2000 May Pose Pressroom Headaches
by L. Carol Christopher
If you haven't started checking your press systems' Year 2000 compatibility, you may be in for the hangover of the millennium.
Imagine waking up on January 1, 2000. Your ad department's sold all those nice color ads, your advertisers have paid, your publisher has visions of sugarplums, and-
Uh-oh. Your pre-set computer shuts down. Sure, you can run the press manually, but you lost all those artsy-craftsy press operators ten years ago because you had this Great New Technology. But now, when it sees the digits 00 instead of 99, the color-registration algorithm says to itself, "I have so many encoder counts, I know that 1900 has expired, so I will not proceed," explains Tom C. Renner, industry-marketing manager for Rockwell Automation.
Or maybe you've thought about your Y2K technical issues, but your equipment came from a big-name supplier, and you figure they'll have a fix waiting in the wings. Right?
Wrong. Hardware vendors don't have the resources to pore through the mountains of unsupported and undocumented software running the hardware that runs the presses. "The newspaper press is a unique application," says Renner. "There's always some customization."
Vendor downsizing has diminished in-house knowledge of, and experience with, proprietary operating systems and applications. Through a series of mergers, swaps and shutdowns, Goss Graphic Systems Inc. got out of the software system business, "so they don't have [software] engineers anymore," Renner contends. "They all found new jobs-some of them with us."
Renner reports that heavy-metal hardware vendors often refer customers to vendors like Rockwell Automation. Rockwell offers two options: re-tooling existing code or upgrading to a Windows NT-based system. "Upgrades are a natural benefit for the end user, since it not only fixes the Year 2000 problem, but gives you newer features like auto-impositioning," Renner says.
Whether aiming to upgrade or retool, don't wait to act: Despite plans to hire "an army" to handle business over the next two years, Renner predicts a minimum five- to six-month delivery cycle for upgrades or compliancy checks for existing programs.
L. Carol Christopher is president of Christopher Communications in Berkeley, Calif. E-mail, cchristo@weber.ucsd.edu; phone, (510) 444-7841.