The year 2000 will bring more than the just a figurative bridge that President Clinton keeps talking about. It is the year when many software programs will "break" unless something is done.

Here's the problem. Years ago, computers were much more expensive -- and much slower -- than they are today. To conserve precious disk space and speed up processing, computer programmers have used a simple shortcut to store dates inside computer files. For example, if a person was born on February 20, 1987, the programmer would store the date as 022087, rather than 02201987. They would just assume the year began with 19, thereby saving two characters for every person in their data file.

To calculate a person's age, you would subtract the birth year from the current year:

97 - 87 = 10 years old

Everything works fine until the calendar flips over to the year 2000. Then the calculation looks like this:

00 - 87 = ?? years old. Yikes!

Millions of lines of computer code have been written since computers first started being used in businesses. Date calculations are used to determine things like a person's age, the age of account receivables, retirement ages, loan amortization schedules, etc.

The total price to correct these date-related problems is not precisely know, but has been estimated in the billions of dollars for businesses around the world.

I have some personal experience with year 2000 software problems.

After graduating from college, I was employed by Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York as a systems analyst. During the time I worked there, I wrote many computer programs that dealt with date processing. I can remember specific conversations with co-workers about the fact that these programs would only work until the year 1999. At the time, there wasn't strong enough justification to store and process the extra data needed to accommodate post-1999 date calculations.

At the time, the year 1999 was so far into the future, it didn't seem as though it would ever get here.

And yet the year 2000 is now less than three years away.

What should you do? You need to determine if the software you use -- especially accounting software -- is affected by this date processing problem. If you're not sure, contact the software vendor and see if they have provisions for turn-of-the-century processing.

By the way, if you're using a Macintosh computer, you don't need to worry at all. Since the first 128K Macintosh was built in 1984, the Macintosh operating system has used a 32-bit number to store date values accurately from January 1, 1904 through February 6, 2040.

Now I KNOW the year 2040 is far enough into the future that I'm not going to worry about it. I think.

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