded over the years, and they should be immune to this issue,” he said.

He added that the Y2K task force expects to finish final preparations for the new millennium by the end of the month.

“We’ve been really working on this issue for almost two years now,” he said. “And we should be fine for the new year.”

Even if computer systems at ISU used software vulnerable to a Sept. 9 programming snafu, they would likely still go unaffected by the date because most computers use calendar formatting that makes it impossible to have four nines in a row.

For example, with the DD/MM/YY format, zeros would normally precede the nines for both the day and month, yielding a problem-free numerical value of 090999.

“This whole problem is probably much less of a problem than it’s been made to be,” Mukerjea said. “It really shouldn’t be a factor.”